{297}In the figures, the hard cartilage is coloured purple, the soft
cartilage blue, and the muco-cartilage red, so that the position of this
bar is well shown. This bar may be looked upon as bearing the same relation
to the muco-cartilaginous plate of the lower lip as the opercular bar does
to the muco-cartilaginous plate over the thyroid; and seeing that these two
plates form one continuous ventral head-shield of muco-cartilage (Fig. 118,
B), and also that this bar fuses with the opercular bar, we may conclude
that the segment represented by the lower lip is closely connected with the
hyoid or opercular segments. In other words, if the lower lip arose from
the metastoma, then this pair of skeletal bars might be called the
metastomal bars, which formed the supporting skeleton of the last pair of
prosomatic appendages and, as is likely enough, arose in connection with
the posterior lateral horns of the plastron; these posterior lateral horns,
like the rest of the plastron, would give rise to hard cartilage, and so
form in Ammocoetes the two lateral so-called pterygoid projections.
In the branchial region the muscles which marked out each branchial segment
were of two kinds--ordinary striated visceral muscles and tubular muscles.
Of these the former represented the dorso-ventral muscles of the branchial
appendages, while the latter formed a separate group of dorso-ventral
muscles with a separate innervation which may have been originally the
segmental veno-pericardial muscles so characteristic of Limulus and the
scorpions. In Figs. 116, 117, the grouping of these muscles in each
branchial segment is well shown, and it is immediately seen that the hyoid
segment possesses its group of striated visceral muscles (_m_3_) supplied
by the VIIth nerve in the same manner as the posterior groups, as has
already been pointed out by Miss Alcock in her previous paper. Passing to
the segment in front, Fig. 116 shows that the group of visceral muscles
(_m_2_) corresponds in relative position with respect to the metastomal bar
to the hyoid muscles with respect to the opercular bar or to the branchial
visceral muscles with respect to each branchial bar. What, then, is this
muscular group? The series of sections show that these are the
dorso-ventral muscles belonging to the lower lip, which, as seen in Fig.
119 (_M._), form a well-marked muscular sheet, whose fibres interlace
across the mid-ventral line of the lower lip. This group of lower
lip-muscles is very suggestive, for these muscles arise, not from the
trabeculæ, but from the front dorsal region of the cranium, just in front
of the two lateral {298}eyes. In Fig. 117 the dorsal part is seen cut
across on its way to its dorsal attachment. Such an origin is reminiscent
of the tergo-coxal group of muscles, arising, as they do, from the
primordial cranium and the tergal carapace, and suggests at once that when
the chilarial appendages expanded to form a metastoma, their tergo-coxal
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