2 Sea Lilies. 



some of the past periods of the earth's history. So abundant 

 were they that deep beds of limestone were often formed by 

 the gradual accumulation of little else than their skeletons, the 

 stem-joints and cups cemented together by limy sediment. 



During the lapse of ages the whole order seems to have been 

 worsted in the " struggle for life." They become scarce 

 in the newer Mezozoic beds, still scarcer in the Tertiaries, and 

 in the seas of the present period the two living stalked Crinoids 

 appear to be confined to the deep water off the outer Antilles, 

 whence the fishermen from time to time recover mutilated 

 specimens entangled on their lines. They seem, however, to 

 be rare. Their occurrence has been known for more than a 

 century, and although many eyes have been watching for them, 

 only about twenty specimens in all have reached Europe. Only 

 two of these show all the joints and plates of the skeleton, and 

 the soft parts are lost in all. 



An aberrant group of the Crinoids, the Comatulidge, 

 attached by stems only in their early youth, and afterwards be- 

 coming free and swimming about, seem to have started up about 

 the middle of the Mezozoic period, and to have gathered strength 

 with the decadence of their fixed predecessors. This group is 

 generally though meagrely distributed in modern seas. Its 

 head- quarters seem to be near the verge of the Arctic Circle, 

 but every here and there in sheltered bays along the coasts of 

 Britain, the dredger falls in with colonies of two pretty little 

 representatives, " Miller's" and the " rosy" feather-stars. 



I will describe in the present communication the general 

 structure of the West Indian stalked Crinoids, and sketch the 

 singular relation which they bear to the feather-stars of our 

 Northern seas. 



Our Plate represents the specimen under the glass shade in 

 the northern Zoological gallery. This species has been known 

 in Europe since the year 1755, when a specimen was brought 

 to Paris from the island of Martinique, and was described by 

 Guettard in the Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Sciences. For 

 the next hundred years an example turned up now and then 

 from the Antilles. Ellis described one, now in the Hunterian 

 Museum of Glasgow, in the Philosophical Transactions for 1761. 

 One or two found their way into the museums of London, 

 Copenhagen, Bristol, and Paris, two into the British Museum, 

 and one fortunately fell into the hands of the late Professor 

 Johannes Miiller, of Berlin, who published an elaborate account 

 of it in the Berlin Academy Transactions in 1843. Within the 

 last two or three years Mr. Damon, of Weymouth, a well- 

 known and excellent collector and distributor of objects of 

 natural history, has procured three very good specimens. One 

 of these is now in the Imperial Museum of Moscow, another 



