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Updated: May 28, 2025
All the trees and bushes were polyps, half animal and half plant; they looked like hundred-headed snakes growing out of the sand, the branches were long slimy arms, with tentacles like wriggling worms, every joint of which, from the root to the outermost tip, was in constant motion. They wound themselves tightly round whatever they could lay hold of and never let it escape.
In this complicated tunnel the creature resides, presenting a lovely circular disc of glowing pink as its front door. A few inches beneath the water this operculum or lid is not unlike a pearl, but as you gaze upon it, it slips on one side, and five animated red rays appear, waving like automatic flag signals. Though well housed, it is almost as timorous as the coral polyps.
The internal cavity and the radiating tubes, instead of being connected with the outer wall of the body as in Polyps, or hollowed out of the substance of the body as in Jelly-Fishes, are here inclosed within independent walls of their own, quite distinct from the wall of the body.
The demonstration of the unity of plan pervading the diversities of the Polyps, Hydroids, Acalephal and Echinodermal modifications of your truly natural group of Radiates, is to my mind perfect, and I trust that the harsh and ugly and essentially error-breeding name of Coelenterata may have received its final sentence of exile from lasting and rational zoological terminology.
There is yet another of zoophytes, or polyps, and another of sponges, and, finally, we have a sub-kingdom of minute creatures, or animalculæ, of very varied forms, which may make up the sub-kingdom of Protozoa, consisting of animals which are mostly unicellular.
But still the coral goes on growing, the living polyps protecting the dead coral below and beneath, and then dying to make way for the next generation. And so the coral holds its own in spite of the fury of the sea, and the many little boring water animals that strive to penetrate the dead coral, and crumble the rock into ruins.
I have now satisfied myself that the madrepores have something analogous to this in the arrangement of their partitions, so that I am tempted to believe that this tendency to a symmetrical arrangement of parts in pairs, is a general character of polyps, disguised by their radiating form. Among the medusae something similar exists in the disposition of the marginal appendages and the ocelli.
As I have said, they were for a long time supposed, notwithstanding these differences, to be Polyps, and I had shared in this opinion, till, during the winter of 1857, while pursuing my investigations on the Coral Reefs of Florida, one of these Millepores revealed itself to me in its true character of Acaleph.
Polyps and echinoderms abounded on the seafloor: various isis coral, cornularian coral living in isolation, tufts of virginal genus Oculina formerly known by the name "white coral," prickly fungus coral in the shape of mushrooms, sea anemone holding on by their muscular disks, providing a literal flowerbed adorned by jellyfish from the genus Porpita wearing collars of azure tentacles, and starfish that spangled the sand, including veinlike feather stars from the genus Asterophyton that were like fine lace embroidered by the hands of water nymphs, their festoons swaying to the faint undulations caused by our walking.
His instruction for first aid to the injured in case of hemorrhage in the absence of the physician, is to apply pressure directly upon the wound itself. The development of the surgical specialties among the Arabs is particularly interesting. Abulcasis has much to say about nasal polyps.
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