Segmentation-cavity meaning

On examining more minutely the course of the development, it is found that the ovum goes through the usual process of cleavage, always total and regular in this group, and so gives rise to a hollow sphere or ovoid with the wall composed of a single layer of cells, and containing a spacious cavity, the blastocoele or segmentation-cavity.

Then follows the phenomenon of gastrulation, by which onehalf of the blastula is invaginated into the other, so as to obliterate the segmentation cavity.

Regarding the Echinoderms as a whole in the light of the foregoing account, we may give the following analytic summary of the characters that distinguish them from other coelomate animals: They live in salt or brackish water; a primitive bilateral symmetry is still manifest in the right and left divisions of the coelom; the middle coelomic cavities are primitively transformed into two hydrocoels communicating with the exterior indirectly through a duct or ducts of the anterior coelom; stereom, composed of crystalline carbonate of lime, is, with few exceptions, deposited by special amoebocytes in the meshes of a mesodermal stroma, chiefly in the integument; reproductive cells are derived from the endothelium, apparently of the anterior coelom; total segmentation of the ovum produces a coeloblastula and gastrula by invagination; mesenchyme is formed in the segmentation cavity by migration of cells, chiefly from the hypoblast.

The formation of an inner cell-mass converts the singlelayered blastula (monoblastula) into a double-layered embryo (diblastula) which may be termed a parenchymula, since at first the inner cell-mass forms an irregular parenchyma which may entirely fill up and obliterate the segmentation cavity (fig.