Actiniæ in this, that instead of having like them a walking disc, it has a free open lower end, with which (I know not how) it buries itself upright in the sand, with its mouth just above the surface. The figure on the left of the plate represents a curious cluster of papillæ which project from one side of the mouth, and are the opening of the oviduct. But his value consists, not merely in his beauty (though that, really, is not small), but in his belonging to what the long word-makers call an “interosculant” group,—a party of genera and species which connect families scientifically far apart, filling up a fresh link in the great chain, or rather the great network, of zoological classification. For here we have a simple, and, as it were, crude form; of which, if we dared to indulge in reveries, we might say that the Creative Mind realized it before either Actiniæ or Holothurians, and then went on to perfect the idea contained in it in two different directions; dividing it into two different families, and making on its model, by adding new organs, and taking away old ones, in one direction the whole family of Actiniæ (sea-anemones), and in a quite opposite one the Holothuriæ, those strange sea-cucumbers, with their mouth-fringe of feathery gills, of which you shall see some anon. Thus there has been, in the Creative Mind, as it gave life to new species, a development of the idea on which older species were created, in order—we may fancy—that every mesh of the great net might gradually be supplied, and there should be no gaps in the perfect variety of Nature’s forms. This development is one which we must believe to be at least possible, if we allow that a Mind presides over the universe, and not a mere brute necessity, a Law (absurd misnomer) without a Lawgiver; and to it (strangely enough coinciding here and there with the Platonic doctrine of Eternal Ideas existing in the Divine Mind) all fresh inductive discovery seems to point more and more. [Picture: 1. Peachia Hastata. 2. Uraster Rubens] Let me speak freely a few words on this important matter. Geology has disproved the old popular belief that the universe was brought into being as it now exists by a single fiat. We know that the work has been gradual; that the earth “In tracts of fluent heat began, The seeming prey of cyclic storms, The home of seeming random forms, Till, at the last, arose the man.”