250 THE OCEAN WORLD. 



very beautiful oblong star, and diminish gradually from thence to 

 the margin, each being furnished with a single series of short, slender, 

 delicate appendages, or limbs (cilia), that move with great celerity in 

 all directions, as the creature pleases to direct its flexions, and in a 

 regular accelerated succession from the top to the margin. It is 

 impossible to express the liveliness of the motions of those delicate 

 organs, or the beautiful variety of colour which rise from them as 

 they play to and fro in the rays of the sun ; nor is it easy to express 

 the speed and regularity with which the motions succeed each other 

 from one end of the rays to the other." "The grace and beauty 

 which the entire apparatus presents in the living animal," says 

 Gosse, " or the marvellous ease and rapidity with which it can be 

 alternately contracted, extended, and bent at an infinite variety of 

 angles, no verbal description can sufficiently treat. Fortunately the 

 creature is so common in summer and autumn on all our coasts, 

 that few who use the surface-net can possibly miss its capture. It is 

 worthy of a poet's description, which it has received : — 



' When first extracted from her native brine, 

 Behold a round, small mass of gelatine, 

 Or frozen dewdrop, void of life and limb ; 

 But round the crystal goblet let her swim 

 'Midst her own elements ; and lo ! a sphere 

 Banded from pole to pole ; as diamond clear, 

 Shaped as bard's fancy shapes the small balloon. 

 To bear some sylph or fay beyond the moon. 

 From all her bands see lurid fringes play, 

 That glance and sparkle in the solar ray 

 With iridescent hues. Now round and round 

 She whirls and twirls ; now mounts, then sinks profound.' " 



Drummond. 



The species oi Pleurobrachia (Flem.) are globulous or egg-shaped, 

 furnished with eight rows of ciha, corresponding with as many 

 sections more or less distinct, and tenninated by two long filiform 

 tentacles, issuing from the base of the zoophyte and fringed on the 

 sides. "It is," says Gosse, "a globe of pure colourless jelly, about 

 as big as a small marble, often with a wart-like swelling at one of its 

 poles, where the mouth is placed. At the other end there are 

 minute orifices, and between the two passes the stomach, which is 

 flat or wider in one diameter than the other." Pleurobrachia pileus, 

 found abundantly in the spring on all our coasts, is so transparent 

 that it is scarcely visible in the water, where it seems like living, 

 moving crystal. PI. densa, which abounds in the Mediterranean, is 

 of a crystalline white, with rows of reddish cirrhi, terminating in two 



