But whatever might be inferred from the experiments just described in favor of a senseless and unintelligent life of star-fishes, Professor Preyer was nevertheless able by extending his experiments to win the conviction that the old conception of star-fishes being real reflex animals was wholly untenable, since a great number of capacities and capabilities could be verified and provoked, which are intelligible only on the basis of adaptive co-operation and mutual concerted action in the five rays. We shall not discuss here whether this is also proved by the wonderful fact that a star-fish, which fastens its arms to everything possible, never seizes its own arm and thus, like Molière's miser, in its visits to its oyster beds never catches itself for a thief. We might say, indeed, that the arm seeking a hold does not seize its companion because it feels it and has learned by experience that it takes a Münchausen to pull one's self out of a swamp by the tops of one's boots. But we find exactly the same phenomenon among creeping plants, which clasp every kind of support in their way, but never, as Darwin observed, take hold of their own stalks; whence we might assume that there probably exists in these beings some sort of power of reflex inhibition dependent upon a property of the body and developed in consequence of the fact that clasping and grasping parts of itself would involve a useless waste of energy. We shall see, however, that under certain circumstances this instinctive "dread" of contact with self is inoperative.