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Updated: May 22, 2025
In the case of the red coral, the hard skeleton belongs to the interior of the stem and branches only; but in the commoner white corals, each polype has a complete skeleton of its own. These polypes ate sometimes solitary, in which case the whole skeleton is represented by a single cup, with partitions radiating from its centre to its circumference.
The red coral polype perches upon the sea bottom, it then grows up into a sort of stem, and out of that stem there grow branches, each of which has its own polypes; and thus you have a kind of tree formed, every branch of the tree terminated by its polype. It is a tree, but at the end of the branches there are open mouths of polypes instead of flowers.
Beast and fowl, reptile and fish, mollusk, worm, and polype, are all composed of structural units of the same character, namely, masses of protoplasm with a nucleus. There are sundry very low animals, each of which, structurally, is a mere colourless blood-corpuscle, leading an independent life.
On that leg grows, amid another copse of the grey polypes, a delicate straw-coloured Sertularia, branch on branch of tiny double combs, each tooth of the comb being a tube containing a living flower; on another leg another Sertularia, coarser, but still beautiful; and round it again has trained itself, parasitic on the parasite, plant upon plant of glass ivy, bearing crystal bells, each of which, too, protrudes its living flower; on another leg is a fresh species, like a little heather-bush of whitest ivory, and every needle leaf a polype cell let us stop before the imagination grows dizzy with the contemplation of those myriads of beautiful atomies.
In fact, there is a period when, as Aristotle long ago said, the embryo of the highest animal has the form of a mere worm; and, devoid of internal and external organisation, is merely an almost structureless lump of polype substance.
It is known that many of these creatures are capable of being multiplied by artificial division, the divided halves growing, after a time, into complete and separate animals; and that many are able to perform a very similar process naturally, in such a manner that one polype may, by repeated incomplete divisions, give rise to a sort of sheet, or turf, formed by innumerable connected, and yet independent, descendants.
It is, in fact, a pile of cup-shaped pieces, very loosely connected together. A little later, these pieces free themselves successively, and the sedate polype disappears in a company of sprightly young medusæ.
The coral polype, like everything else, takes a certain time to grow to its full size; it does not do it in a minute; just as a child takes a certain time to grow into a man so does the embryo polype take time to grow into a perfect polype and form its skeleton. Consequently every particle of coral limestone is an expression of time.
You have seen the room in the British Museum full of corals, madrepores, brain-stones, corallines, and sea-ferns? Oh yes. Then fancy all those alive. Not as they are now, white stone: but covered in jelly; and out of every pore a little polype, like a flower, peeping out. Fancy them of every gaudy colour you choose.
After enjoying its freedom for a longer or shorter time, and being carried either by the force of its own cilia, or by currents which bear it along, the embryo coral settles down to the bottom, loses its cilia, and becomes fixed to the rock, gradually assuming the polype form and growing up to the size of its parent.
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