212 BUNODID.E. 



thick horn-like form of the tentacles, the latter the tough 

 and leathery consistence of the flesh. The law of priority, 

 however, must be obeyed. 



Scarcely less abundant than Act. mesembryanthemum, 

 this magnificent species is sown broadcast upon all our 

 shores, and seems everywhere to be equally common. In 

 its habits, however, it is widely different from that favour- 

 courting species. Somebody has illustrated the character 

 of two peoples by saying, that if an Englishman retires 

 from business and builds a box, he raises a high wall, and 

 plants a shrubbery before it, to keep off the eye of the 

 profanum vulgus ; but a Frenchman under similar cir- 

 cumstances builds his house on the very edge of the high- 

 way, and takes his meals in the verandah. If this be true, 

 the Actinia is a Frenchman, the Tealia an Englishman. 

 You may hunt among the rocks till the rising tide covers 

 them, and, finding hundreds of Beadlets, but not a single 

 Dahlia, go away with the conviction, that the latter is a 

 scarce species ; but to-morrow, an initiated friend accom- 

 panies you to the same spot, and, pointing with his toe to 

 an angle, says, " Here they are ! and here ! and here ! — 

 three, four, half-a-dozen in a group !" and you are tired of 

 collecting before the profusion fails. 



It is in the angles formed by some great boulder with 

 the beach, that the crassicornis delights to dwell ; and here, 

 according to his recluse habits, he chooses to conceal 

 his showy person from intruding eyes, by covering himself 

 with a coat of gravel and fragments of shell, which he has 

 attached to his adhesive suckers, till only the experienced 

 eye can detect the difference between the animal and the 

 surrounding rubbish. 



Not seldom, however, do we meet with a colony in 

 some persistent rock-pool, in whose never-ebbing fulness 

 the gorgeous creatures remain almost permanently ex- 



