Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 20, 2025
Driesch had given an experimental basis for this theory at an earlier stage, in his experiments on the initial stages of the development of sea-urchins, starfishes, zoophytes, and the like. A Planarian worm cut into pieces developed a new worm of smaller size from each part. A mutilated Pluteus larva developed a new food-canal, and restored the whole typical form.
In certain sea-urchins, which are really starfishes with the gaps between the arms filled up, the body is elongated, and thus the head and tail conditions of all animals higher in the scale of life are represented. Many of us look with longing to the days of Columbus; we chafe at the thought of no more continents to discover; no unknown seas to encompass.
Even among these swarm starfishes and limpets and other crustaceans, and streamers of kelp squirm out from the rock where they keep slender hold, to sway in the restless water, just as all the rocks above a certain depth and below a certain height are olive black with dense hangings of rockweed while in depths that are just awash at low tide they are olive brown with unending mats of Irish moss.
Bivalve and univalve mollusca seem to be rare at the greatest depths; but starfishes, sea urchins and other echinoderms, zoophytes, sponges, and protozoa abound. It is obvious that the Challenger has the privilege of opening a new chapter in the history of the living world. She cannot send down her dredges and her trawls into these virgin depths of the great ocean without bringing up a discovery.
The young man, who has enough to do in order to acquire such familiarity with the structure of the human body as will enable him to perform the operations of surgery, ought not, in my judgment, to be occupied with investigations into the anatomy of crabs and starfishes.
These delicately "chambered" shells were once the homes of creatures which lived in the sunless depths of the ocean, for though it is totally dark at the bottom of the deep, deep sea, life is now known to exist at all depths below the surface of the ocean; on the ocean-floor starfishes and their relations abound, and some of those brought from a great depth are very beautiful indeed telling to those who have eyes to see, the same tale as the little fern buried in the coal that it is the glory of every created thing to show forth something of its Creator, even in hidden places where no human eye can trace its loveliness.
Indeed in this respect the worms have been well compared to the relics which fill the shelves of one of our grandmother's china-closets. The four great branches are the echinoderms, mollusks, articulates, and vertebrates. The echinoderms, including starfishes, sea-urchins, and others straggled early from the great army.
Brightly colored starfishes, beautiful sea-urchins, strange stationary ascidians, and flower-like sea-anemones, quaint sea-horses, and filmy, fragile jellyfishes and their multiform kin all seem novel and wonderful as one sees them in their native element.
I refuse regretfully your explanation that it is my finger which is bigger; I should like to think that it were indeed so, and that the boys and girls of to-day find their crabs and starfishes in the size and quantity to which I was accustomed. But I am afraid we cannot hide it from ourselves that the supply is giving out.
It is in fact obvious that one cannot keep on taking starfishes home and hanging them up in the hall as barometers without detriment to the coming race. We had another amusement as children, in which I suppose the modern child is no longer able to indulge.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking