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Updated: June 18, 2025
I believe, Uniacke, yes, on my soul, I believe that I had bland visions of the sea-urchin being happy and prosperous on a high stool in an office, at home with ledgers, a contented little clerk, whose horizon was bounded by an A B C shop, and whose summer pastime was fly-killing. My big work finished, a sort of eager idiocy seized me. I was as a man drugged.
They can be bent this way or that. If the Urchin is on a rock he clings tightly with these sucker-feet; then, if he wishes to move away, you will see the long thin tubes stretch out and bend about. They fix themselves to the rock, and the animal is drawn along. Besides these spines and suckers, the Sea-urchin owns another set of tools.
"The upper valve is almost invariably wanting, though occasionally found in a perfect state of preservation in the white chalk at some distance. In this case, we see clearly that the sea-urchin first lived from youth to age, then died and lost its spines, which were carried away.
From the principles laid down in the last sentence it would follow that if man were constructed upon a plan as different from that of any other animal as that of a sea-urchin is from that of a whale, it would be "equally probable" that he had been developed from some other animal as it is now, when we know that for every bone, muscle, tooth, and even pattern of tooth, in man, there is a corresponding bone, muscle, tooth, and pattern of tooth, in an ape.
"It might be suitably placed on many of the memorial slabs in the church yonder," he continued, waving his hand towards the casement that looked on the churchyard. "But your sea-urchin " "Oh, I speak only of the fading of the town nature into the sea nature," rejoined the painter quickly, "only of that.
Then the young Crania adhered to the bared shell, grew and perished in its turn; after which, the upper valve was separated from the lower, before the Echinus became enveloped in chalky mud." A specimen in the Museum of Practical Geology, in London, still further prolongs the period which must have elapsed between the death of the sea-urchin, and its burial by the Globigerinæ.
From this point both the landscape and the rocky cauldron are visible, and the latter is seen to be the remainder of a stalactitic cavern, the roof of which has fallen in. In the very hard limestone, which is like marble, I observed traces of bivalves and multitudes of spines of the sea-urchin, but no well-defined remains could be knocked off.
In the first place, it is sufficiently maddening to see the settled homes of other happier souls, all apparently so firmly rooted in a warm soil of contentment while he floats, an unhappy sea-urchin, in an ocean of indecision. One day it is Great Neck, the next it is Nutley; one day Hollis, the next Englewood; one day Bronxville, and then Garden City.
If we come now to consider the more partial phosphorescence of the sea, we find that it is due to animals belonging to almost every group of marine forms to Echinoderms, or creatures of the sea-urchin and star-fish type, to Annelid worm, to Medusidæ, or jelly-fish, as they are popularly called, including the "great domes" and the "silvery disks" of the passage above quoted from Professor Martin Duncan, to Tunicates, among which is the Pyrosoma, to Mollusks, Crustaceans, and in very many cases to Actinozoa, or forms belonging to the type of the sea anemone and the coral polyp.
It is true that on Darwinian principles the ancestral form from which the sea-urchin developed was different, and must not be conceived merely as an Echinus devoid of pedicellariæ; but this makes the difficulty none the less. It is equally hard to imagine that the first rudiments of such structures could have been useful to any animal from which the Echinus might have been derived.
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