26 MR. TEMPLETON ON SOME INVERTEBRATED ANIMALS 
Disc livid, or pale blueish, with a small corrugated mouth on a gently raised central 
eminence. Rays eight or nine, thick, fleshy, the discoid surface with numerous little 
bodies which resemble the suckers of the Sepie. Peduncle thick, corrugated into annuli 
when undistended, blueish with some lividity, gradually becoming carnose as it reaches 
the common soft cortical texture from which the peduncles all spring. 
On stones below low water mark within the reefs, near Black River, Isle of France, 
not uncommon. 
I have named this curious species in honour of my friend M. Desjardins, a distin- 
guished naturalist, and the indefatigable Secretary of the Natural History Society of 
Mauritius. 
The material from which the peduncles arise is spread over the surface of the stones 
to an extent in many places of more than a foot. It is about the eighth or tenth of an 
inch in thickness, though it is at parts occasionally much thicker, from the substance 
diving into the minute hollows of the stone, and yet leaving the outer surface without 
evidence of the depressions. When cut into it appears composed of irregular tubes 
interlacing in every possible way, and of various sizes. Among them, and apparently 
outside of them, I detected a vast number of minute whitish grains, spherical and 
polished, which I should have reckoned ova, but from the circumstance that little 
knobs were here and there apparent, which were obviously rudimentary peduncles, 
leaving no doubt of the mode of growth or propagation. Eight or nine (according 
to the number of the rays) of these tubes coalescing, and receiving a common cover- 
ing from the base, form the stem, in the centre of which is found the alimentary 
canal, a distinct and separate tube, the inner membrane being corrugated and minutely 
papillated. On tracing these tubes up the peduncle, we find them compressed, so as 
to become somewhat quadrangular, but easily detachable from each other, a fine cellular 
tissue alone connecting them. Their inner surface resembles that of the central ali- 
mentary tube, except that they are destitute of the folds: they continue together until 
they arrive at the disc, when each separates from its fellows, and is continued into a 
ray, and ultimately sends a branch into each of the little suckers ; it forms here, how- 
ever, a cul de sac, there being no communication that I could detect with the external 
surface. The mouth is a simple fleshy ring when contracted, either forming a slit or 
three or four irregular plaits, but not more rigid than any other part of the animal. 
The discs are perpetually in motion, waved from side to side, as if in search of 
objects ; and the moment anything comes in contact with any part of the rays, the 
suckers or cilia close in upon it, and the ray doubles up like a finger, and carries the 
prey to the mouth: if the object be large, two or three of the rays are employed ; and 
me 
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