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nydus/On Growth and FormPublic
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CHAPTER IX ON CONCRETIONS, SPICULES, AND SPICULAR SKELETONS

three much smaller {451} rays, the latter are recurved, as in Fig. 215. This type, save for the constancy of the number of rays, and the limitation of the terminal ones to three, and save also for the more important difference that they occur only at one and not at both ends of the long axis, is similar to the type of spicule illustrated in Fig. 213, which we have explained as being probably developed within an oval cell, by whose walls its branches have been conformed to geodetic curves. But it is much more probable that we have here to do with a spicule developed in the midst of a group of three coequal and more or less elongated or cylindrical cells or vesicles, the long axial ray corôÙreôÙsponôÙding to their common line of contact, and the three short rays having each lain in the surface furrow between two out of the three adjacent cells.

A series of line drawings depicting various spicule or skeletal structures found in marine organisms.

Just as in the case of the little curved or S-shaped spicules, formed apparently within the bounds of a single cell, so also in the case of the larger tetractinellid and analogous types do we find among the Holothuroidea the same conôÙfiôÙgurôÙaôÙtions reproduced as we have dealt with in the sponges. The

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