POLYPES, 
71 
V presenting to the Sea- Anemone any small shellfish or 
an atom of raw meat. When a tentacle comes into con- 
tact with it, it contracts forcibly, and the prey is thus 
dragged upon the oral disk, the surrounding tentacles 
arching over it. The lips instantly begin to protrude, 
stretching out towards the morsel, which they presently 
embrace, and gradually enclose, extending their volume, 
until they close over it, sucking it in as it were, and forcing 
it to disappear within the body. Digestion now takes 
place j and in the course of the next twenty-four hours 
the remains, such as the shell of the mollusk, or the hard 
parts of a little crab, are disgorged through the mouth, 
enveloped in a tenacious, slimy mucus. 
Though commonly the prey of the Actiniae is small, it 
is not always so ; the voracious creature occasionally 
mastering and swallowing a victim even much larger than 
itself, strange as such a proposition may sound. Dr 
Johnston has recorded from his own experience an example 
of this. “ I had once brought me,” he observes, “ a 
specimen of Actinia crassicornis, that might have been 
originally two inches in diameter, and that had somehow 
contrived to swallow a valve of the great scallop ( Pecten 
maximus), of the size of an ordinary saucer. The shell, 
fixed within the stomach, was so placed as to divide it 
completely into two halves, so that the body, stretched 
tensely over, had become thin and flattened like a pancake. 
1 communication between the inferior portion of the 
stomach and the mouth was of course prevented, yet, in- 
steac of emaciating and dying of an atrophy, the animal 
a a ' a '' e d itself of what undoubtedly had been a very 
untoward accident, to increase its enjoyments and its 
