1336 THE STORY OF THE UNIVERSE 



own, are very remarkable. They contain, soon after 

 they are formed, numerous little jelly-fish attached to 

 stalks. There may be twenty or thirty of these in 

 each bud, and the day will come when they will 

 burst forth, be cast loose from their stems, and swim 

 off. They resemble hand-bells of a very flat kind, 

 and the mouth is prolonged into a four-parted pro- 

 jection, which protrudes through a structure not 

 seen in the great jelly-fish, but peculiar to these 

 smaller ones, which fills up the disk underneath, 

 from the mouth to the edge, with a layer of muscular 

 fibres. They have four long tentacles, and when 

 they have lived for some time they begin to play some 

 very curious tricks. Thus a foreign, naturalist, M. 

 Van Beneden, was examining some creatures in his 

 aquarium, and found hundreds of these very small 

 jelly-fish, and he caught some in order to examine 

 them with his microscope. He began to draw some 

 of them carefully in order to write a description of 

 them. About an hour afterward, on again looking 

 at his specimen, he was amazed to find its shape 

 changed, and the animal apparently turned inside 

 out. The tentacles on the edge seemed to be re- 

 versed in their position; the umbrella-like dome, 

 from being convex was the reverse, and the curled 

 lip-like proboscis seemed converted into the stem of 

 a solitary polype. One of these Campanularians, 

 called erroneously the Wrinkled-thread Coralline, 

 grows on sea-weeds near low-water mark, and es- 

 pecially on the great Riband Tangle. It is a small 

 thing, about an inch in height, and its stem is of a 

 pink or rose- red color; it is sparingly branched in a 



