184 THE OCEAN WOELD. 



succeeded, after violent exertions, in tearing the lower part of the 

 animal. Six portions remained attached to the glass walls of the 

 aquarium. At the end of eight days, attempts were again made to 

 detach these fragments ; hut it was observed, with much surprise, that 

 they shrank from the touch and contracted themselves. Each of them 

 soon hecame crowned with a little row of tentacula, and finally each 

 fragment hecame a new anemone. Every part of these strange crea- 

 tures thus "becomes a separate being when detached, while the mutilated 

 mother continues to live as if nothing had happened. In short, it has 

 long heen known that the sea anemones may he cut limb from limb, 

 mutilated, divided, and subdivided. One part of the body cut off is 

 quickly replaced. Cut off the tentacles of an actinia, and they are 

 replaced in a short time, and the experiment may be repeated in- 

 definitely. The experiments made by M. Trembley of Geneva upon 

 the fresh-water polypi were repeated by the Abbe Dicquernare on the 

 sea anemones. He mutilated and tormented them in a hundred ways. 

 The parts cut off continued to live, and the mutilated creature had the 

 power of reproducing the parts of which it had been deprived. To 

 those who accused the Abbe of cruelty in thus torturing the poor 

 creatures, he replied that, so far from being a cause of suffering to 

 them, " he had increased their term of life, and renewed their 

 youth." 



The Actiniadte vary in their habitat from pools near low-water mark 

 to eighteen or twenty fathoms water, whence they have been dredged 

 up. " They adhere," says Dr. Johnston, " to rocks, shells, and other 

 extraneous bodies by means of a glutinous secretion from their en- 

 larged base, but they can leave their hold and remove to another station 

 whensoever it pleases them, either by gliding along with a slow and 

 almost imperceptible movement (half an inch in five minutes), as is their 

 usual method, or by reversing the body and using the tentacula for the 

 purpose of feet, as Keaumur asserts, and as I have once witnessed ; or, 

 lastly, inflating the body with water, so as to render it more buoyant, 

 they detach themselves, and are driven to a distance by the random 

 motion of the waves. They feed on shrimps, small crabs, whelks, and 

 similar shelled mollusca, and probably on all animals brought within 

 their reach whose strength or agility is insufficient to extricate them 

 from the grasp of their numerous tentacula ; for as these organs can 

 be inflected in any direction, and greatly lengthened, they are capable 



