STEENSTRUPIA RUBRA. 73 
circumstances that both animals as yet have been found only in the Zetland and Orkney seas, 
where that giant zoophyte was first enrolled among British species by Professor Goodsir and 
myself, in 1839. The specimens taken by us had, however, their buds too immature to 
permit of our perceiving the close resemblance and affinity of those bodies to true Meduse. 
The apical process, which is so striking a feature of the following animals, is almost certainly 
the remains of a funiculus by which the young animals were attached to its parent—but 
whether that parent was a “nurse,” guised as a hydriform Coryne, or a Medusa, like the 
offspring, as we have seen to be the case in the gemmiparous Sarsi@ and Lixxie, is a point 
’ 
which fortunate future observations only can determine. 
1. Steenstrupia rubra, Forbes. 
Plate XII, Fig. 1. 
The umbrella of this strange little Meduse is conical, rather elongated, transparent, 
smooth, and colourless. Its summit bears a little tentacle-like, fleshy, red appendage. Its 
orifice is rather contracted and quadrangular. At each angle there is an elongated, slanting, 
tentacle-like ocellus, fixed throughout, and terminating above in a bulb. This body is 
entirely of a vermilion red. From the side and lowest part of one of them springs a very long, 
thick, fleshy, bright-red tentacle, which twists and coils like a worm, and under the microscope, 
presents a ringed and granulated structure. The sub-umbrella is oblong. It is comparted 
by four simple gastric vessels, running to the tentacular bulbs. Its orifice is surrounded by a 
veil. From its centre depends a thick, tubular, very contractile, fleshy, red peduncle, 
terminating in a round or imperfectly quadrate mouth. This peduncle is capable of great 
changes of form, and sometimes presents an appearance as if it had a nucleus denser than 
the substance composing its walls. Though highly extensile, it does not appear even to be 
voluntarily produced beyond the opening of the disk. Its base is connected with the little 
finger-like process on the apex of the umbrella, by a rather tortuous colourless cord, presenting 
a tubular appearance. 
The length of the body is about a line and a half. Small as this Medusa is, it is very 
conspicuous in the water, owing to the brilliant colouring and fleshy substance of its tentacles 
and stomach. It is very active and tenacious of life; before dying, assuming all manner of 
strange shapes, doubling itself up, and turning its organs inside out in a terrific manner, giving 
up the ghost with convulsions as fearful as those of a popular actor in the death-scene of a 
tragedy. One of the least strange of these moribund attitudes is represented in Plate XIII, 
fig. 1, d, where the creature has constricted its body so as to assume the aspect of some twin 
Acaleph, such as Diphyes. At such times, if we had not seen the animal previously in a 
healthy state, it was very difficult to perceive any resemblance between it and the other 
genera of its family. But when well and uninjured, it is an extremely active and regularly 
formed creature, though, owing to the weighty and unbalanced tail which it is doomed per- 
petually to drag as its train, it cannot advance through the water with the easy grace and 
rapidity for which its allies are remarkable, but struggles forward with frantic energy, con- 
tracting and expanding rapidly, and without ceasing, reminding us of an escaped felon impeded 
in his course by the dragging of his heavy fetters. When I first saw how the weight and 
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