They are endowed with such exquisitive sensitiveness that
to evade capture they sacrifice, apparently without a pang, their
wriggling legs piece by piece, and each piece, large or small, squirms and
wriggles. The poet says that when the legs of one of the heroes of
"The Chevy Chase" were smitten off, "he fought upon their stumps!"
The voluntary dismemberment of the brittle star may be even more
pitiful--in fact almost complete, yet it still strives to pack away
its forlorn body in some crevice or hollow of the coral rock. It has
been asserted that no one has ever captured by hand a brittle star
perfect in all its members. "One baffled collector," said a highly
entertaining London journal recently, "who thought that he had
succeeded in coaxing a specimen into a pail, had the mortification of
seeing it dismember itself at the last moment, and asserts that the eye
which is placed at the end of a limb gave a perceptible wink as he
picked up the fragment!"
Here too, most of the "brittle stars" are self-conscious to the point
of self-obliteration. But some, though still quite worthy the specific
title FRAGILISSMA, which science has bestowed upon the tribe, may, if
taken up tenderly, be handled without the loss of a single limb, and a
limb more or less can hardly be of consequence to a creature which, no
greater than half a walnut shell, possesses five, each 12 or 14 inches
long, and supplied with innumerable feet.
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