68 COMATULA. 



bivalve shell-fish, and in numerous compound animals of the classes 

 Zoophyta and Infusoria. I have also shewn, in my memoirs on the 

 Cirripedes, examples of animals being free and locomotive in their 

 first stages, and afterwards becoming permanently fixed ; but an 

 animal growing for a period as it were a flower, fixed by its stem, 

 and then dropping from its pedicle and becoming, during the re- 

 mainder of its life, free and locomotive, is not only new, but without 

 any parallel in the whole range of the organized part of the creation. 

 No wonder, then, that any naturalist, on the first discovery of the 

 young animal in its first or fixed stage of existence, should consider 

 it as belonging exclusively to those which are known to be perma- 

 nently fixed ; analogy would permit no other conclusion to be formed, 

 and consequently it could be classed with none other except the 

 Crinoideae, one known genus of which tribe participates with 

 Comatula in being locomotive in its advanced stage ; so that this 

 circumstance connects all these animals into an inseparable group, 

 with which the present state of our knowledge will not permit us 

 to associate any other of the Asteriae. 



=?s^ 



W} ji^fes 



Fig. 19, 

 Figure 19. Adult Comatula decanemos. 



"When, therefore, I formerly described the young of the Comatula* 

 as a new species of Fentacrinus, no person could have suspected so 

 anomalous and unexpected a result, as that it was the young state of 

 this curious star-fish, an animal not only free, but leading the most 

 vagrant life of any of the tribe with which it has hitherto been asso- 

 ciated by naturalists, — at one time crawling about amongst submarine 

 plants, at others floating to and fro, adhering to thin fragments by 

 means of its dorsal claspers, or even swimming about after the 



* Memoir on Fentacrinus europaus. Cork, 1827. 



