BENEATH TROPIC SEAS 



credulous way, has believed for generations that 

 the long-stemmed barnacles of the sea occasion- 

 ally open their ivory, valve-like gates to permit 

 one of these geese, full-fledged, to make its escape. 

 Today we, of a scientific turn of mind, sneer at the 

 evidence of such superstitious ignorance. Yet our 

 same scientific acumen has discovered and vouches 

 for the life story of the thimble jelly. 



Here and there on the corals and sea-weed, 

 fathoms under our keel, are pale growths less than 

 a half -inch in height. In places they are so dense 

 that they appear like a furry covering. The 

 imaginative eye sees them as algae or an aquatic 

 mildew of sorts. These are animal growths al- 

 though they have no sex — in which they are lower 

 than ferns — ^and they increase by a simple system 

 of stolon -like roots, in which they may call the 

 moss, brother. Swellings appear at intervals upon 

 their stems and elongate into a strange sea-fruit. 

 As each bud grows it becomes repeatedly con- 

 stricted until, in the course of time, it resolves 

 into a pile of saucers. One day the uppermost, 

 which by now has curved into a cup, wriggles in a 

 manner unknown to its vegetative golem-like 

 parent, breaks away, turns upside down, and, 

 using up the last of our threadbare similes — throbs 

 gaily off as a thimble jelly. With free movement 

 has come sex, and the jellylet is followed by 

 brothers and sisters from its own and hosts of other 

 saucer piles, until in their thousands they swim 

 into my ken, and in scores into my aquarium. 



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