I mentioned just now Synapta; or, as Montagu called it, Chirodota: a much better name, and, I think, very uselessly changed; for Chirodota expresses the peculiarity of the beast, which consists in—start not, reader—twelve hands, like human hands, while Synapta expresses merely its power of clinging to the fingers, which it possesses in common with many other animals. It is, at least, a beast worth talking about; as for finding one, I fear that we have no chance of such good fortune. [Picture: Plate 4: Synapta Digitata etc.] Colonel Montagu found them here some forty years ago; and after him, Mr. Alder, in 1845. I found hundreds of them, but only once, in 1854 after a heavy south-eastern gale, washed up among the great Lutrariæ in a cove near Goodrington; but all my dredging outside failed to procure a specimen—Mr. Alder, however, and Mr. Cocks (who find everything, and will at last certainly catch Midgard, the great sea-serpent, as Thor did, by baiting for him with a bull’s head), have dredged them in great numbers; the former, at Helford in Cornwall, the latter on the west coast of Scotland. It seems, however, to be a southern monster, probably a remnant, like the great cockle, of the Mediterranean fauna; for Mr. MacAndrew finds them plentifully in Vigo Bay, and J. Müller in the Adriatic, off Trieste. But what is it like? Conceive a very fat short earth-worm; not ringed, though, like the earth-worm, but smooth and glossy, dappled with darker spots, especially on one side, which may be the upper one. Put round its mouth twelve little arms, on each a hand with four ragged fingers, and on the back of the hand a stump of a thumb, and you have Synapta Digitata (Plates IV. and V., from my drawings of the live animal). These hands it puts down to its mouth, generally in alternate pairs, but how it obtains its food by them is yet a mystery, for its intestines are filled, like an earth-worm’s, with the mud in which it lives, and from which it probably extracts (as does the earth-worm) all organic matters. You will find it stick to your fingers by the whole skin, causing, if your hand be delicate, a tingling sensation; and if you examine the skin under the microscope, you will find the cause. The whole skin is studded with minute glass anchors, some hanging freely from the surface, but most imbedded in the skin. Each of these anchors is jointed at its root into one end of a curious cribriform plate,—in plain English, one pierced like a sieve, which lies under the skin, and reminds one of the similar plates in the skin of the White Cucumaria, which I will show you presently; and both of these we must regard as the first rudiments of an Echinoderm’s outside skeleton, such as in the Sea-urchins covers the whole body of the animal. (See on Echinus Millaris, p. 89.) {111} Somewhat similar anchor-plates, from a Red Sea species, Synapta Vittata, may be seen in any collection of microscopic objects.