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Reflect on the flower-like expansion of its arms, and then imagine it mounted on a stalk, mouth side upward, with those arms more tapering than they now are waving round the mouth. That, apparently, was the past of the starfish and its cousins.
Now it was a queer bit of seaweed, now it was a group of gulls clamoring over a dead fish, now a purple starfish, now a breaker of unusual size. Her splendid vitality carried her away. She was excited, alive to her very finger-tips, vibrant to the least sensation, quivering to the least impression. "Let's get up here and sit down somewhere," said Condy, at length.
On the rocks and sand at the bottom starfish and crabs crawled slowly along or clung to some stone. The purple sea-urchins, queer round-shelled creatures covered with thorny spines, crowded together, and the ugly toad-fish hid in the green and brown seaweeds.
Professor Haeckel adduces the fossil Crossopodia and Phyllodocites as examples of the Annelidan forms, by the coalescence of which the Echinoderms may have been produced; but, even supposing the resemblance of these worms to detached starfish arms to be perfect, it is possible that they may be the extreme term, and not the commencement, of Echinoderm development.
When a basket starfish finds one of the baits in that sunless void far beneath our boat, he hugs it so tenaciously that the upward jerks of the reel only make him hold the more tightly. Once in a great while the fishermen find what they call a "knob-fish" on one of their hooks, and I never knew what they meant until one day a small colony of five was brought ashore.
We are forced to believe, further, that there may be as important differences between two cells as there are between two adult animals or plants. In some way there must be concealed within the two cells which constitute the egg of the starfish and the man differences which correspond to the differences between the starfish and the man.
Gibney had a starfish tattooed on the back of his left hand, a full-rigged ship across his breast, and a gorgeous picture of a lady climbing a ladder adorned the inner side of his brawny right fore-arm. The feet of the lady in question hung down below the fringe of Mr. Your fortune lies at sea. Then she threw a fit an' mumbled something about a light-haired man that was' goin' to cross my path.
Innumerable crustacea frequent every part of the plant. On shaking the great entangled roots, a pile of small fish, shells, cuttlefish, crabs of all orders, sea-eggs, starfish, beautiful Holothuriae, Planariae, and crawling nereidous animals of a multitude of forms, all fall out together. Often as I recurred to a branch of the kelp, I never failed to discover animals of new and curious structures.
Serpent starfish, agile as insects and very brittle, are abundant, and new forms of worms, like great slugs, their backs covered with gills in the form of tufted branches. In these outer, eternally submerged regions are starfish of still other shapes, some with a dozen or more arms. I took one with thirteen rays and placed it temporarily in a pool aquarium with some large anemones.
From one half, the unshaded portion, develops the starfish of the next generation, B. The other is distributed without change in the ovaries, ov, of the individual, B. From these ovaries arises the next egg, A', with its germ plasm.
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