212 
BUNODIDiE. 
thick horn-like form of the tentacles, the latter tlie tough 
and leathery consistence of the flesh. The law of priority, 
however, must be obeyed. 
Scarcely less abundant than Act. mesemhryanthemum, 
this magnificent species is sown broadcast upon all om' 
shores, and seems everywhere to be equally common. In 
its habits, however, it is widely difierent from that favom- 
courting species. Somebody has illustrated the character 
of two peoples by saying, that if an Englishman retires 
from business and builds a box, he raises a high wall, and 
plants a shrubbery before it, to keep off the eye of the 
profanum vulgm ; but a Frenchman under similar cir- 
cumstances builds his house on the very edge of the high- 
way, and takes his meals in the verandah. If this be true, 
the Actinia is a Frenchman, the Tealia an Englishman. 
You may hunt among the rocks till the rising tide covers 
them, and, finding hundreds of Beadlets, but not a single 
Dahlia, go away with the conviction, that the latter is a 
scarce species ; but to-morrow, an initiated friend accom- 
panies you to the same spot, and, pointing with his toe to 
an angle, says, “ Here they are! and here! and here! — 
three, four, half-a-dozen in a group !” and you are tired of 
collecting before the profusion fails. 
It is in the angles formed by some great boulder with 
the beach, that the crassicornis delights to dwell ; and here, 
according to his recluse habits, he chooses to conceal 
his showy person from intruding eyes, by covering himself 
with a coat of gravel and fragments of shell, which he has 
attached to his adhesive suckers, till only the experienced 
eye can detect the difierence between the animal and the 
surrounding rubbish. 
Not seldom, however, do we meet with a colony in 
some persistent rock-pool, in whose never-ebbing fulness 
the gorgeous creatures remain almost permanently ex- 
