Of the star-fishes and serpent-stars (_Asteridea_ and _Ophiuridea_), Zittel says: "It would seem that the Palaeozoic 'sea-stars' differed very little from those in the seas of the present age." (p. 395.) The crinoids, we are told, "are among the earliest in geological history," making up vast limestones of the Palaeozoic rocks; and forms scarcely separable from the modern are found in the Jurassic, but so far as the text-books tell us are =absolutely unknown in any later deposits=. But there are several modern genera, such as Pentacrinus, Rhizocrinus, Bathycrinus, etc., found in the deep waters of nearly all the oceans. The genus Rhizocrinus was discovered off the coast of Norway about the sixties of the last century. But what were these creatures doing since "Jurassic times," while the "pulsating crust" was putting parts of the continents under the sea for ages at a stretch? Why did they form no deposits during the Cretaceous, Eocene, Miocene or Pliocene ages? Surely the absurdity of the present arrangement is evident to a child. During all these intervening ages the climate of the globe continued of the same remarkable mildness, fossils of all these formations being found about as far north as explorers have ever gone. Why did the crinoids and polyp-corals suspend business from "Jurassic times" to the "recent," merely to accommodate a modern theory? Dana says that "The coral reefs of the Oolyte in England consist of corals of the same group with the reef-making species of the existing tropics,"[49] and he argues from this fact that the mean temperature of the waters must have been about 69 deg. F. But a luxuriant vegetation still continued in the Arctic regions during the Cretaceous and the Tertiaries. How absurd to say that these corals built no reefs about the European coasts during all these ages. Or, to put the matter in another way, considering how many of their characteristic types are alive in our modern seas, why should we say that the crinoidal or coral limestones of the Mesozoic or Palaeozoic rocks are not as recent as the nummulitic limestones of the Eocene or any late Tertiary deposits? It is no answer at all to tell us that, though the general types are the same, the =species= of the Palaeozoic and the Mesozoic are entirely extinct. I have not had the courage "to attempt to spell through" all the "dead weight" of the modern literature, but I think that the world would like more satisfactory proof of this oft-repeated assertion than the customs and traditions of a hundred years, and the exigencies of a fanciful theory. This worn-out argument of Cuvier's about extinct species has kept up a running fight with common sense for many decades, and though driven backward from one point to another over the long thin line of this taxonomic series of the fossil world, it still contests every inch of ground.