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Updated: May 22, 2025
We know that, among the sea-anemones and coral-forming animals, each polype has a mouth leading to a stomach, which is open at its inner end, and thus communicates freely with the general cavity of the body; that the tentacles placed round the mouth are hollow, and that they perform the part of arms in seizing and capturing prey.
On the contrary, in their earliest condition they are all alike, and the primordial germs of a man, a dog, a bird, a fish, a beetle, a snail, and a polype are, in no essential structural respects, distinguishable.
Again, when this great cup was alive, the whole surface was covered with a beautiful body upon which were set innumerable small polype flowers, if we may so call them, often brilliantly coloured; and the whole cup was built up in the same fashion by the deposit of carbonate of lime in the interior of the combined polype body, formed by budding and by fission in the way I described.
If I make a bud grow out here, and another on the opposite side, and each fashions itself into a new polype, the practical effect will be that before long you will see a single polype converted into a sort of tree or bush of polypes.
M. de Trembley showed that you could take a polype and cut it into two, or four, or many pieces, mutilating it in all directions, and the pieces would still grow up and reproduce completely the original form of the animal.
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 must understand that all this skeleton has been formed in the interior of the body, to suit the branched body of the polype mass, and that it is as much its skeleton as our own bones are our skeleton.
The building of the piers at Port Said, and the construction of the canal, as meagrely described by the magnate of the Fifth Avenue, were the kind of subjects he believed in; and he had a sort of mild contempt for one who could discourse learnedly over a polype, and did not know the difference between a sea mile and a statute mile.
There is reason to believe that such masses as these take a long time to form, and hence that the age a polype tree, or polype turf, may attain, may be considerable.
Or, what is still more common, a polype may throw out buds, which are converted into polypes, or branches bearing polypes, until a tree-like mass, sometimes of very considerable size, is formed. This is what happens in the case of the red coral of commerce. A minute polype, fixed to the rocky bottom of the deep sea, grows up into a branched trunk.
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