212 THE AQUARIAN NATURALIST. 



readers, whose opportunities enable them to make 

 experiments upon this interesting subject. 



The eggs of the Star-fish come to perfection in the 

 months of April and May, at which time the roe, 

 which consists of large bundles of tubes occupying 

 the angles between the rays, is very much distended. 

 The eggs indeed are incredibly numerous, so that 

 all surprise at the multitudes of these creatures met 

 with upon our coast at once ceases on beholding their 

 prodigious fertility. When first deposited, the ova are 

 not at once abandoned by the parent animals, but 

 are retained in a kind of cavity formed by incur- 

 ving the body and rays of the mother, until they 

 make a sort of chamber, beneath which the eggs are 

 protected during the earlier part of their development 

 (PL IV. fig. 3). The young animal, at the moment 

 of its escape from the egg, is of an ovoid or sub- 

 spherical shape (PL IV. fig. 3, a), completely unpro- 

 vided with limbs, but enabled to swim vivaciously 

 about in the surrounding water by means of the cilia 

 with which its body is profusely covered, giving it 

 exactly the appearance of an infusorial animalcule ; 

 indeed this may be called the first, or infusorial con- 

 dition of the young Asterias. After the lapse of a 

 few days, certain appendages begin to make their 

 appearance, sprouting, as it were, from the anterior 

 part of the body, and ultimately appearing as forming 

 four club-shaped processes, whereby the little crea- 

 ture fixes itself to the sides of the incubatory cavity 

 (PL IV. fig. 3 b, c, d, e). The body of the little embryo 

 now becomes gradually flattened into a minute cir- 

 cular disc, upon one surface of which hence at onoe 

 distinguished as the ventral the rudiments of 



