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Updated: May 23, 2025
While, therefore, the idea of the continuity of germ substance greatly simplifies our problem, we must acknowledge that once more we are thrown back upon the mysteries of the cell. Until we can more fully explain the cell machine we must recognize our inability to solve the fundamental question of why an individual is like its parents. A represents an egg of a starfish.
He picked out and threw over three or four large starfish, or "five-fingers." The hake head stuck on the bait-spear in the center was almost gone; Jim replaced it with a fresh head from the bait-tub. Then he seized a mottled, purplish crab that had been aimlessly scuttling to and fro across the bottom of the pot, and impaled him, back down, on the barb of the spear.
At best there would be many rough miles to cover, in rounding the numerous arms of that great starfish, the Bocche di Cattaro, and no boat of the Austrian Lloyd or Hungarian Croatian lines was available to-day, even if shipping the motor in that way wouldn't have involved endless red tape, delay and bother.
I do not envy the millions at Margate and Blackpool, at Salcombe and Minehead, for I have persuaded myself that the sea is not what it was in my day. Then the pools were always full of starfish; crabs really big crabs stalked the deserted sands; and anemones waved their feelers at you from every rock.
Then, taking the echinus in his hand, "These two fellows are first cousins, very nearly related, though you may not be inclined to believe the fact. The thing you call an egg was as much a living being, capable of feeding itself and producing young, as this starfish. If I was to bend round the rays of the starfish and fill up the interior, I could produce an animal very like the echinus.
Ask any fisherman what he thinks of the "harmless" Starfish, and he will call it a pest and a nuisance. "It gets into the crab traps," he says, "and eats all the bait. And when we are line-fishing it sucks the bait off our hooks, and sometimes swallows hook and all." Small wonder that Five-fingers, or Five-fingered Jack, as it is called, has no friend among fisher-folk.
Now a strange thing happens. The mouth of the Starfish opens into a kind of bag which slips between the oyster shells. The Starfish, as it were, turns itself inside-out! It then eats the oyster and leaves the clean shell. Mussels are smaller, so they are eaten in a different way. The Starfish merely presses the mussel into its mouth, cleans out the shells, and throws them away.
We know that the crew of the Royal Navy's Bulldog fished up a starfish from 2,620 fathoms, hence from a depth of more than one vertical league. Would you still say, Captain Nemo, that we really know nothing?" "No, professor," the captain replied, "I wouldn't be so discourteous. Yet I'll ask you to explain how these creatures can live at such depths?" "I explain it on two grounds," I replied.
In addition to these, her accumulation of pet specialities included a seven-fingered starfish, which is supposed by the ignorant to be peculiarly inimical to the adventurous cat that swalloweth it; and a ring-horned pandalus or `Aesop prawn, which queer creature Master Bob appropriately christened `The Prawnee Chief, much to the annoyance of Miss Nell, who had become quite grand now in her language, becoming `puffed up, as Bob said, with her newly-acquired `knowledge' a `little' of which, as the proverb tells us, is "a dangerous thing."
They would take spades and hammers and magnifying glasses and fountain pens, and Oswald's cigar lighter and some lunch, and come back at night with a fine mess of these here trilobites and vertebrae; and ganoids and petrified horseflies, and I don't know what all; mebbe oyster shells, or the footprints of a bird left in solid rock, or the outlines of starfish, or a shrimp that was fifty-two million years old and perfectly useless.
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