74 NATURAL HISTORY READER. 



vaneed more and more, creeping slowly out, and pres- 

 ently parted from the coral stock and floated free in the 

 water, an independent being, oval in shape, a mere bubble 

 for transparency and lightness, but evidently a living thing, 

 since it moved about quite rapidly. He had seen the birth 

 of a coral animal. While lie followed its motions with 

 wonder and interest, he perceived that the same process was 

 going on over the whole mass. It was a birthday in this 

 great family, for now from the countless mouths, crowding 

 the surface of the coral-head, the same little objects began 

 to appear, and were cast off like the first, till hundreds of 

 new beings floated in the water around the parent community. 



9. Mr. Agassiz had chanced upon the moment of breed- 

 ing in a coral stock. He had never seen it, nor had any 

 naturalist ever seen it before ; he has never seen it since ; 

 he might watch for months, perhaps, and never see it again. 

 This is what I mean when I say that these investigations 

 are so baffling and slow. The patient waiting of years may 

 give you only one such hour. Still, the time is not lost, 

 for it is by intimate familiarity with the structure of ani- 

 mals, by constant comparison of one with another — by un- 

 wearied study, in short — that the observer acquires the 

 knowledge which enables him to understand some entirely 

 new fact when it suddenly presents itself. 



10. Mr. Agassiz was unable to follow the history of his 

 new brood beyond its first stages, because it was impossible 

 to maintain the conditions necessary to rear them, and they 

 soon died. But having ascertained that the young corals 

 begin their existence as free, independent beings, and re- 

 semble the young of the soft-bodied radiates, so much is 

 known of the latter, and of later stages in the life of the 

 morals, that it was easy to put these facts together and make 

 out the whole story. 



11. Suppose such a being to be born into the sea — and 

 no doubt they are cast in swarms from the coral stocks into 



