, the red weeds and
corallines, small and delicate in form, line the bottom of the pool in
its darkest nooks.

And now if I hand round two specimens,--one a coralline, and the other
something you do not yet know,--I am sure you will say at first sight
that they belong to the same family, and, in fact, if you buy at the
seaside a group of seaweeds gummed on paper, you will most likely get
both these among them. Yet the truth is; that while the coralline (1,
Fig. 4) is a plant, the other specimen (2), which is called
_Sertularia filicula_, is an animal.

This special sertularian grows up right in my pool on stones or often
on seaweeds, but I have here (Fig. 5) another and much smaller one
which lives literally in millions hanging its cups downwards. I find
it not only under the narrow ledges of the pool sheltered by the
seaweed, but forming a fringe along all the rocks on each side of the
cove near to low-water mark, and for a long time I passed it by
thinking it was of no interest. But I have long since given up
thinking this of anything, especially in my pool, for my magic glass
has taught me that there is not even a living speck which does not
open out into something marvellous and beautiful. So I chipped off a
small piece of rock and brought the fringe home, and found, when I
hung it up in clear sea-water as I have done over this glass trough
(Fig. 5) and looked at it through the lens, that each thread of the
dense fringe, in itself not a quarter of an inch deep, turns out to be
a tiny sertularian with at least twenty mouths. You can see this with
your pocket lens even as it hangs here, and when you have examined it
you can by and by take off one thread and put it carefully in the
trough. I promise you a sight of the most beautiful little beings
which exist in nature.

[Illustration: FIG. 5. _Sertularia tenella_, HANGING FROM A SPLINT OF
ROCK OVER A WATER TROUGH. ALSO PIECE ENLARGED TO SHOW THE ANIMAL
PROTRUDING.]

Come and look at it. It is a horny-branched stem with a double row of
tiny cups all along each side. Out of these cups there appear a row of
tiny cups all along each side (see Fig. 5), Out of these cups there
appear from time to time sixteen minute transparent tentacles as fine
as spun glass, which wave about in the water. If you shake the glass a
little, in an instant each crystal star vanishes into its cup, to come
out again a few minutes later; so that now here, now there, the
delicate animal-flowe