GA APTER VIE 
THE SPONGES. 
THE bosom of the ocean is full of mysteries. Among the animal 
organisations which it encloses and nourishes, perhaps few are so 
little understood as those peculiar creatures we call sponges. This 
production appears a mass of light, resisting, elastic tissue; the 
colour is a light brown or yellow, sometimes verging on red. 
The most varied opinions have been held by scientific men as to 
the exact nature of sponges. The ancients were as much divided 
as to the position in nature they ought to occupy as more modern 
observers. One opinion ranked them in the animal kingdom, 
another classed them with the vegetables, while a third prescribed 
them an intermediate place, and considered them as the nests of 
polypes; the owners of the nests were not attached to their 
homes, but were able to go in and out as they pleased. The coral 
polype is not so fortunate. 
Pliny, Dioscorides, and their commentators, believed that 
sponges were capable of feeling, that they adhered to their native 
rock by a vital force, and that they shrunk from the hand which 
tried to seize them. They even distinguished in them a male and 
female formation. But we may say, in passing, that the early 
naturalists invariably saw males and females in everything; man 
has ever wished to find resemblances to himself in the most obscure 
organisations. Erasmus, however, criticising Pliny, concludes that 
he may safely omit all that the historian wrote on the sponge. 
More recently Nuremberg, Peyssonnel, and Trembley have main- 
tained, with some reason, that sponges are animals, and their views 
have been adopted by Linnzus, Guettard, Donati, and Lamouroux, 
on the Continent, and by Ellis, Fleming, and Grant, in England. 
Sponges are found in every sea, though the Mediterranean is the 
chief region of their growth in Europe. The Red Sea and the Gulf 
of Mexico are also noted for them. They love warm or temperate 
