196 THE bird's-head coralline. 



avicularia. Well does it deserve tlie name of Bird's 

 head Coralline, given it by tlie illustrious Ellis, for 

 it possesses those curious appendages that resem- 

 ble Vulture's heads, in great perfection. All these 

 specimens of mine were most thickly studded with 

 them, not a cell without its bird's head, and all see- 

 sawing, and snapping, and opening the jaws, with the 

 most amusing activity, and (what was marvellous) 

 equally active on one specimen from whose cells all 

 the polypes had died away, as in those in which 

 the polypes were protruding their lovely bells of 

 tentacles. 



The polypidoms were distinctly visible to the naked 

 eye, and attracted my attention before T touched them, 

 while yet in their native pool ; though of course I did 

 not know what they w^ere until I examined them to 

 better advantage. Some of them stand two inches in 

 height, and are about one third of an inch in widest 

 diameter. The cells are set in longitudinal series, 

 two or three rows abreast, and closely adhering; the 

 branchlets thus formed divide dichotomously, (that is, 

 into two, and each of these into two more, and so on,) 

 and so make broad fan-shaped branches, which are 

 segments of funnels : and the peculiar elegance of 

 this zoophyte consists in the mode in which these 

 ultimate branches are set on the stem, viz. in a spiral 

 turn, so that the effect is that of several funnels set 

 one within another, but which yet are seen, on turning 

 the whole round, to compose one corkscrew band of 

 fans. (See Plate X. fig. I.) 



The stem ascends perpendicularly from a slender 

 base which is attached to the rock, or to the cells of 



