170 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 



Besides the reasons mentioned, there are many other facts 

 (principally from the comparative anatomy of Echinoderma) 

 which most distinctly prove the correctness of my hypothesis. 

 I established this hypothesis in 1866, without having any 

 idea that fossil articulated tvornis still existed, apparently 

 answering to the hypothetical primary forms. Such have 

 in the mean time, however, really been discovered. In 

 a treatise "On the Equivalent of the North American 

 Taconic Schist in Germany,"* Geinitz and Liebe, in 1867, 

 have described a number of articulated Silurian worms^ 

 which completely confirm my suppositions. Numbers of 

 these very remarkable worms are found in an excel- 

 lent state of preservation in the slates of Wiirzbach, in the 

 upper districts of Reusz. They are of the same structure 

 as the articulated arm of a Star-fish, and evidently possessed 

 a hard coat of mail, a much denser, more solid cutaneous 

 skeleton than other worms in general. The number of 

 body-segments, or metamera, is very considerable, so that 

 the worms, although no more than a quarter or half an 

 inch in breadth, attained a length of from two to three feet. 

 The excellently preserved impressions, especially those of 

 the Phyllodoeites thuringiacus and Crossopodia Henrici, are 

 so like the arms of many Star-fish (Colastra) that their 

 true blood relationship seems very probable. This primsBr 

 val grovip of worms, which are most probably the ancestors 

 of Star-fish, I call Mailed worms (Phraethelminthes, p. 150.) 



The three other classes of Echinoderma evidently arose 

 at a later period out of the class of Sea-stars which have 

 most faithfully retained the original form of the stellate 



* " Ueber ein Aequivalent der takonischen Schiefer Nordamerikas in 

 Deutschland." 



