496 
of nature? John Locke had furnished them with the solution— 
true erevfas Dei—in which every man’s faculty was such as to 
allow him to control all those desires which ran counter to the 
good of mankind, and cherish those only which would benefit 
the welfare of the whole of society, and which every man felt 
as sufficiently true to enable him to know what he ought to do. 
Society as now constituted consisted of a considerable number 
of the foolish and the ignorant—a small proportion of good 
genuine knaves and a sprinkling of capable and honest men, by 
whose efforis the former were kept in a reasonable restraint. 
Such being the case, he could not see how the limit could 
be laid down as to the question which, under some circum- 
stances, the action of Government might be rightfully carried on, 
The question was where they ought to draw the line between 
those things which a State ought to do, and which they ought 
not todo. The difficulty which met the statesmen was the same 
as that which met all of them in individual life. Moore and 
Owen, and all the great modern Socialists, bear witness that 
Government might attain its end for the good of the people 
by some more effectual process than the very simple and easy 
one of letting all matters of enterprise alone. He thought that 
the science of politics was but imperfectly known ; and that 
perhaps they would be able to get clearer notions of what a 
State might or might not do, if they estimated the truth of the 
proposition, that the end of government is the good of mankind. 
It was necessary to consider a little what the good of mankind 
really was. The good of mankind meant the admission of every 
man to all the happiness which he could enjoy without diminish- 
ing the happiness of his fellow men. Having dwelt at some 
length on this point, Mr. Huxley went on to say that it was uni- 
versally agreed that it would be useless to admit the freedom of 
sympathy between man and man directly ; but he could see no 
reason why the State might not do many things towards that end 
indirectly. He was not going to argue that there should be a 
State science, or a State organisation, such as they bad seen in 
France, by which all scientific teaching was to be properly regu- 
lated. On the contrary, the State had left local enterprise to 
work out its own ends as soon as local intelligence and energy 
proved itself equal to the task. These local efforts not only 
benefited the localities; but every means of teaching, every 
stimulus given to intellectual life was so much positively added to 
the wealth and welfare of the nation, and as such deserved some 
equivalent modicum of support from the general purse. But if 
the positive advancement of the peace, wealth, and intellectual 
and moral development of its members were the objects which 
the representative of the corporate authority of society, the 
Government, might justly strive after in the fulfilment of its end, 
which was the good of mankind, then it was clear that the 
Government might undertake the education of the people, for 
education promoted peace by teaching men the realities of life, 
and the obligations which were involved in the very existence of 
society ; and promoted the intellectual development, not only by 
training the individual intellect, but by sifting out from the mass 
of ordinary or inferior capacities those which were competent to 
increase the general welfare by occupying higher positions ; and 
lastly, it promoted morality and refinement by teaching men to 
discipline themselves, and leading them to see that the highest, 
as it was the only permanent, content was to be attained not by 
groveling in the rank stream of the foulest sense, but by con- 
tinually striving towards those higher peaks where, resting in 
eternal calm, reason discerned the undefined but bright ideal 
of the highest good, ‘‘a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night.” 


ON THE STRUCTURE OF THE PALZOZOIC 
CRLNOIDS * 
HE best known living representatives of the Echinoderm 
class Crinoidea are the genera Avntedon and Pentacrinus— 
the former the feather stars, tolerably common in all seas ; the 
latter the stalked sea-lilies, whose only ascertained habitat, until 
lately, was the deeper portion of the sea of the Antilles, whence 
they were rarely recovered by being accidentally entangled on 
fishing-lines. Within the last few years Mr. Robert Damon, the 
well-known dealer in natural history objects in Weymouth, has 
procured a considerable number of specimens of the two West 
Indian Pentacrini, and Dr. Carpenter and the author had an 
opportunity of making very detailed observations both on the 
* Abstract of a paper read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh, by 
Prof. Wyville Thomson, April 3, 1871. 
NATURE 



[ Oct..19, 1871 
hard and the soft parts. These observations will shortly be 
published. : 
The genera Antedon and Pentacrinus resemble one another in 
all essential particulars of internal structure. The great distine- 
tion between them is, that while Avfedon swims freely in the — 
water, and anchors itself at will by means of a set of “dorsal — 
cirri,” Pentacrinus is attached to a jointed stem, which is either — 
permanently fixed to some foreign body, or, as in the case of a 
fine species procured off the coast of Portugal during the cruise 
of the Porcupine in the summer of 1870, loosely rooted by a whorl 
of terminal cirri in soft mud, Setting aside the stalk, in Anfedon 
and Pentacrinus the body consists of a rounded central disc and — 
ten or more pinnated arms. A ciliated groove runs along the 
“oral” or ‘‘ ventral” surface of the pinnules and arms, and these 
tributary brachial grooves gradually coalescing, terminate in five — 
radial grooves, which end in an oral opening, usually subcentral, 
sometimes very excentric. The cesophagus, stomach, and intes- 
tine coil round a central axis, formed of dense connective tissue, 
apparently continuous with the stroma of the ovary, and of inyo- 
luuions of the perivisceral membrane ; and the intestine ends in 
an anal tube, which opens excentrically in one of the inter-radial 
spaces, and usually p:ojects considerably above the surface of the 
disc. The contents of the stomach are found uniformly to con- 
sist of a pulp composed of particles of organic matter, the shields 
of diatoms, and the shells of minute foraminifera. The mode of 
nutrition may be readily observed in Anfedon, which will live for 
months in a tank. The animal rests attached by its dorsal cirri, 
with its arms expanded like the petals of a full-blown flower. A 
current of sea water, bearing organic particles, is carried by the 
cilia along the brachial grooves into the mouth, the water is ex- 
hausted of its assimilable matter in the alimentary canal, and is 
finally ejected at the anal orifice. The length and direction of 
the anal tube prevent the exhausted water and the fcecal matter 
from returning at once into the ciliated passages. 
In the probably extinct family Cyathocrinids, and notably in 
the genus Cyathocrinus, which the author took as the type of the 
Palxozoic group, the so-called Crinoidea Tessellata, the arrange- 
ment, up to a certain point, is much the same. There is a 
widely-expanded crown of branching arms, deeply grooved, 
which doubtless performed the same functions as the grooved arms 
of Pentacrinus ; but the grooves stop short at the edge of the 
disc, and there is no central opening, the only visible apertures 
being a tube, sometimes of extreme length, rising from the 
surface of the disc in one of the inter-radial spaces, which is 
usually greatly enlarged for its accommodation by the interca- 
lation of additional perisomatic plates, and a small tunnel-like 
opening through the perisom of the edge of the disc opposite the 
base of each of the arms, in continuation of the groove of the 
arm. The functions of these openings, and the mode of nutrition 
of the crinoid having this structure, have been the subject of much 
controversy. 
The author had lately had an opportunity of examining some 
very remarkable specimens of Cyathocrinus arthriticus, procured 
by Mr. Charles Ketley from the upper Silurians of Wenlock, 
and a number of wonderfully perfect examples of species of the 
genera Actinocrinus, Platycrinus, and others, for which he was 
indebted to the liberality of Mr. Charles Wachsmuth, of Bur- 
lington, Ohio, and Mr. Sidney Lyon, of Jeffersonville, Indiana ; 
and he had also had the advantage of studying photographs of 
plates, showing the internal structure of fossil crinoids, about to 
be published by Messrs. Meek and Worthen, State Geologists for 
Illinois. A careful examination of all these, taken in connection 
with the description by Prof. Loveén, of //yponome Sarsii, a recent 
crinoid lately procured from Torres Strait, had led him to the 
following general conclusions. 
In accordance with the views of Dr. Schultze, Dr. Liitken, and 
Messrs. Meek and Worthen, he regarded the proboscis of the 
tesselated crinoids as the anal tube, corresponding in every 
respect with the anal tube in Avedon and Penfacrinus, and he 
maintained the opinion which he formerly published (Edin. New 
Phil. Jour. Jan. 1861), that the valvular “pyramid” of the 
Cystideans is also the anus. The true mouth in the tesselated 
crinoids is an internal opening vaulted over by the plates of the 
perisom, and situated in the axis of the radial system more or 
less in advance of the anal tube, in the position assigned by Mr, 
Billings to his ‘‘ambulacral opening,” Five, ten, or more 
openings round the edge of the disc lead into channels continuous 
with the grooves on the ventral surface of the arms, either covered 
over like the mouth by perisomatic plates, the inner surface of 
which they more or less impress, and supported beneath by chains 
