60 LIFE AND HER CHILDREN. 
themselves along may be distinctly seen with the 
naked eye ; and when put in a drop of water under 
the microscope, all the different parts of the body, as 
shown at 3, Fig. 22, can be clearly made out. For 
this bell is a true and delicately organised living 
being. It is a new instrument which Life has 
invented for carrying the eggs of the animal - 
tree far away over the sea. While the mouths, 
a a, are busily catching food for the whole animal 
by their lassos, there has been growing on part 
of the stem a bag (S), in which this little bell has 
been formed, and when it is ready to start on its 
journey the bag opens at the tip and the bell 
struggles out. How gracefully it now drives itself 
along by shooting water in and out of the hole in its 
thin veil as it contracts and expands its rim, and 
from the water thus driven in, its mouth (m) takes 
the minute living beings, and digesting them in its 
tube f, sends the nourishment down the canals to the 
rim, and so over the whole bell ; while in the little 
bags o in the canals it forms and carries the eggs to 
be dropped down on some distant spot to grow up 
into a new animal-tree. ^ 
Thus this minute bell is a living, active creature 
with all the necessary parts for swimming and feed- 
ing, and also for forming eggs to give birth to young 
ones by and by. Its whole body is crowded with 
lasso-cells, though it does not seem greatly to need 
them, and what is much more interesting, in many 
cases it even bears on its rim the first attempts at 
eyes and ears. 
Often the passage of these tiny bells through the 
water can only be traced by some bright spots like 
