THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



MAY, 1875. 

 SEA-ANEMON'ES. 



By Rev. S. LOCKWOOD, Ph.D. 



EVEN in minds the most illiterate you will find a sort of pbiloso- 

 pliy, if you but look for it. Among the dwellers by the shore is 

 a class known as Watermen. These men, with great irregularities of 

 toil and idleness, obtain the support of their families wholly from the 

 bounteous, though sometimes precarious, harvest of the sea. Often 

 one finds among them men of the roughest mould, yet with generous 

 natural gifts, but without either education or culture. Of natural 

 phenomena, in a practical way, they are shrewd observers. They 

 know a good deal, too, about many queer forms and strange habits 

 belonging to the denizens of the deep. In their way, they are positive 

 men, and real empiricists too for, from their limited lookout, and 

 their small stock of facts, they will generalize as broadly as do some 

 scientists upon a few experiments. An old waterman, who could not 

 read a word, said to us : " Sir, Nature works the same in every place. 

 There's nothing on the land what isn't in the sea ; and I've even seen 

 ships in the sky ! " Here, then, although not a little empirical, in our 

 fisherman's philosophy was a splendid generalization. And how broad 

 it was ! It covered every ])rovince possible for human experience, in 

 his conception the earth, the sea, and the air. 



And empiricism begotten of a spirit in no wise nobler, abounded 

 in the elder science. Thence have come down to us those heated con- 

 troversies on the supposed vegetable nature of the polyps that build 

 the corals, and other similar structures in the great deep. And there 

 was that temporary calm which set in upon that stunning clincher 

 of that empiricist, who declared that the coral polyps were, and must 

 be, plants, for "I have see^i the flowers!" And Sir Wiseman was 

 true. And so was the fisherman true, when he said, " he had seen 

 ships in the sky." Each in his own way had seen a mirage. 



But that clincher would not stay clinched. As concerned their 

 external forms, all admitted them to be sea-flowers. Still, these flow- 



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