46 



INTRODUCTION TO ZOOLOGY. 



vertebrae are well described by the common English name of 

 " wheel- stones." "The perforations in the centre of these 

 joints, affording a facility for stringing them as beads, has 

 caused them, in ancient times, to be used as rosaries.* In 

 the northern parts of England, they still retain the appellation 

 of St. Cuthbert's beads." Sir Walter Scott has, with his 

 usual felicity, referred to the circumstance in his poem of 

 Mansion ' 



" But fain St. Hilda's nuns would learn 

 If, on a rock by Lindisfarn, 

 St. Cuthbert sits, and toils to frame 

 The sea-born beads that bear his name." CANTO II. 



The race of Crinoid Star-fishes was believed to be altogether 

 extinct in European seas, when, 

 in 1823, Mr. J. V. Thompson 

 announced the discovery, in the 

 Cove of Cork, of a diminutive 

 species measuring only three- 

 quarters of an inch in length. In 

 1836, the same gentleman pro- 

 claimed that this was the young 

 state of the Star-fish known as 

 the Rosy- feather-star (Comatula 

 rosacea, Fig. 31). . The actual 

 change of the animal, from its 

 fixed and pcdunculated state into 

 its free condition, had not actually 

 been seen by this intelligent ob- 

 server. But at length the matter 

 was placed beyond any possibility 

 of doubt. 



"When dredging," says Pro- 

 fessor Forbes, "in Dublin Bay, 

 in August, 1840, with my friends 

 Mr. R. Ball and Mr. W. Thomp- 

 son, we found numbers of the 

 Phytocrinus or polype state of 

 the Feather-star, more advanced 



Fig. 31. POLYPE STATE OF THE IT 



FEATHER-STAR (MAGNIFIED), than they had ever been seen 

 before ; so advanced that we saw 



the creature drop from Its stem, and swim about a true 

 * Buckland's Bridgcwater Treatise, vol. i. page 424. 



