CHAP. IL] FROM PORTSMOUTH TO TENERIFFE. 137 
found that the number for sale was unlimited, the prices of 
good specimens fell from four or five pounds to ten shillings or 
less; and “ Venus’s flower-basket ” was often to be seen under 
a glass shade in a drawing-room, whose owner had little idea of 
its close relation to his familiar bath companion. 
It seems that Huplectella is very abundant in some spots in 
deep water among the Philippine Islands, and particularly near 
the island of Zebu. It lives partially buried in mud, which is 
so soft and loose as not to crush it, nor to impede in any way 
the assumption of its elegant form—that of a horn or a grace- 
ful bouquet-holder—and it is supported in its position and pre- 
vented from sinking by its fringe-like root of glassy spicules. 
The natives get it by dragging weighted bars of wood, to which 
fish-hooks are attached, over the bottom. The sponges are 
pulled out of the mud by the hooks; many of them are torn 
and injured, but they are in sufficient numbers to give an ample 
supply of perfect specimens. The soft animal-matter is then 
removed in some way, and the skeleton is cleaned and bleached. 
Until within the last few months, no examples of Huwplectella 
were known with the soft parts preserved; but I understand 
that lately spirit specimens have been received at the British 
Museum; and the late Professor Max Schultze, of Bonn, stated 
at a meeting of the Niederrheinische Gesellschaft, on the 3d 
of March last, that a fine series had been placed in his hands by 
Drs. Gutschow and Heuthe, of the German ship-of-war Hertha. 
As might have been anticipated in fresh specimens, the crystal 
frame-work is covered and entirely masked by a layer of gray- 
brown gelatinous matter, “sarcode,” as it is technically called, 
which Professor Schultze describes as being very thin, and 
loaded with granules, pigment masses, grains of sand, and the 
shells of foraminifera. Even in this slimy covering, however, 
there is not absent the element of beauty, for a multitude of 
minute siliceous spicules which pervade it everywhere, and 
whose function seems to be to bind its particles together and 
