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Updated: May 19, 2025
There has appeared of late, like a penultimate branching-out of the old classical trunk, or, better still, like one of those excrescences, those polypi, which decrepitude develops, and which are a sign of decomposition much more than a proof of life there has appeared a strange school of dramatic poetry.
"And you may add," observed Ernest, "since so interesting a subject is on the tapis, that if two of these polypi happen to quarrel over their prey, the largest generally swallows the smallest, in order to get it out of the way; and the latter, with the exception of being a little cramped for space, is not in the slightest degree injured by the operation."
"Exactly so, Willis." "Might they not as well consist of multitudes of insects piled heaps upon heaps?" "It is in a great measure as you say, Willis." "Not I I do not say it quite the contrary." "Well, Willis, you are at liberty to believe it or not, as you think proper." "I hope so; we shall, therefore, put the polypi with Ernest's stars and Jack's admirals."
The branches, moreover, as we have just seen, sometimes possess organs capable of movement and independent of the polypi. Surprising as this union of separate individuals in a common stock must always appear, every tree displays the same fact, for buds must be considered as individual plants.
I believe that it was at one time supposed that these coral formations rose from immense depths in the ocean, and that those wonderful and persevering polypi worked upwards till they had formed submarine mountains with their honey-combed structures; but it is now ascertained that they cannot exist below at the utmost fifty feet of the surface, and that they establish the foundation of their structures on submarine mountains and table-lands, while they do not work above low-water mark.
A tourist whose glowing fancies had not been nipped in the bud by the vigors of an extended experience might have been able to invest it with certain weird charms, but to me it was only the fag-end of civilization, abounding in horrible odors of decayed polypi and dried fish. A cutting wind from the distant Jokuls and a searching rain did not tend to soften the natural asperities of its features.
We may discover the presence of a tumour of this nature in one of the nasal passages, when, on putting our hand to the orifice of the nostril, there issues little or no air; or when we sound the nostril with the finger or a probe, or examine it on a bright day. The methods of destroying polypi in the nasal cavity vary with the texture, size, form, and position of these excrescences.
"And he rests now, near his companions, in the coral cemetery?" "Yes, forgotten by all else, but not by us. We dug the grave, and the polypi undertake to seal our dead for eternity." And, burying his face quickly in his hands, he tried in vain to suppress a sob. Then he added: "Our peaceful cemetery is there, some hundred feet below the surface of the waves."
I strongly suspect his father was a sea-lion and his mother a grampus or scragg whale, and that he was fished up out of the sea when young by some hardy son of Neptune, and subsequently trained up in the ways of humanity on board a fishing-smack, where the food consisted of polypi, lobsters, and black bread. Yet there was something wonderfully genial about this old pilot.
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