56 SPONGES 
The first price paid for sponges in Nassau averages about one dollar per 
string, each string weighing one pound, and as it takes about twenty sponges 
which are about six inches in diameter, to weigh a pound, the sponger makes 
barely enough money to suffice for his scanty living, from twenty-five to fifty 
cents a day being about what is earned by eachman. These wages also have 
to suffice to keep the sponger and his family during July, August and Septem- 
ber, which are known as the hurricane months, when all the vessels are laid up 
in harbor, and no sponges are gathered. 
PARASITES OF HORNY SPONGES. 
As already remarked, we find that one species of sponge often grows upon 
another, but this does not imply that they are parasites in the most correct 
sense of the term. That is, it is not at all probable that one sponge derives 
any nutriment from another; it simply grows upon another sponge just as it 
would grow upon a rock or other base. 
Few living animals are without true parasites, and the sponges are no ex- 
ception to therule. One of the most conspicuous parasites of the Horny 
Sponges is a long sea worm which lives in the excurrent orifices of several spec- 
ies of sponges. One of the most singular things about this worm is that it 
makes a kind of tube in which it lives. The walls of this tube are very thin, 
and when it is removed from the sponge and dried, resemble paper. This 
tube differs from that made by most species of worm which are usually contin- 
uous, without branches, inasmuch as it sends ramiform branches into the va- 
rious excurrent tubes of the sponge. The worm has to fold its body many 
