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THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 



inward in the direction of the mouth. 

 Thus if one may venture to ascribe 

 sensations of any sort to a jellyfish, 

 this one's chief pleasure seems to be in 

 observing himself eat. It is found off 

 the coast of Brazil; and Great Peconic 

 Bay is at its northern limit. 



It is remarkable how abundant and 

 apparently well-conditioned an organ- 

 ism may be at the extreme limit of its 

 range. Thus the scallop shell, Pectcn 

 irradians, is found by hundreds in 

 Provincetown Harbor, Cape Cod, but 

 practically vanishes north of this point. 

 Also on Smith Island, Cape Fear, North 

 Carolina, we find a flourishing grove of 

 palmetto palms, the most northerly of 

 their species. 



There is something pathetic in Nat- 

 ure's wholesale ruthless destruction of 

 all who transgress her laws, and it is 

 with a pitying eye that one finds in our 

 chilling sea the iridescent crest and 

 float of the Portuguese man-of-war, 

 Physalia, a beautiful glass model of 

 which may be seen in the American 

 Museum. This creature appears only 

 occasionally off our coast but then 

 nearly always in swarms as is commonly 

 the case with the floating animals of the 

 sea. The Physalia when well grown 

 must always remain floating with its 

 numerous tentacles stretched far out 

 like slender ribbons edged with rows of 

 purple beads, and woe betide any un- 

 wary fish which touches their stings. 

 The struggling, more than half-para- 

 lyzed victim is drawn quickly within 

 reach of the hundreds of greedy mouths 

 which fasten like suckers upon it. A 

 creature of the wide and open sea is the 

 Physalia and little is known of its de- 

 velopment excepting that when very 

 young it can discharge the gas from its 

 then oval float and sink with its single 

 tentacle into the ocean's depths. For a 

 long time it was thought that all of our 



physalias were males, but recently the 

 female organs have been discovered and 

 we now know that the creature is 

 hermaphroditic. In the Paciflc there 

 is a smaller species which has one large 

 and many small tentacles. Our Phy- 

 salia passes through such a stage but 

 eventually acquires many large tenta- 

 cles. Over the wide region of the tropi- 

 cal Atlantic this beautiful creature may 

 be seen flashing its iridescent hues above 

 the deep blue of the sea, drifting cease- 

 lessly, unharmed by hurricanes or calm, 

 and heedless of the sunshine or the 

 night; while gliding languidly in and 

 out among the tangles of its tentacles, 

 flshes of purple and silver hues flnd their 

 refuge and their food. 



Rivaling the Physalia in interest but 

 smaller and more uniformly blue are its 

 two floating relatives, Velella and Por- 

 pita. Velella is a parallelogram-shaped 

 animal, about three inches long and an 

 inch wide, while in the center there is an 

 oval chitinous float which extends up- 

 ward in a sail-like crest. Porpita is 

 much smaller and is circular and has no 

 crest. In the Gulf Stream one some- 

 times flnds swarms composed of such 

 myriads of these creatures that the 

 water is dotted with purple-blue for 

 many square miles. There are inter- 

 esting things respecting the habits of 

 Velella and Porpita, among which is the 

 fact that they are always infested with 

 great numbers of minute, rounded, 

 yellow-colored plant cells. Even the 

 youngest larvse of these creatures have 

 these plant cells which by giving off 

 oxygen and consuming carbonic acid 

 must aid the vital processes of their host. 



Blue is the prevailing color of the 

 upper surfaces of these floating animals 

 of the sm'face waters of the tropics, and 

 the remarkable drifting snail, Janthina, 

 is no exception to the rule as it exudes a 

 bubble like raft which floats both it and 



