4 Echin. 
XIV. ECHINODERMA. 
great libraries, and in even larger part to the generosity and kindly help 
of fellow-workers who enable the Recorder to deal with much matter that 
he would otherwise see with great difficulty or not at all. None the less 
there does seem to be an actual growth of interest in Echinoderma and an 
absolute increase in the publications that refer to them. Partly this is 
due to the rise of experimental embryology, which has some of its most 
tractable material provided by starfish and sea-urchins. Partly it may be 
that geologists now find it easier to employ both crinoids and echinoids as 
stratigraphical counters, thanks to the labours of palaeontological systema- 
tists. Contributions to such outlying branches of the subject, though 
often of deep significance for the pure specialist in Echinoderms, and 
therefore rightly recorded here, might in some more philosophical classifi¬ 
cation of the sciences be far removed from writings descriptive of these 
animals. But even were this annual Record confined to Echinoderma in 
their morphographic and taxonomic aspects, its growth would still be 
apparent; despite the attractions of experimental and mathematical 
biology, the energy of anatomist and systematist is unabated. 
The entries of early date in the present list have been furnished by two 
important publications hitherto inaccessible, but now visible at the 
Natural History Museum, London. These are Memorie della Pontificia 
Accademia dei Nuovi Lincei, and Anales de la Real Academia de Ciencias 
...de la Habana. The three entries from 1900 were included before their 
correct date was ascertained ; others originally included have been rele¬ 
gated to that year’s Record, and should perhaps have been accompanied 
by yet others. The private distribution of a few reprints, undated or even 
wrongly dated, before the definitive publication, is responsible for most of 
this confusion. Reprints are the blessing of the specialist, but when their 
bibliographic indications are not merely imperfect but misleading, one is 
apt to regard them as a curse (see Nature lxi, p. 367, 15 Feb. 1900, and 
Science xi, p. 231, 9 Feb. 1900). The fault is nearly always the printer’s, 
and the remedy lies with the editor. The editor would also do well to 
exercise his powers in the case of misleading titles. Who would expect to 
read about sea-urchins in a memoir on “ La faune entomologique du 
Delagoa,” even in an appendix, entitled “Mollusques recueillis au Delagoa” ? 
And if a new name for an Ecliinoid genus is proposed under the head 
of “ Notes sur Terebratella it seems almost a mercv that it is born a 
synonym. 
II. Biology. A. The flow of speculation that compares Echinoderm 
larvae with supposed ancestors of the Chordata , continues undisturbed 
(Masterman 168, 169, Willey 255, MacBride 165), but seems to mean 
little more than that Chordata and Echinoderma , and perhaps other 
Phyla, were independently derived from a group of primitive Coelomata. 
The view that the chief peculiarities of Echinoderm structure are due to 
the early intervention of a sessile stage is supported by MacBride (165), 
Steinmann (223), and Bather (22); but while Bather ascribes to this 
stage the essential characters of the Pelmatozoa , MacBride supposes 
that the division of the Echinoderm stem into the two great branches 
(.Pelmatozoa and Eleutherozoa of Bather, Microphagi and Megophagi of 
Sollas, 216) took place before the Pelmatozoa had been definitely evolved. 
The difference of view is not great, and at any rate the embryologist and 
palaeontologist agree in recognising a division between the two branches so 
broad that it precludes the homologies required by the calycinal theory of 
Loven & Carpenter. 
The speculations of Sollas (216) are chiefly concerned with the homo¬ 
logies of the buccal armature, which structure he has found well-developed 
in two Silurian Echinoids often supposed to have Cystid affinities. He 
also thinks that he has found in them an inner and an outer series of 
ambulacral plates [ = flooring-plates and covering-plates], of which the 
