ins small. One may be as big as a
mop, others no larger than an egg.

Down in the blue Mediterranean Sea are found the best sponges that grow.
They are called "horny sponges," and grow in great masses, fine, yet
tough and durable. A sponge from the Mediterranean, called the "Turkey
sponge," will cost three times as much as a coarser, more brittle one
from other waters. They are porous, or full of little holes and hollows.

We fishes like to bang against the sponges and feel the sudden spray
dash over us. Water we have all around and about us, but a shower-bath
is not as common a thing.

When you buy a sponge, it is round, flat, or cone-shaped. Now see what
they look like under water. Here is a little tree, you say. Oh, no, it
is only a mass of sponges piled together and branching out as they grow.

Here are fans, arches, tiny caves, and many different shapes forming a
sponge-garden. Queer, isn't it? Oh, lots of things are queer until you
learn about them.

Would you like to see how I wash myself? Don't laugh so loud, you might
scare the fishes. I know very well that it seems to you as if I was
washing or bathing all the time, but there! Some kind of a water-bug has
plumped right down onto my head, and left a lot of sticky sand on it,
that the water does not wash away.

Now don't be alarmed. I won't let you be swept from my back. I am only
going to wash my head. See me swim directly under this mass of sponge,
swaying out from a rock. There will be no bits of sand clinging to me
after I have been sponged a few moments.

Here is a sponge that looks as if almost as large as your sun when it
rises out of the water, but if you squeeze that fellow dry--the sponge,
not the sun--it will not begin to be the size it is now. You could press
it into a bowl of moderate size when dry, but then take it to the pump
or the faucet, fill it with water, and my, what a balloon!

Sponges were once called "worm-nests," and were thought to be a mere
kind of seaweed. But looked at under the sea, it would be known at once
that they are neither nest nor weed.

Once in awhile sponges seem to spring directly up from the mud without
anything to cling to, but generally they are fastened to rocks or large
stones, and spread out and out from them. Here they look so much like a
kind of herb, that Folks who make a study of things in nature, and are
called naturalists, for a long time took them to be a kind of sea-plant,
and for years it was a pu