THE COMMON SEA-URCHIN. 557 



Should you with knives their prickly bodies wound, 

 Till the crude morsels pant upon the ground ; 

 You may e'en then, when motion seems no more, 

 Departing sense and fleeting life restore. 

 If in the sea the mangled parts you cast. 

 The conscious pieces to their fellows haste ; 

 Again they aptly join, their whole compose, 

 Move as before, nor life, nor vigour lose. 



Between the spines, and disposed in a continued 

 longitudinal series on the several divisions or regions 

 of the shell, are an infinite number of very small fo- 

 ramina, communicating with an equal number of 

 tentacula placed above them. These are the in- 

 struments by which the creature affixes itself to any 

 object, and stops its motions. They are possessed of 

 a very high degree of contractile power, and are fur- 

 nished at the extremities with an expansile part, 

 which may be supposed to operate as a sphincter, or 

 as the tail of a leech, in fastening the animals se- 

 curely to rocks and other substances to which they 

 chuse to adhere. 



The shell of this animal, when deprived of the 

 spines, which often fall off after its death, is of a pale 

 reddish tinge, and the tubercles on which the spines 

 are fixed appear like so many pearly protuberances 

 on the surface. 



At Marseilles, and in some other towns on the 

 continent, this species is exposed for sale in the mar- 

 kets as oysters are with us, and is eaten boiled like 

 an egg. It forms an article of food among the lower 

 class of people on the sea-coasts of many parts of 



