WONDERS OF THE SHORE 1363 



the microscope, you will find the cause. The whole 

 skin is studded with minute glass anchors, some hang- 

 ing freely from the surface, but most imbedded in 

 the skin. Each of these anchors is joined at its root 

 into one end of a curious cribriform plate in plain 

 English one pierced like a sieve, which lies under 

 the skin and reminds one of the similar plates in the 

 skin of the White Cucumaria, which I will show 

 you presently; and both of these we must regard as 

 the first rudiments of an Echinoderm's outside skele- 

 ton, such as in the sea-urchins covers the whole body 

 of the animal. The animal, when caught, has a 

 strange habit of self-destruction, contracting its skin 

 at two or three different points, and writhing till it 

 snaps itself into "junks," as the sailors would say, 

 and then dies. 



Every ledge of these flat New Red Sandstone rocks, 

 if torn up with the crowbar, discloses in its cracks 

 and crannies nests of strange forms which shun the 

 light of day; beautiful Actiniae fill the tiny caverns 

 with living flowers; great Pholades bore by hundreds 

 in the softer strata; and wherever a thin layer of 

 muddy sand intervenes between two slabs, long 

 Annelid worms of quaintest forms and colors have 

 their horizontal burrows, among those of that curious 

 and rare radiate animal, the Spoonworm, an eye- 

 less bag about an inch long, half bluish gray, half 

 pink, with a strange scalloped and wrinkled pro- 

 boscis of saffron color, which serves in some mys- 

 terious way, soft as it is, to collect food and clear its 

 dark passage through the rock. See, at the extreme 

 low-water mark, where the broad olive fronds of 



