14 CURIOUS HOMES AND THEIK TEKANTS. 



locomotion, and being fixed for life to the spot to which 

 it is attached. It now alters its shape, and develops 

 eight tiny buttonlike projections about the fore end 

 that contains the mouth, and soon grows a row of 

 fringed feelers or tentacles like petals, becoming so 

 much like a blossom in appearance that up to a com- 

 paratively recent time they were supposed to be the 

 flowers of some sea plant. From the stalk of this little 

 anemone-like creature buds put forth, soon showing a 

 mouth like that of their parent, and around these grow 

 tentacles, so that the solitary little polyps becomes a 

 cluster of coral animals. Besides these two modes of 

 increasing and multiplying, corals have a third and 

 more remarkable one, in which, however contradictory 

 it may seem, the sum total of the coral colony is in- 

 creased and multiplied by being divided, the animals 

 splitting themselves up, and each and every portion 

 becoming a perfect animal. 



One of the main differences between a coral polyp 

 and an anemone is, that the former has the power of 

 continually depositing at its base little particles of 

 carbonate of lime, and of thus building a base or sup- 

 port for its house. The polyp does not do this con- 

 sciously or purposely, or has it any more will in the 

 matter than we do in growing our bones ; but, to use 

 a fashionable phrase of the day, " he is the instrument 

 of a great work." Year by year his skeletons accu- 

 mulate, all cemented together in one mass, until after 

 countless centuries a great reef is formed and a new 

 land begun, which, but for the part he took in making 

 it, would never have existed. 



