c., or in forms like plants, and multiply in such numbers as to
create rocks and whole islands in many seas, by their untiring
industry. Polypus signifies having many feet, or roots; it is derived
from the Greek.

_Myriads_, countless numbers.

Whence are the best and greatest number of Sponges brought?

From the Mediterranean, especially from Nicaria, an island near the
coast of Asia: the collection of sponges forms, in some of these
islands, the principal support of their inhabitants. They are procured
by diving under water, an exercise in which both men, women, and
children are skilled from their earliest years. The fine, small
sponges are esteemed the best, and usually come from Constantinople;
the larger and coarser sorts are brought from Tunis and Algiers, on
the coast of Africa. Sponge is very useful in the arts, as well as for
domestic purposes.

What is Coral?

A substance which, like sponge, was considered as a vegetable
production, until about the year 1720, when a French gentleman of
Marseilles commenced (and continued for thirty years,) a series of
observations, and ascertained that the coral was a living animal of
the Polypus tribe. The general name of zoophytes, or plant animals,
has since been applied to them. These animals are furnished with
minute glands, secreting a milky juice; this juice, when exuded from
the animal, becomes fixed and hard.

_Series_, a course or continued succession.

_Glands_, vessels.

_Exuded_, from exude, to flow out.

Is this substance considered by naturalists as the habitation of the
Insect?

Not merely as the habitation, but as a part of the animal itself, in
the same manner that the shell of a snail or an oyster is of those
animals, and without which they cannot long exist. By means of this
juice or secretion, the coral insects, at a vast but unknown depth
below the surface of the sea, attach themselves to the points and
ridges of rocks, which form the bottom of the ocean; upon which
foundation the little architects labor, building up, by the aid of the
above-mentioned secretion, pile upon pile of their rocky habitations,
until at length the work rises above the sea, and is continued to such
a height as to leave it almost dry, when the insects leave building on
that part, and begin afresh in another direction under the water. Huge
masses of rocky substances are thus raised by this wonderful little
insect, capable of resisting the tre