THE FLOWERS OF THE SEA. 43 



Fig. 2. Enlarged view of mouth organs ; lab. labium ; mand. man- 

 dibles ; 1 max. & 2 max. 1st and 2nd maxillae ; 2a, stout 

 limb of mandible ; 26, a 1st maxilla both further 

 enlarged. 



STUDY IX. THE STRUCTURE OF ANEMONES. 



Ever since that comparatively recent period little more than a 

 century ago, when, for the first time, men's eyes were opened to the 

 beauties of the smaller marine creatures, the sea-anemones have held 

 perhaps the foremost place of honour in this artistic appreciation. 

 Their very name the implied resemblance to the gorgeous scarlet- 

 rayed, black disc'd anemones that give such wealth of colour to our 

 old-fashioned gardens suggests this thought. And our German 

 cousins vie in doing similar honour, a higher one if possible, by 

 calling them after the queen of flowers, for they name them Sea-roses 

 (Seeros'en). Even the learned and usually strictly practical framers 

 of our scientific nomenclature have experienced the same spell, for is 

 not Anthozoa one of the terms applied to the Anemone group 

 merely the Greek rendering of " Flower-animals " ? Few marine 

 animals are nowadays better known. Everyone who has started 

 even the smallest of small aquaria if only in the form of a big 

 pickle-jar or an earthenware pan has begun by stocking with some 

 common species of anemone ; mayhap the brownish-red Beadlet 

 (Actinia) with its necklace of lovely blue beads ; or perhaps the 

 stout fleshy Tealia, with body covered with strange warts, each 

 holding firmly some fragment of shell or pebble ; or yet again, he 

 may have started with the medusa-locked Anemonia sulcata 

 (Anthea cereus). Their hardiness, as well as their beauty, conduces 

 to this popularity. 



If we take any typical anemone, we find it to be of extremely 

 primitive structure. Usually the body consists of a short, stout, 

 hollow cylinder (column), attached at the base to some rock or 

 boulder, by a sucker-like pedal disc, often spoken of as the foot. 

 The opposite or free end, the peristome or mouth disc, bears the 

 mouth, slit-like in shape, and surrounded by several concentric rows 

 of hollow, finger-like tentacles, the older towards the centre. At the 

 point where the peristome merges into the column, is a distinct 

 ridge, the margin (PI. vii. Fig. 3, m.) 



No anus is present. The mouth, o, leads into a short oesophagus 

 or stomodseum (s), not continuous with a stomach and intestine as 

 in the higher and more familiar animals, but ending in a free, 

 pendant margin, opening direct into the great body cavity, the 

 coelenteric space. The fundamental form of this simple alimentary 



