72 The Animal Mind 



be more marked than the contact reaction. W. H. Pollock 

 a number of years ago reported his observation that cer- 

 tain unnamed sea-anemones opened out if food were sus- 

 pended near them in the water, and referred the phenom- 

 enon to "a sense of smell" (609). Adamsia rondeleti winds 

 its tentacles around bits of sardine meat and passes them 

 from tentacle to tentacle toward the mouth. When balls 

 of filter paper softened with sea water are substituted, the 

 feeding reaction is wholly lacking. Either the tentacles 

 fail to react at all, or the ball is "felt of" slowly with no 

 attempt to seize it, or it is momentarily seized and then 

 dropped. If the paper ball be soaked in fish juice, on the 

 other hand, it is seized as eagerly as the fish meat. A 

 negative reaction, consisting in the withdrawal of the 

 tentacles affected, may be produced by applying a bit of 

 paper soaked in quinine solution or by the discharge of 

 quinine solution from a pipette near the tentacles (427, 

 518). A peculiar form of negative reaction has been ob- 

 served in Adamsia, and more strikingly in Cerianthus, when 

 a paper ball soaked in fish juice has been passed from ten- 

 tacle to tentacle till it has nearly reached the mouth. The 

 process is suddenly reversed, and the ball is passed back 

 from one tentacle to another till it reaches the outside edge 

 and is dropped off. Nagel, the observer, thinks the stim- 

 ulus for this change of reaction is the gradual wearing off 

 of the "sapid parts" of the ball during its passage toward 

 the mouth — it might be the squeezing out of the meat 

 juice — and calls special attention to the fact that the 

 reaction whereby the paper is got rid of is wholly different 

 from the ordinary reaction of a tentacle to mechanical 

 stimulation, which, as we have seen, does not involve seiz- 

 ing the object at all. A tentacle touched by a bit of moist- 

 ened filter paper ordinarily responds, if at all, by a mere 



