JEB Class ics

In the early 1930s Carl Pantin spent several months at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples studying neuromuscular transmission in crustacea. These investigations reached a convenient stopping point several weeks before Pantin was to return to England, and he cast about for something else to do in the meantime. The previous occupant of the laboratory in which he was working had left some sea anemones in an aquarium, and Pantin chose to examine the neural control of muscular contraction in these (Pantin, 1968). The results of this fortuitous change in direction was a series of papers on the behavioral machinery of coelenterates that changed, in a major way, views on the neural control of behavior in coelenterates and on the early evolution of nervous systems in general. The first and arguably the most important of these papers is the principal subject of this column (Pantin, 1935a).