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VENUS’S FLOWEE-BASKET (. EUPLECTflLLA ). 
By De. J. E. GRAY, F.R.S., V.P.Z.S., F.L.S., &c. 
I T is a truism that every created object is beautiful when 
properly examined. Even the toad has a cc jewel in his 
head.” But there are some objects, which from the symmetry of 
their form, the neatness of their structure, and the beauty of the 
material of which they are composed, attract the attention and 
excite the curiosity of the most inattentive. The^Venus’s flower- 
basket from the Philippines, which is now to be seen in most of 
the shops of the dealers in objects of Natural History and in 
almost every collection, is a production that combines all these 
attributes of beauty and is admired by all. 
The Venus’s flower-basket, Ewplectella , may be shortly 
described thus : as a siliceous sponge attached by its expanded 
base to some marine body, supported by a skeleton of a 
cylindrical tubular form, formed of numerous elongated fibres,,, 
consisting of fascicules of very long slender linear cylindrical 
spicules, and crossed by similar fascicules of spicules, forming a . 
square network which at length is covered by a finer network 
of fibres, producing concentric and oblique ridges across the- 
outside of the tube, and a broad expanded fringe round the edge 
of the upper end of the tubular cavity of the skeleton, and 
covered with a network lid formed of bundles of shorter spicula. 
The base of the tubular body is surrounded by a beard of 
elongated, free, siliceous filaments which have recurved hooks 
near the end, and which form a ring of recurved hooks at the 
top. See PL xi. and xii. 
The tube is generally gradually tapering and bevilled on one- 
side at the base, but some specimens are shorter and more 
ventricose, and more or less ovate or oblong cylindrical. 
The skeleton before it is perfectly formed, merely consists of 
a tube formed of longitudinal hoops of transverse fibres without 
any lid ; the lid is next developed and at length the frill round the 
end of the tube, and finally the oblique and cross ridges formed 
of the finer external network, are also developed. The score 
of specimens in the British Museum exhibit each of these states, 
proving that the absence of the lid or of the fringe or of the 
external ridges are not specific characters. The free filaments 
VOL. VI. — NO. XXIV. T 
