You will dredge, too, the twelve-rayed sun-star (Solaster papposa), with his rich scarlet armour; and more strange, and quite as beautiful, the bird’s foot star (Palmipes membranaceus), which you may see crawling by its thousand sucking-feet in the Crystal Palace tanks, a pentagonal webbed bird’s foot, of scarlet and orange shagreen. With him, most probably, will be a specimen of the great purple heart-urchin (Spatangus purpureus), clothed in pale lilac horny spines, and other Echinoderms, for which you must consult Forbes’s “British Star-fishes:” but perhaps the species among them which will interest you most, will be the common brittle-star (Ophiocoma rosula), of which a hundred or so, I can promise, shall come up at a single haul of the dredge, entwining their long spine-clad arms in a seemingly inextricable confusion of “kaleidoscope” patterns (thanks to Mr. Gosse for the one right epithet), purple and azure, fawn, brown, green, grey, white and crimson; as if a whole bed of China-asters should have first come to life, and then gone mad, and fallen to fighting. But pick out, one by one, specimens from the tangled mass, and you will agree that no China-aster is so fair as this living stone-flower of the deep, with its daisy-like disc, and fine long prickly arms, which never cease their graceful serpentine motion, and its colours hardly alike in any two specimens. Handle them not, meanwhile, too roughly, lest, whether modesty or in anger, they begin a desperate course of gradual suicide, and, breaking off arm after arm piecemeal, fling them indignantly at their tormentor. Along with these you will certainly obtain a few of that fine bivalve, the great Scallop, which you have seen lying on every fishmonger’s counter in Hastings. Of these you must pick out those which seem dirtiest and most overgrown with parasites, and place them carefully in a jar of salt water, where they may not be rubbed; for they are worth your examination, not merely for the sake of that ring of gem-like eyes which borders their “cloak,” lying along the extreme out edge of the shell as the valves are half open, but for the sake of the parasites outside: corallines of exquisite delicacy, Plumulariæ and Sertulariæ, dead men’s hands (Alcyonia), lumps of white or orange jelly, which will protrude a thousand star-like polypes, and the Tubularia indivisa, twisted tubes of fine straw, which ought already to have puzzled you; for you may pick them up in considerable masses on the Hastings beach after a south-west gale, and think long over them before you determine whether the oat-like stems and spongy roots belong to an animal, or a vegetable. Animals they are, nevertheless, though even now you will hardly guess the fact, when you see at the mouth of each tube a little scarlet flower, connected with the pink pulp which fills the tube. For a further description of this largest and handsomest of our Hydroid