THEIR EXTRAORDINARY POWER OF EVISCERATION. 243 



to study more minutely this part of their economy, 

 will find it described at length in another work*", or 

 may easily satisfy himself by careful dissection, how 

 elaborately arranged, and at the same time how deli- 

 cate, is their internal structure; or indeed he need 

 hardly take that trouble, as the complaisant creatures 

 will not unfrequently dissect themselves in his pre- 

 sence, as though determined that, coute que coute, 

 they will convince him concerning their wondrous 

 organization. It is difficult, in truth, to keep some 

 of them entire, for on the slightest insult or provoca- 

 tion many specimens will at once proceed coolly to 

 disembowel themselves, as though out of sheer spite, 

 and, by what seems to be an act of voluntary suicide, 

 of which our reading furnishes no parallel, except in 

 Jack the Giant-killer, defy alike the anatomist and 

 his scalpel. 



Dr. Johnston gives the following account of this 

 voluntary ejection of the viscera in a common species, 

 Thy one papillosa : " The animal having been kept in 

 sea- water unchanged for two or three days, sickened, 

 and by the more frequent involutions and evolutions 

 of its oral end, evinced its uneasiness. Being left 

 unobserved in this state for an hour or so, I found on 

 my return that it had vomited up its tentacula, its 

 oral apparatus, its intestinal tube entire, and a large 

 cluster of ovaries which lay about the plate. The 

 muscular convulsion must have been very great, which 

 thus so completely embowelled the creature ; and yet 

 life was not extinct, for the tentacula contracted 



* " A General Outline of the Organization of the Animal 

 Kingdom/' by the Author. 



M2 



