348 EVENINGS AT THE MICEOSCOPE. 



and confirmed my suggestion of the natural affinities of 

 the form. 



Altogether unlike, in their shape, and in the unwonted 

 vivacity and peculiar human character of their movements, 

 all the other members of their natural family that I had 

 ever seen or heard of, these curious creatures have afforded 

 much entertainment, not only to myself, but to those 

 scientific friends to whom I have had opportunities of 

 exhibiting them. When I see them surrounding the man- 

 sion of the Sabella, gazing, as it were, after him as he 

 retreats into his castle, flinging their wild arms over its 

 entrance, and keeping watch with untiring vigilance until 

 he reappears, it seems to require no very vivid fancy to 

 imagine them so many guardian demons ; and the Lares 

 of the old Roman mythology occurring to memory, I de- 

 scribed the form under the scientific appellation of Lar 

 Sabellarum. You may, however, if it pleases you better, 

 call them " witches dancing round the charmed pot."* 



The Polypes that we have as yet been looking at are all 

 of simple structure individually, though some of them we 

 have seen united into a very populous community of com- 

 pound life. We will now look at some whose organisation 

 is of a higher, that is, more complex character. 



On this old worm-eaten oyster shell, which has been 

 dredged up from the bottom of the sea, you observe 

 several rounded lumps. They are of a cream-white hue, 

 of somewhat solid texture, tough and hard to the touch, 

 and studded all over with shallow depressions or pittings. 

 The largest of these is not more than an inch and a-half in 

 height, by two-thirds of an inch in thickness ; but specimens 

 often occur of twice or thrice these dimensions, and much 



* Since my first discovery of this strange form in 1855, and my 

 memoir on it in the " Trans, of the Linnean Society," it has remained 

 unrecognised (and, indeed, somewhat suspected) for seventeen years. 

 In the summer of 1872, however, it again occurred to the observation 

 of the Rev. T. Hincks, who published a paper, with illustrations, on it, 

 in the Annals and Mag. of Nat. Hist, for Nov., 1872. 



