Archon

“ By means of the Gnosis which he taught men’s souls are redeemed, while their bodies perish.―The development of one of these systems into the other might be most simply explained by assuming that the one described in the Elenchus of Hippolytus is the original and that its reconstruction was brought about by the overpowering intrusion of current dualistic, emanationistic, and docetic ideas. All that had there been said about the great Archon must now be attributed to the Supreme God, the Pater innatus, while the inferior archon might keep his place as ruler of the lowest planetary heaven. ”

“ But when archons are present, an assemblage of many luminous appearances runs round them, difficult to be borne, whether these appearances are mundane or terrestrial. They have not, however, a supermundane tenuity, nor even that of the supreme elements. And to the psychical appearances the air is more allied, and, being suspended from them, receives in itself their circumscription. ”

“ The archons had various privileges and honours. The greatest of the former was the exemption from the trierarchies—a boon not allowed even to the successors of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. As a mark of their office, they wore a chaplet or crown of myrtle; and if any one struck or abused one of the archons, [36] when wearing this badge of office, he became atimus (ἄτιμος) , or infamous in the fullest extent, thereby losing his civic rights. The archons, at the close of their year of service, were admitted among the members of the areiopagus. [Areiopagus.] ”

“ Some of them were stoned to death outside the temple, and some who had fled for sanctuary to the altars were slain there. Only those who fell as suppliants at the feet of the archons' wives were spared. After this the archons were called accursed, and were viewed with horror; moreover, the survivors of Kylon's party regained strength, and continued their intrigues against Megakles and the archons. ”

“ Look at the slim slip of a boy who gravely walks at the head of this team of enormous fawn-coloured oxen, toilsomely dragging their ponderous load up a hill so steep as almost to need a ladder to ascend. The urchin cannot be more than ten or eleven, and in any other country would alternately skip and idle, or at least allow his attention to wander with every fresh object that struck his fancy. ”

“ How that urchin, who, being deprived of his natural rest at night, constantly sleeps whilst driving by day, is to steer through the omnibuses in Piccadilly, is a matter of speculation for those who love “horrid accidents”; but it is fortunate that the magnificent animal knows his own way home, and will only stop once, at a door in Park Lane, where he is used to being pulled up, and where, we are concerned to add, his master has no business, although he is sufficiently welcome. ”

“ The sea urchin lays eggs, and from these eggs come the young urchins. (What other animal have we already found, that lays eggs?) When they are babies they don't look a bit like their parents. And here is another thing that the sea urchin does that you will remember when we come to kangaroos. Some of the sea urchins carry their babies in pouches. They fold their spines over their babies just as you carry a doll in your arms. ”

“ All urchins are supplied with eggs, but in some of the species the eggs are exceedingly small and unfit for food. Singularly enough, the urchin has what we may call its head and mouth down below, and a place for the issue of the residuum up above; (and this same property is common to all stromboids and to limpets) . For the food on which the creature lives lies down below; consequently the mouth has a position well adapted for getting at the food, and the excretion is above, near to the back of the shell. ”

“ Sea urchins are spherical, oval or flattened free-moving echinoderms covered with spines. Their soft tissue anatomy is characterized by a dominant digestive tract, a varying number of gonads, and the highly specialized water vascular system with its external appendages, the tube or ambulacral feet. ”

“ Such a regular urchin as has here been described lives with the mouth downwards, preferring a hard floor, on which it creeps by its podia and its radioles, constantly scraping the algae and seaweeds from the rock with its teeth and so feeding itself. If it does not bore a hole, or is not protected by long needle like radioles, it may grasp bits of sea-weed or other objects with its pedicellariae and hide beneath them from the fish that seek it for food.
The Irregular urchins (fig. 3) have been modified for another way of life. Some of them live in mud or ooze, through which they creep. ”

“ So a sea urchin is able to move its spines about quite freely. Indeed, it sometimes walks with them as well as with the little sucker-feet, which it pokes out through tiny holes in the shell just as a starfish does, moving a few forward at a time, and so hitching [112] its way along over the sand at the bottom of the sea.
If you succeed in finding a live sea urchin—and you can generally do so without very much trouble, by hunting in the pools among the rocks when the tide is out—you will notice that it has a very big mouth, with five perfectly enormous teeth. ”

“ Of slender-rayed brittle stars there are brown and green and mottled sorts, some with white cross bands on each arm, and all with the fragile arms breaking away with the least roughness in handling. Often merely the contact with the preserving fluids seems to be sufficient for a general epidemic of arm-shattering. Among the sea urchins a kind with very slender, long, almost needle-like spines is abundant. These spines are not only sharp, but stinging, and often a warning tingle told the exploring hand in crevice or pool bottom of the presence of this well-protected little urchin. ”

“ Fair-haired Myrtilus seemed to pay little heed to the game which Gras, Archias's Bithynian house steward, was counting, but black-bearded Hermon had given it more attention, and when Daphne drew back he nodded approvingly, and pointing to the heap of motionless inhabitants of the air, exclaimed with sincere regret: "Fie upon us human wretches! Would the most bloodthirsty hyena destroy such a number of living creatures in a few hours? Other beasts of prey do not kill even one wretched sparrow more than they need to appease their hunger. ”

“ Distinct features of internal sea urchin anatomy may extend to the sizes and shapes of digestive tract, gonads, ampullae and muscles. A thorough revision of internal structures in the light of recent technological advances will therefore almost certainly change our view of facts that, for years, were taken for granted. Scanning of sea urchins has so far been performed by us on more than 50 species (Ziegler et al., publication in preparation) . ”

“ We thank her, but prefer to drink the cool water of the nuts from the shell.
The brown-skinned urchins, upon seeing their mother in friendly conversation with the strangers, return to the clearing and eye us with wonder and some distrust. They are on their little toes, so to speak, watching for the slightest suspicious movement, ready to fly to the protective jungle. Their big sloe eyes grow wistful as we offer them some pennies and their mother reassures them, finally overcoming their fears and bringing them to the place where we are crouched upon our haunches with hands outstretched. ”

“ And therefore it seemed to the Urchin's curators sound and advisable to take him out to the Zoo one Sunday afternoon just to suggest to his delightful mind that nothing is impossible in this curious world.
Of course, the amusing feature of such expeditions is that it is always the adult who is astounded, while the child takes things blandly for granted. You or I can watch a tiger for hours and not make head or tail of it—in a spiritual sense, that is—whereas an urchin simply smiles with rapture, isn't the least amazed, and wants to stroke the "nice pussy." ”

“ The manner in which the urchin unfolds itself at the expense of the larva is quite analogous to that which the asterias present: it is another case of alternate generation, of which our space does not permit us to give even a general outline.
Sea-urchins are found in every sea; they dwell in sandy bottoms, and sometimes upon rocky ground. They are caught with wooden pincers when in shallow water; when found at the water's edge, they may be taken by a gloved hand.
The urchin, like the crab, which it also resembles in taste, becomes red when boiled; only certain species are comestible, however. ”

“ We know that it is the case with one species inhabiting the same seas, but so different in its structure as to form a genus by itself, the Archer of Java (Toxotes jaculator, Cuv.) . The mouth is not at all tubular, nor is it produced into a snout, the gape is rather wide, and the lower jaw is longer than the upper, a mouth totally different from that of Chelmon, yet it has exactly the same habit. "It well merits," observe MM. Cuvier and Valenciennes, "the name of Archer, by its singular industry. ”

“ Between the rows of knobs are five double rows of holes, like pin-pricks. Out of these grow such little suckers as I told you the star-fish had.
In some countries the sea-urchins are small—not much larger than a dime. In warmer seas the urchins grow large, even as large as a large orange. People often use these larger ones for food.
The sea-urchin walks on his spines, as the cross-star-fish does on his. But as the quills of the urchin are all around him, like a ball-cover, his walk is a roll! By the little suckers he can cling to the rocks, and he can climb up their sides. ”

“ By the influx of liquid which they inclose they become inflated throughout all their prickles, in such a manner that they can attach themselves to any solid body, at the will of the animal, by means of their terminal suckers. Frédol, in "Le Monde de les Mers," thus explains the urchin's mode of progression. "Let us imagine," he says, "one of these creatures to be at rest; all its spines are immovable, and all its filaments repose within the shell; some of these involuntarily escape; they extend themselves and feel the ground all round them: others follow, but the animal is firmly fixed. ”

“ It is through these holes that the feet are thrust out, so that in its main features an echinus is merely a star-fish with its five rays curved into the shape of a hollow spheroid, and then converted into a rigid box, with holes left for its feet to come through. The urchin crawls in the same way as the common star-fish, but makes use of its spines also to help push itself along. The suckers, moreover, in being protruded from all sides of a globe instead of from the under side of a flat organism, are of much more use as feelers than they are in the star-fish. ”

“ In spite of its unwieldy horns and staring eyes, which give it a savage look, it is abject before its keeper, usually a small, black urchin with a shaven head and a piece of string tied tightly round his waist for clothing. ”

“ When a child cries for the moon, and a cloud comes and covers up the coveted bauble, and hides it away, the urchin has small comfort in being told that it is just as near the object of its desires as when it could see it, and look, and long, and stretch its tiny hands. ”

“ The attachment of the larger radioles is protected by a ring of smaller ones. These and the other small spines protect the sea-urchin, as its prickles protect a hedgehog; the larger ones may also help the animal to move or to fix itself firmly against the shock of waves. Some urchins, especially the purple egg-urchin, bore holes even in very hard rocks, and by stretching out their radioles they can hold themselves immovably in their holes ”

“ There must be a good deal more than a score of them, all told, and they range in age from here and there a white-polled blackamoor who looks well on in the sixties, down to a sable urchin of not more than ten or twelve. But however they may vary in age, in one respect, at any rate, they are unvarying—in their hunger and thirst after the piastre. ”

“ Although several specimens of the echinoid taxon missing in our study, the Echinothurioida (or leather urchins) , were found in museum collections, their shape prevented successful soft tissue imaging. These sea urchins possess a flexible calcite endoskeleton as well as specialized internal muscles that contract when the animal is fixed, resulting in a pancake-like shape of the organism. ”

“ It is the most common of all, and seen on every urchin’s string; a simple and inoffensive fish, whose nests are visible all along the shore, hollowed in the sand, over which it is steadily poised through the summer hours on waving fin. Sometimes there are twenty or thirty nests in the space of a few rods, two feet wide by half a foot in depth, and made with no little labor, the weeds being removed, and the sand shoved up on the sides, like a bowl. ”

“ In the neighbourhood of Torone there are sea-urchins of a white colour, shells, spines, eggs and all, and that are longer than the ordinary sea-urchin. The spine in this species is not large nor strong, but rather limp; and the black formations in connexion with the mouth are more than usually numerous, and communicate with the external duct, but not with one another; in point of fact, the animal is in a manner divided up by them. The edible urchin moves with greatest freedom and most often ”

“ The fourth, an urchin apparently about five years old,—he might be much younger, judging from his stunted size; somewhat older, judging from the vicious acuteness of his face,—on the floor under his father's chair, was diving his little hand into the paternal pockets in search for a marble sportively hidden in those capacious recesses. ”