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Updated: May 7, 2025
I turned and faced an immensity of crimson waters, unbroken, a true sea, if ever there was one. A breeze blew the first real wind I had encountered in the hidden places; under it the surface, that had been as molten lacquer, rippled and dimpled. Little waves broke with a spray of rose-pearls and rubies. The giant Medusae drifted stately, luminous kaleidoscopic elfin moons.
The sea-plumes lie flabby and dark as dead animals, until absorbing water, they suddenly rear themselves up, transparent and full of leaves. Thus they go from one side to the other, with the lightness of a feather, or, burrowing in the sand, send forth a phosphoric glow. The belles of the sea, the elegant Medusae, open out the floating circle of their fragile beauty.
I gasped for the fish had been a ganoid that ancient, armoured form that was perhaps the most intelligent of all life on our planet during the Devonian era, but which for age upon age had vanished, save for its fossils held in the embrace of the stone that once was their soft bottom beds; and the half-globes were Medusae, jelly-fish but of a size, luminosity, and colour unheard of.
I will begin with some account of the Hydroids, including the story of the alternate generations, by which they give birth to Medusae, while the Medusae, in their turn, reproduce the Hydroids, from which they spring. But first, a few words upon the growth of Radiates in general. There is no more interesting series of transformations than that of the development of Radiates.
When I watched them I said they put me in mind of a white silk parasol opening and shutting. Dr Cuff had a powerful microscope, through which he examined one of the stomachs of the medusae.
Dark as it was overhead, the whole ocean was flashing with light, at some places in streaks, at others in vast masses, the spouts of several whales appearing like jets of liquid fire; while numberless huge medusae floated about, appearing as if composed of molten silver. "I wonder the ship doesn't catch fire!" exclaimed Tommy, who had just come on deck.
The Yekta of the Crimson Sea, are as extraordinary developments of hydroid forms as the giant Medusae, of which, of course, they are not too remote cousins. The closest resemblances to them in outer water forms are among the Gymnoblastic Hydroids, notably Clavetella prolifera, a most interesting ambulatory form of six tentacles.
Shutting his throat then, as he does, the water is obliged to flow out of his mouth as fast as it flows in; it is also spouted up through his blowholes, and this with such violence that many of the little creatures would be swept out along with it but for the hairy-ended whalebone which lets the sea-water out, but keeps the medusae in.
It is truly a pleasure for me now to be able to demonstrate in my lectures the insensible gradations existing between polyps, medusae, and echinoderms, and to designate by the same name organs seemingly so different. Especially has the minute examination of the thickness of the test in echinoderms revealed to me unexpected relations between the sea-urchin and the medusa.
"Those who have studied the subject say that it is caused by the presence of myriads of minute marine organisms, some soft and gelatinous, and others such as the Crustacea of a hard nature; but, in reality, under some conditions of the atmosphere all sorts of marine creatures, like those huge medusae, shine both in the water and out of it." This appearance continued many hours.
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