THE TREPANG. 



5 l 7 



to their meat-hunting fellow-denizens of the sea. They have an 

 exceedingly rare peculiarity. When one excites them, handles 

 them roughly, or takes them out of the water, they contract their 

 musculous body convulsively, and vomit themselves out — not only 

 the contents of their stomach or intestines, but the intestines with 

 the contents. But this self-mutilation, apparently so terrible, is 

 not as bad as it seems to be. The intestine is capable of replac- 

 ing itself, and, after a short season of fasting, our sea cucumber 

 is again restored to its former condition. This is a remarkable 

 phenomenon of a regeneration or restitution process, not yet suf- 

 ficiently investigated. The holothurias are, like all the spiny- 

 skinned animals, exclusively inhabitants of the sea ; at least no 

 fresh-water form is known. In the sea itself, however, they are 

 of universal occurrence. Their representatives are found from 

 pole to pole, and in all depths, from those of only a few metres 

 to those of a thousand metres and more. 



A former officer of the Dutch East Indies, M. Lion, who is 

 thoroughly acquainted with the characteristics of that remark- 

 able region, says that there is not an island in the Indian Archi- 

 pelago near which the trepang is not found ; and this is confirmed 

 by the Englishman Jamieson, who marks as the home of the ani- 

 mal all the seas from Sumatra 



to New Guinea. The trepang =^llil=IPIP ^--— — ^--- 



can be found everywhere in this 

 region when the surf is not too 

 strong, chiefly at depths of from 

 six to nine metres, on flats cov- 

 ered with coral sand, but not 

 on muddy bottoms. Here they 

 feed, as the English author Gup- 

 py has described them to us. An 

 individual of any of the species 

 of trepang from twelve to fif- 

 teen inches long will eat half a 

 pound of weathered coral sand 

 a day, loosening it from the sur- 

 face of the reef. The term eat, 

 however, is hardly the proper 



one. The animal lets the mass, which contains only a trifling 

 fraction of nutritive matter, pass through its intestines. Fifteen 

 or sixteen of these animals would thus dispose of a ton, or about 

 eighteen cubic feet, of sand in a year. Mr. Guppy speaks of an 

 " organic denudation," of a process of weathering of the coral reef, 

 in course of accomplishment through living causes. 



" The Celestial Empire," says Mr. Jamieson, " could not exist 

 without trepang and East Indian birds' nests ; and the inquiry for 



Fig. 3. — Infancy of a Sea Cucumber. A, 

 a jelly animal swimming and feeding; 

 a, small sea cucumber forming inside. 

 B, the young sea cucumber with the leaf- 

 like tentacles round its mouth, walking 

 on its tube feet. 



