174 



HAECKEL 



time he still had another special class of material, 

 similar to the radiolaria, the medusae. 



The ship cuts through the ocean. It rises like 

 a lofty fortress from the illimitable blue plain, 

 with the white clouds on the far horizon. No 

 land has been in sight for days. Yesterday a poor 

 wind-borne butterfly rested on the deck. To-day 

 it is gone, and all is sea. Then they suddenly 

 appear silently in the blue mirror : mysterious 

 discs, red as the anemones on a Koman meadow 

 in spring, golden as the autumn leaves on a dark 

 pond in the park, then blue, like a lighter blue 

 floating on the general azure. They are the me- 

 dusae. At one time the ship sails through a whole 

 swarm of them thousands, hundreds of thousands, 

 millions, a veritable milky way of coloured stars. 

 On the next day they have all gone. No inhabi- 

 tant of the ocean seems to be so close to it as 

 this creature. The whole animal is only a shade 

 more substantial than the water. You take it out, 

 and try to catch hold of it. It stings your hand 

 like a nettle : that is its one weapon. But it is 

 already destroyed, melted away, a formless nothing. 

 You put it on a piece of blotting-paper, and it 

 dries up into the spectral outline of a shadow, a 

 tiny " fat-spot," summary of its whole existence. 



Yet this soap-bubble of the water is a real 

 animal. Its transparent body is shaped like a bell, 

 and moves through the water by regular contrac- 

 tion and expansion, like the lung in breathing. 

 Where the clapper of the bell should be, we find 

 a stomach, with a mouth for eating, hanging down 



