SEA ANEMONES, 207 
“ The brilliancy of its colours and the great elegance of its tentacular 
crown when fully expanded,” says Professor Allman, “render it 
eminently attractive ; hundreds may often be seen ina single pool, and 
few sights will be remembered with greater pleasure by the naturalist 
than that presented by these little zoophytes, as they expand their 
green and rosy crowns amid the algze, millepores, and plumy corals, 
co-tenants of their rock-covered vase !” 
The toxicological properties of the Actinia have been attributed to 
certain special cells full of liquid ; but M. Hollard believes that these 
effects are neither constant enough nor sufficiently general to con- 
stitute the chief function of these organs, which are found in all the 
species and over their whole surface, external and internal. Though 
quite incapable of discerning their prey at a distance, the sea ane- 
mone seizes it with avidity when it comes to offer itself up a victim. 
If some adventurous little worm, or some young and sluggish crus- 
tacean, happens to ruffle the expanded involucrum of an actinia in 
its lazy progress through the water, the animal strikes it at once with 
its tentacles, and instinctively sweeps it into its open mouth. This 
habit may be observed in any aquarium, and is a favourite spectacle 
at the “ Jardin d’Acclimatation ” of Paris, at noon on Sundays and 
Wednesdays, when the aquatic animals are fed. Small morsels of 
food are thrown into the water. Prawns, shrimps, and other crus- 
taceans and zoophytes inhabiting this medium, chase the morsels as 
they sink to the bottom of the basin; but it is otherwise with the 
Actinia ; the morsels glide downward within the twentieth part of an 
inch of their crown without their presence being suspected. It requires 
the aid of a directing wand, directed by the hand of the keeper, to 
guide the food right down on the animal. Then its arms or tentacles 
seize upon the prey, and its repast commences forthwith. 
The Actinia are at once gluttonous and voracious. They seize 
their food with the help of their tentacula, and engulf in their 
stomach, as we have seen, substances of a volume and consistence 
which contrast strangely with their dimensions and softness. In less 
than an hour, M. Hollard observed that one of these creatures voided 
the shell of a mussel, and disposed of a crab all to its hardest parts ; 
nor was it slow to reject these hard parts, by turning its stomach 
inside out, as one might turn out one’s pocket, in order to empty it 
of its contents. We have seen in Dr. Johnston’s account of A. cras- 
sicornis, that when threatened with death by hunger, from having 
swallowed a shell which separated it into two halves, at the end of 
eleven days it had opened a new mouth, provided with separate rows 
of tentacula. The accident which, in ordinary animals, would have 
