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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



SEA-SIDE STUDIES. 



By Professor SANBOKN TENNEY. 



AMONG the thousands who visit the sea-shore in summer, there are 

 many who, although not naturalists, are more or less interested 

 in the various marine forms which there abound, and perhaps a brief 

 notice of some of these forms will be acceptable to those who have not 

 made a special study of life as it is revealed in the sea. 



If an observer be on a rocky shore he will not fail to become inter- 

 ested in the " sea-anemones," those "flowers of the sea " which at first 

 view appear to be on the border-land between plants and animals, so 

 that one hardly knows whether to refer them to the vegetable or to the 

 animal kino-dom. 



Fig. 1.— Actinia, or Sea- Anemone {Metrldium marginatum, Milne-Edwards) : c, closed ; o, open- 

 ing ; e, expanded. 



Although some sea-anemones live in the sand (Fig. 2), the home of 

 the ordinary kinds is the pools and caverns among the rocks ; here we 

 may find and study them when the tide is out. Groups, sometimes in 

 thousands, and standing so closely together that they cover the whole 

 interior of the rocky cavern or grotto, are not uncommon. Some are 

 expanded to their fullest extent, like a full-blown flower ; others are 

 only partly open ; others are just opening ; and others still are closed 

 as tightly as the bud of a flower, which they more or less resemble. 



Various are the colors which they exhibit, from pale or nearly white 

 to the richest hues of pink, rose, red, and purple. 



In the centre of the top there is an opening or mouth, which leads 

 directly into a central sac or stomach, and around the mouth are rows 

 of long and delicate hollow appendages, which the animal moves freely 



