Animals with more than Two Eyes. 207 
its head or mantle, or broad, creeping disc. Then, if not upon 
the body, where can the eyes possibly be? The question has 
only been answered within the last three years, for up to that time 
all the Chitonidze were described in the text-books as eyeless. It 
was Doctor Moseley, professor of anatomy in the University of 
Oxford, who made the discovery. Whilst washing the shell of 
one of these creatures with spirit, he noticed that it sparkled here 
and there as if set with small crystals. 
Further and prolonged investigation let him into a secret 
which has astonished the whole world of zodlogists. |The sur- 
faces of many of these coat-of-mail shells are really full of eyes. 
They glisten at us like diamonds in their calcareous setting, as we 
view them with a hand-lens of moderate power. 
On taking up an oyster-shell, or, indeed, any shell you may 
have as an ornament in your house, and examining it, you would 
hardly expect it to have any power of feeling, any more than a 
stone, so utterly inorganic and devoid of anything like nervous 
structure does it seem to be. Yet in the coat-of-mail shells, this 
stony-looking armour, which covers the back of the animal, is so 
thickly set with eyes and touch-organs that in many cases you can 
barely place a pin’s head upon it without touching some of these 
organs of sense. 
I have before me as I write a Corephium shell, which has, at 
least, eleven thousand five hundred eyes on its surface. These 
eyes have their nerves running down through the shell into the 
body below, and the outer sensations are thus transferred along 
the telegraph nerves to the brain. 
In the centre of the eye we see the outline of the iris. <A 
perfectly transparent and strongly double convex lens is found 
behind the iris-aperture. So there is no room left for guess-work 
about these glistening objects which we found in such enormous 
numbers on the coat-of-mail shells. | Their structure and function 
has been fully made out. 
Before we take leave of these wonders of the shore, and come 
to the scarcely less wonderfully gifted animals of the land, let us 
mention, in passing, one or two other marine examples of the 
many-eyed. Have you ever looked with a magnifying glass at 
the eyes of the lobster? If not, I would advise you to do so. 
The lobster’s two eyes are made up of many smaller eyes, more, 
indeed, than you would care to count. Moreover, each of these 
many eyes has its own cornea, lens, optic nerve, and other 
accessories which go to make up a separate, yet complete, organ. 
Every one of these separate eyes is set diamond fashion, and on 
the face of each diamond is a cross. 
This singular and beautiful pattern is repeated in hundreds of 
these component eyes, so that the lobster looks out upon the 
world from a very curiously decorated window indeed. 
