THE BRITTLE STAR. 91 
like a brittle-star. It usually remains anchored, feed- 
ing on the minute beings in the water, which it drives 
into its mouth by hundreds of cilia or jelly-lashes 
which line the grooves of the arms. 
It does not care to move at any time, though it 
can swim gracefully through the water when disturbed 
from its hold. But in its infancy it was not even 
free to do this, for the lovely feather-star is nothing 
more than the cup of the little stone-lily (A, Fig. 38 
and Fig. 31), which has broken from its stem and 
grown up into a free animal. In the early spring you 
may find it in its infant state in the quiet bays of our 
west coast or of Ireland, like a white or yellow stony 
flower, growing on fronds of seaweed, or on small stony 
corals. Its stem of jointed plates is covered with a 
film of living matter, and its cup has the stony threads 
hanging down from it, which afterwards serve as 
claws to hold it to the rock. In the autumn you will 
find it so no more. The cup (a, Fig. 31, p. 78), 
floating off its stem () will have emancipated itself 
from the race of fixed stone-lilies, and joined the 
free star-fish, thus forming a curious link between 
these two groups of animals. It still, however, keeps 
much of its old habits, and while it can swim grace- 
fully from place to place, loves better to cling to the 
nearest rock or weed, feeding upside down as com- 
pared to its new companions, and waving its deep 
red plumes, a harmless thing of beauty. 
Not so, the brittle-star (B, Fig. 36), which, as we 
saw in Fig. 32, was a free being from the first, and is 
as voracious as the common star-fish, and much more 
active. In some ways, however, it is like the feather- 
star, for it has strong jointed suckerless arms and 
