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 ina 
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 of Preurobrachia (Flem.) are globulous or egg-shaped, 
furnished with eight rows of cilia, corresponding with as many 
sections more or less distinct, and terminated 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. 72. densa, which abounds in the Mediterranean, is 
of a crystalline white, with rows of reddish cirrhi, terminating in two. 
