A Summer Afternoon by the Sea. 153 



transparent; the alimentary canal straight, without enlarge- 

 ments, vessels not perceptible ; the blood colourless ; the sexes 

 separate ; the eggs lie free in the abdominal cavity. The nature 

 of certain rosette-shaped organs, found within at the base of the 

 floats, Busch could not ascertain. The nervous cord in living 

 specimens is difficult to detect, but in animals preserved in spirits 

 I found its halves laid close side by side, scarcely forming gan- 

 glionic swellings, and the mouth ring narrow. 



" Genus Tomopteris, Esch. — T. onisciformis, Eschsch. Isis, 

 1825, p. 736, tab. v. fig. 5. Busch, Mull. Arch. 1847, p. 180, ' 

 tab. vii. fig. 5. Grube, Idem, 1848, p. 456, tab. xvi. figs. 9 — 13. 

 Briareus scolopendra, Quoy et Gaim. Ann. des Sci. Nat. x. p. 

 235, tab. vii. fig. 1." 



As the creature under notice is not only one of great rarity, 

 but also of more than usual elegance, I have thought that a 

 figure drawn from the present specimen, and a description of 

 its principal features, might prove not uninteresting to that 

 large portion of the readers of the Intellectual Observer who 

 are at this season rifling the treasures of the sea among the 

 secluded coves and smiling tide-pools of our rocky shores. 



Fig. 1 in Frontispiece represents a male Tomojpteris onisci- 

 formis when first taken, magnified six times ; its natural dimen- 

 sions during the vigour of health extending to about an inch and 

 a half in length. Strange to say, it rapidly deteriorated in con- 

 finement; though transferred within an hour of its capture to a 

 tumbler full of sea-water, it steadily diminished till, in the 

 course of about four hours, it was not more than three-quarters 

 of an inch long ; and this, not by a contraction in length only, 

 but by an uniform diminution of all its parts, so that the same 

 form and proportions were maintained, but on a constantly les- 

 sening scale. Nor was this the only alteration perceptible ; 

 when my friend, a gentleman of science accustomed to accurate 

 observation, captured it, the animal was so perfectly diapha- 

 nous that, when searching the pool, with his eye brought as 

 close as possible to the surface, he caught sight of it only by 

 the flashings and twinklings of light reflected from the rapidly- 

 moving fins of its side-processes ; and when he caught it by 

 placing his hollowed hands, basin-wise, under the twinkling 

 spot, and lifting out the water, he could see nothing of it either 

 in his hands or in the bottle into which he poured the contents. 

 So thoroughly was it transparent, and so exactly was the re- 

 frangibility of its body -tissues that of the circumambient water, 

 that when he put the cork into the phial, and examined it, he 

 actually could not discern the creature, and supposed that he 

 had either failed to capture it, or else had lost it in pouring the 

 water from his hands. Yet when, an hour afterwards, he 

 brought it to me, the animal was distinctly visible, and could 



