PLATE CLXVIII. 



We can feel little confidence in adding any synonyms to the 

 species of Echinus now before us. As an objeet of interesting curiosity 

 to the naturalist, and one of no very rare occurrence, it cannot but be 

 familiar to most collectors, and may possibly have been intended by 

 certain figures in the work of Klein, to which we have above adverted, 

 and perhaps some others, but if this idea be correct, we must confess 

 that both the figures and the descriptions by which they are accom- 

 panied are too indefinite to authorise any precise conclusion on the 

 subject. We have indeed sometimes thought that in one of the 

 representations of Echinus Basteri, in the work of Klein, to which 

 we have referred, that we could trace the lineaments of the very 

 remarkable sprig of alternate triangular leaf-like purple spots, so 

 conspicuous in the examples before us, at the same time that it must 

 be allowed that the representation is confessedly too remote, or too 

 imperfect to be relied upon. There are several other species of this 

 tribe, which assimilate very nearly to this, and it may be therefore 

 possible that some other kind has been intended, rather than the 

 species now the subject of our consideration. 



We should not omit to mention that the figures of Echinus 

 Basteri, figured by Klein in his Echinodermata, have been repeated 

 in one of the plates of the Encyclopaedic Methodique, and yet so 

 little were the editors satisfied with those figures, if really intended 

 for our present species, that they caused a new figure to be engraved 

 for that work : this latter may be seen in the supplemental plate 198, 

 the former figures from Klein in plate 142, f. 5, 6. This figure, 

 besides differing in some few minor characters from the specimens in 

 our possession is, as usual, devoid of colours, and can therefore, it is 

 presumed, in no manner render our present representation needless 

 or unimportant. 



