stance which is to be seen only in the cabinets of
curious persons, or in museums, or, may be, over the mantelpieces of
sea-faring men. But although the red coral, as I have mentioned to you,
has access to the very best society; and although the white coral is
comparatively a despised product, yet in this, as in many other cases,
the humbler thing is in reality the greater; the amount of work which is
done in the world by the white coral being absolutely infinite compared
with that effected by its delicate and pampered namesake. Each of these
substances, the white coral and the red, however, has a relationship to
the other. They are, in a zoological sense, cousins, each of them being
formed by the same kind of animals in what is substantially the same
way. Each of these bodies is, in fact, the hard skeleton of a very
curious and a very simple animal, more comparable to the bones of such
animals as ourselves than to the shells of oysters or creatures of that
kind; for it is the hardening of the internal tissue of the creature, of
its internal substance, by the deposit in the body of a material which
is exceedingly common, not only in fresh but in sea water, and which
is specially abundant in those waters which we know as "hard,"
those waters, for example, which leave a "fur" upon the bottom of a
tea-kettle. This "fur" is carbonate of lime, the same sort of substance
as limestone and chalk. That material is contained in solution in sea
water, and it is out of the sea water in which these coral creatures
live that they get the lime which is needed for the forming of their
hard skeleton.

But now what manner of creatures are these which form these hard
skeletons? I dare say that in these days of keeping aquaria, of
locomotion to the sea-side, most of those whom I am addressing may have
seen one of those creatures which used to be known as the "sea anemone,"
receiving that name on account of its general resemblance, in a rough
sort of way, to the flower which is known as the "anemone"; but being
a thing which lives in the sea, it was qualified as the "sea anemone."
Well, then, you must suppose a body shaped like a short cylinder, the
top cut off, and in the top a hole rather oval than round. All round
this aperture, which is the mouth, imagine that there are placed a
number of feelers forming a circle. The cavity of the mouth leads into
a sort of stomach, which is very unlike those of the higher animals,
in the circumstance