THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 69 



after ten minutes' careful work, we have brought 

 up, from a foot depth or more — what ? A thick, 

 dirty, slimy worm, without head or tail, form or 

 color. A slug has more artistic beauty about 

 liira. Be it so. At home in the aquarium, 

 (where, alas ! he will live but for a day or two, 

 under the new irritation of light,) he will make a 

 very different figure. That is one of the rarest 

 of British sea-animals. Actinia chrt/saiithellum, 

 though really he is no Actinia,* and his value 

 consists, not merely in his beauty, (though that 

 is not small,) but in his belonging to what the 

 long-word-makers call an "interosculant" group, 

 — a party of genera and species which connect 

 families scientifically far apart, filling up a fresh 

 link in the great chain, or rather the great net- 

 work, of zoological classification. And here we 

 have a simple, and, as it were, crude form; of 

 which, if we dared to indulge in reveries, we might 

 say, that the Divine Word realized it before either 

 sea-anemonc9 or holothurians, and then went on 

 to perfect the idea contained in it in two different 

 directions ; dividing.' it into two different families, 

 and making on its model, by adding new organs, 

 and taking away old onc.«, in one direction the 

 ♦ Now " rcnchin," of Jlr. Go»sc. 



