“CORALS. 2i1 
reluctance to commence, and were awed into silence, knowing 
that we could make but a faint picture of the corals as they 
appear to the eye, or give satisfactory expression to the moody 
speculations which they naturally suggest to an inquiring mind. 
The coral was formerly believed to belong to the vegetable 
kingdom, but naturalists have for some time agreed that it is one 
of the lowest forms of animal life. To those whom ‘ proud science 
never taught to stray,” it appears, upon casual inspection, to be 
in some of its forms nothing but a curious and beautiful kind of 
limestone, and in others a marine vegetable having such a stony 
habit of growth as closely to ally it to the inanimate rock upon 
which it builds, and to which it is securely attached and appar- 
ently rooted. It belongs to the large family of coradligerous 
zo6phytes, and is found not only in the Bahama waters, but off 
the coast of Florida, around the Bermuda and West India islands, 
Madagascar and Mauritius, off the coast of Zanzibar, in the Per- 
sian Gulf, in the Red and the Mediterranean Seas, and in the 
Indian and Pacific oceans; but, as it cannot live and work except 
in water of the temperature of not less than 68° of Fahrenheit, it 
is only found within a belt of ocean thirty-six hundred miles 
wide, through which the line of the equator runs. In colder 
latitudes, and off the western coast of. South America and Africa, 
it is not found. Some of its reefs are over a thousand miles 
long. - 
The most important of the coral-making animals are the Polyps, 
which in external form and delicacy of coloring Prof. Dana com- 
pares to the garden aster. Both have a central disc, fringed 
with petal-like organs called tenacles. Below the disk the coral 
polyp has a stout cylindrical ‘pedicel or body which contains the 
stomach and internal cavity of the polyp. The mouth is in the 
center of the disk. The coral animal is very domestic, from ne- 
cessity, being as it were, ‘‘ tied to its own door-post.” Like a tree 
