Marvels of the Universe 



425 



SOME SEA ANEMONES 



BY EDWARD STEP, F.L.S. 



There is a prettj' constant tendency to name the newly-known according to its resemblance to 

 the well-known, and much confusion has arisen from the practice. As a case in point, take the 

 wonderfiil Sea Anemones. The earlier observers were impressed by their superficial resemblance 

 to certain flowers ; so when thej- admitted them into their schemes of classification and had to 

 invent a name for the group of hitherto nameless things they manufactured from the Greek lexicon 

 the word Anthozoa, which means " flower-animals." As an English equivalent they invented 

 Sea Anemones, which served to fix the floral idea, and different species were named with the 

 names of particular flowers. Minor poets wrote of them as flowers of the sea, and so, even 

 to-day, there lingers the 

 idea that thej- are a> 

 much vegetable as animal 

 if not more so. 



If the Sea Anemones, 

 with their beautiful tints 

 and petal -like tentacles, 

 are not flowers, what are 

 they ? To give an idea 

 of their true nature in 

 popular language, we 

 may describe them as 

 coral-polyps that deposit 

 no coral. Coral-polyps 

 are united to form colonies 

 of many individuals, but 

 Sea Anemones (with a 

 few exceptions) are indi- 

 vidually separate. 



The majority of visitor^ 

 to the seaside know onh 

 one kind of Anemone, the 

 kind that may be found 

 in plenty on the rocks 

 bet\veen tide-marks, and 

 £is the waters have receded 

 they are seen only in a 

 closed and more or less 

 flaccid condition. To see 

 the Anemones in their full 

 expanded beauty we must 

 peer into the clear water 

 of the rock-basins that 

 are left full when the tide 



goes out. Some of them sea ANEM0NE.S. U>^ rneo. Carrera. 



never venture so far up ^^^ speclea in the upper pan of the picture is the Gem Pimplet, a flesh-tinted Anemone 



., , J ■ . with pellucid tentacles barred with black and grey. The lower figure is the Dahlia Wartlet, 



tne snore as to get into a large and showy species, common on our shores. (Natural size.) 



