402 EVENINGS AT ISE MICBOSCOPE. 



sea. It is fully expanded, and is now as lovely as just 

 now it was unpleasing. 



In the first place it is swollen to twice its former 

 dimensions, and has acquired at the same time a semi- 

 pellucidity, and a more delicate hue. But in place of 

 the pits on the surface (there were not more than half 

 a dozen in this little specimen, which makes it more 

 suitable for examination), it is covered with tall polypes, 

 standing out on all sides, of crystalline clearness and 

 starry forms, each eminently beautiful in itself, and 

 surrounding the whole mass with a sort of atmosphere 

 of almost invisible and impalpable lustre peculiarly 

 charming. 



Coy as these deep-water strangers are of displaying 

 their beauties in our glaring aquariums, they will bear, 

 when once they are expanded, a good deal of shaking 

 with equanimity. Hence I may be able to transfer the 

 trough with its contents from the jar to the stage of the 

 microscope, and thus enable you to gaze on its details 

 for a little while, before the dull sensorium of the 

 creature is sufficiently warned of its ungenial position 

 to caiise it to shut itself up and resume its ugliness. 



As the protruded polypes are exactly alike, it will 

 be enough to confine our attention to one. It is an 

 elevated tubular column of ti'anslucent substance, ter- 

 minating in an expanded flower of eight slender pointed 

 petals, which spring outward with a graceful swell, 

 so as to give the form of a shallow bell to the general 

 outline. The base springs, like the foot of a tree, from 

 the margin of a cell, which penetrates the substance 

 of the mass, into which we can see far down, and into 

 which the whole of the now extended and expanded 



