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Updated: June 21, 2025
After breakfast, the Captain and Nellie, with the assistance of Bob and Dick, even "the good Sarah," too, being pressed into the service, set about preparing the sea-anemones and other specimens they had collected the previous day for their new home in the aquarium which Mrs Gilmour had bought for the purpose shortly before.
The Sea-Anemones are able to move about from rock to rock, and in that they differ from their first cousins, the Coral Polyps, for they are always stationary. "The Anemone has several curious ways of reproducing itself. Sometimes one animal will divide itself and become two individuals, and sometimes pieces from the bottom of the Anemone will become separate Anemones.
"Yes, I am glad," he replied. "Is that your daughter?" he continued, as if he wished to turn the conversation. "That is my dear daughter Florence." Mrs. Aylmer spoke excitedly. Florence and Kitty Sharston were seated on the edge of a rock. Kitty was poking with her parasol at some sea-anemones which were clinging to the rock just under the water.
And besides these casual visitors there are numberless creatures which have lived and multiplied there, ever since I first visited the pool. Tender red, olive-colored, and green seaweeds, stony corallines, and acorn-barnacles lining the floor, sea-anemones clinging to the sides, sponges tiny and many-colored hiding under the ledges, and limpets and mussels wedged in the cracks.
Here a tree of coral rose up from the depths, its branches covered with lovely star-shaped flowers; farther below a bed of shrubbery sprang from hidden rocks, and close at hand a colony of beautiful Sea-Anemones lifted their proud heads, and swayed gracefully in the water.
In 1710, the great naturalist, Réaumur, had written a memoir for the express purpose of demonstrating that these "orties" are animals; and with this important paper Peyssonel must necessarily have been familiar. Therefore, when he declared the "flowers" of the red coral to be little "orties," it was the same thing as saying that they were animals of the same general nature as sea-anemones.
But the fowls of the air and the fishes of the sea are of all lovely forms and colours. And such corals and sponges, and sea-anemones, blooming like flowers in the transparent pools of the warm blue water that washes the coral reefs and fills the little creeks and bays!" I gasped and he went on. "The commonest trees, I think, are palms and cedars.
But the experienced Pilot warned him to be careful. "They look very fine," said he, "but they are not to be trusted." You know, of course, that the Sea-Anemones, like almost all flowers and plants which grow in the ocean, are living animals, polyps, we call them. The Anemones are polyps, and the coral big and little, living and dead is being made, or has been made by polyps.
Hume had aroused my enthusiasm by telling me that there were endless sea-anemones along the coast; but Providence seemed hostile to my sea-anemone proclivities; for it turned out that what Mrs. Hume understood by sea-anemones was a small, white-flowering weed that grew on the low bluff beside the water.
From the rocks grew sea-weeds of the most brilliant colours, the peacock's tail, sea-fan, and other lovely forms, hanging in wreaths round the holes; while shells of every variety covered the surface of the rocks, amid which appeared sponges, sea-eggs with long spines, and sea-anemones.
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