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The gulls kept telling them the joke; but they didn't understand, and I got on capitally. Every night I dined and fed and frolicked till dawn; then put on my sea-weeds, and lay still to be stared at. I wanted some one to come and live on me; then I should be equal to the island of the polypes. But no one came, and I was beginning to be tired of fooling people, when I was fooled myself.
Now let the coral polypes come and perch on the shore and build a fringing reef, which will stop when they come to 20 or 25 fathoms, and you will have a fringing reef like that round the island in the illustration.
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.
For, as we have seen, these polypes cannot live at a greater depth than about twenty-five fathoms; and actual observation has shown that while, down to this depth, the sounding-lead will bring up branches of live coral from the outer wall of such a reef, at a greater depth it fetches to the surface nothing but dead coral and coral sand.
Peysonell, who paid great attention to the structure of the sponge, brought proofs of its animal vitality before the Royal Society in the years 1752 57. And Mr. Ellis, five years afterward, by his dissections, set the question quite at rest; though he fell into the error of believing that the frame of the sponge was the outer case of worms or polypes.
But the coral cones would look grey and barren below, while their summits would be gay with a richly-coloured parterre of flowerlike coral polypes.
You know that the mountains on shore are covered with vegetation at their bases, while their tops are barren or covered with snow; but these mountains would be perfectly bare at their bases, and all round their tops they would be covered with a beautiful vegetation of coral polypes.
Now I should have been in a towering passion at this, if in my travels I hadn't discovered a race of little creatures as much smaller than polypes as a mouse is smaller than an elephant. I heard two learned men talking about diatoms, as they sailed to Labrador; and I listened. They said these people lived in both salt and fresh water, and were found in all parts of the world.
We will begin by copying a description of it from one of those class-books which suppose children to learn words like parrots, and to repeat them with just as little understanding. "Coral is formed by an animal belonging to the kingdom of Radiates, sub-kingdom Polypes. The soft body of the animal is attached to a support, the mouth opening upwards in a row of tentacles.
Within the zone thus bounded, by far the greater part of the ocean is inhabited by coral polypes, which not only form very strong and large skeletons, but associate together into great masses, like the thickets and the meadow turf, or, better still, the accumulations of peat, to which plants give rise on dry land.
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