Marvels of the Universe 643 
SPA-LILIES 
BY BERNARD C. WHITE 
THE “inviolate sea’’ is a realm apart. It is a 
world teeming with life; a world of infinite 
variety ; but it is nevertheless a hidden world 
whereof the very conditions of its existence 
enable it to guard its treasures jealously. It has 
therefore escaped the notice of mankind in 
general, who have yet to realize the wondertul 
secrets of its vast organization. Forms of life, 
so beautiful, so complex, so outside the very 
borders of the imagination have been brought to 
light by the naturalist after ages of patient re- 
search that the mind reels at the conception of 
such a fairyland and of such strange folk. 
The sea has its gardens, with the weeds and 
the flowers, much in the same manner as the earth 
is made beautiful with a thousand different forms 
of vegetation. But there is this difference between 
a sea-garden and a land-garden. Many of the 
sea’s choicest ‘‘plants’’ are not plants, but 
animals : Sea-fir, Sea-anemone, Sea-cucumber, 
all fall under this category, so also do Sea-lilies. 
These beautiful flower-like forms, known to 
science as Crinoids, occur in great beds at the 
bottom of the ocean; more especially those 
species which inhabit the shallower waters. 
We have evidence in fossil remains that they 
were abundant in the very far-away ages of the 
world’s history. Vast tracts of the ocean’s bed 
must have been covered with the waving masses 
of their feathery plumes (some of them reaching 
to a height of seventy feet), for so thick is their 
débris in certain beds of limestone that the rock 
is known as Crinoidal Limestone. They were in 
existence long before the era of the great coal 
forest, and by a study of these fossils we can dis- 
tinguish many and various changes in the structure 
of these species; in fact, the variety is much 
greater amongst the fossil Crinoids than amongst 
those known to exist to-day. 
Our earliest knowledge of Crinoids was entirely 
obtained from the study of fossil remains ; for it 
was not until about the middle of the seventeenth 
century that living Sea-lilies were discovered. It 
is wonderful to think that so much had been found 
out about them from the bare testimony of the 
THOMPSON'S SEA-LILY 
This Sea-lily is grass-green in colour. Specimens have been 
dredged up from a depth of over one thousand fathoms. 
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