THE LASSO -THROWERS. 71 
the coil of lassos within the body ; they are not them- 
selves lassos but long darts crowded with lasso-cells, 
and after they have punished the enemy that attacks 
them, they can be drawn in again to be used next 
time. By far the larger number of British anemones 
have these darts (called Acontia), so that we find even 
these sluggish stay-at-homes well able to fight the 
battle of life. 
But mingled in among these soft lasso-throwers 
even on our English shores we find small examples 
of a still more wonderful race, whose history in the 
warm depths of the Mediterranean and amidst the 
stormy surge of the Pacific is like a fairy poem. Who 
has not heard of the groves of lovely red coral seen 
through the clear blue waters off the coasts of Corsica 
and Sardinia ; or read of those islands which are built 
in the midst of the stormy Pacific by the delicate 
coral animal ? There, in the midst of violent foam- 
ing breakers, strong circular stony reefs, crowned with 
delicate white sand and shaded by the cocoa-nut 
palm, enclose those peaceful lagoons where 
" Life in rare and beautiful forms 
Is sporting amid the bowers of stone, 
And is safe when the wrathful spirit of storms 
Has made the top of the waves his own." 
And the coral-animal which builds alike the slender 
pink stem of the coral ornament, and whole islands 
of rock in the midst of the sea, is a lasso-thrower. 
In the Mediterranean he is a delicate dainty 
being, beginning life as a little jelly-body thrown out 
of the mouth of a pure white polyp growing out of a 
red coral branch. This jelly-body soon settles down 
on the sea-bottom (a, Fig. 27), and spreading out its 
