TUBULARIA BELLIS. 409 



astei--like hydrantlis expaiuliiig from tlie suniiiiits of the Ijraiiclics, suggest, witli a vividness 

 unsurpassed hy any other liydroid, some of the most faniihar forms of the flower garden.' 



6. TuBUL.vKiA Bellis, Alhion. 



Plate XXII, figs. 5 and G. 



TuBULARiA Bellis, — Alhnuii, in Anu. Nat. Hist, for Jan., 1863. Hinck.i, Brit. Hydr. 



Zooph., p. 122, ()1. x.\i, fig. 3. 



TROPHOSOME. — Hydrocaulus consisting of short sparingly branched stems, 

 which are mostly prostrate at the base, where they spring from the creeping stolon, 

 and then becoming erect attain a height of three quarters of an inch or even one 

 inch ; PERiSARC towards the basal portion marked with wide but distinct annulations, 

 which disappear towards the distal extremity of the stem. Hyduanths supported on 

 an annular collar-like dilatation of the coenosarc, and with the breadth of its base 

 exceeding its entire height; about twenty tentacles in the proximal circlet, and 

 fifteen or twenty in the distal ; diameter of proximal circlet when extended about five 

 lines. 



GONOSOME. — Clusters of gonophoues short, erect, with four or five gonophores 

 usually in the cluster, the gonophores, both male and female, crowned with four 

 conspicuous conical tubercles. 



Colour. — Hydranth scarlet ; coenosarc reddish-orange, becoming deeper in tint towards the 

 base ; spadix scarlet. 



Development, of Gonosome. — .July and August. 

 Habitat. — Attached to the sides of rock pools. 

 Bathymetrical disfribtttion. — Laminarian zone. 

 4oca/^^.-— Shetland Isles. 



Tubularia Bellis is an exquisite little hydroid. It occurs in considerable abundance round 

 the shores of the " Outer Skerries" and some of the other small rocky and more exposed islands 

 of Shetland, where it grows in shallow rock pools, exposed only at extreme low-water spring 

 tides, amid luxuriant meadows of Laminaria, and where the bright colour of its hydranths render 

 it a conspicuous and beautiful object beneath the pure transparent water of the rock pool. 



1 lu the coUectiou of the Jardin des Plantes is a dried specimen, labelled in Lamarck's nriting, 

 " Tubularia larynx." It is a sparingly branched, irregularly rugose, strong and somewhat coarse form. 

 It is impossible, however, to determine it from the dried perisarc, but it is apparently very different 

 from the true Tubularia larynx. 



