of it; being knocked about against rocks and shells, without warning, from morn to night and night to morn. Against which danger, kind Nature, ever _maximus in minimis_, has provided by fitting him with a stout leather coat, which she has given, I believe, to no other of his family. Next for the babies’ heads, covered with prickles instead of hair. They are sea urchins, Amphidotus cordatus, which burrow by thousands in the sand. They are of that Spatangoid form which you will often find fossil in the chalk, and which shepherd boys call snakes’ heads. We shall soon find another sort, an Echinus, and have time to talk over these most strange (in my eyes) of all living animals. I must mention Synapta; or, as Montague 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. 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. 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 will 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 joined 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. The animal, when caught, has a strange habit of self-destruction, contracting its skin at two or three different points, and writhing till it snaps itself into “junks,” as the sailors would say, and then dies.