cky
enough to touch an Anemone.

If your own skin is tender, these little stinging hairs will irritate
it, but not enough to hurt you. It is different, however, with the small
creatures of the sea. They are made quite helpless when caught by
hundreds of these strange threads. We shall find similar poison-threads
in the Jelly-fish; and these, in some cases, can cause us serious
illness. You cannot see them without the aid of a microscope.

All those parts of its food which the Anemone cannot digest, it throws
out again. If you feed an Anemone on raw meat, it tucks the pieces into
its mouth, and, some days after, throws out the hard part of the meat,
having taken all the "goodness" from it.

No doubt the Anemones themselves are eaten by other animals in the sea,
but many kinds of fish will not touch them. You may remember that we
noticed an Anemone which lived on the stolen home of the Hermit Crab.
The crab lives in the whelk shell, and the Anemone lives on the roof, as
it were. In nearly every ocean, all over the world, these two partners
are found, using the same shell. It is thought that the Anemone lives
there for two good reasons. First, the Hermit moves from place to place;
you can see that this would give the Anemone a better chance of
obtaining food. Also, bits of food float to the Anemone when the crab is
picking his dinner to pieces.

The crab seems to like having his strange partner with him. No doubt the
Anemone is of some use to him, or he would at once pull it off. It is
thought that the Anemone protects him from his enemies, the fish. Some
of them would swallow the whelk shell, crab and all, but they would not
eat one on which an Anemone was fixed. We are not _sure_ that these
reasons are the right ones. All we know for certain is, that a crab and
an Anemone have, for some good reasons, gone into partnership.

Anemones have large families. Sometimes they have numbers of eggs; at
other times their little ones come straight into the world as very tiny
Anemones. A boy who kept a large Anemone in a tank of sea water, was
astonished to find that in a short time, he had not one, but hundreds,
of the creatures. The tiny Anemones were fixed to the glass and rock,
all fishing for food with their little outspread tentacles. Sometimes
the Anemone will calmly divide itself into two, each half becoming a
perfect Anemone!

Anemones are of many shapes, sizes, and colours. The loveliest of our
British ones is the Pl