Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/20

10 disaster—literally as to the scallop, and metaphorically as to the polyp: both were sadly taken in. Actinia now looked very serious—comically so—like one in an evil strait. Perhaps it felt as bad as a hen-pecked subject, for it had got itself around a pecten, and a, pecten maximus at that. If a guest at tea should swallow the tea-saucer, matters would look alarming. And this bolted scallop was as big as a saucer. The effect upon the actinia's looks was ludicrous, since there was a narrow, bulging, equatorial belt, strongly significant of an undue centrifugal force in activity at that place. Get rid of the saucer it could not; so it seemed, with a saucy air, to have made up its mind to resort to an expediency that should fairly checkmate the strange exigency. And this expediency was a change of base. In fact, it transformed its old base entirely. Tentacles grew out around it, an oval aperture appeared, and, in a word, it became a double actinia, and the large scallop shell was made a double base, and was accepted ever after as the demarcation of the two individualities. No fun in Nature? If this, despite a smack of sauciness, was not a practical joke of the first water, then bring out your specimen-brick, old Sober-sides!

But the time is up, and so much must be left unsaid. In the cuts is the white Arachnactis, a baseless actinia, which, stuck in the mud, waves its few snaky tentacles about. And there is the waxy Anthea, or opelet, with its snaky or gorgon hair. But we must stop, without telling of the singular varieties of forms, and the rich diversities of tint and color, and the sometimes queer, yet normal functions performed by these marine animal mimics of the floral structures of the land.



E have been concerned heretofore with the human and animal remains of the older Diluvium. We come now to the upper and more recent layers of that formation.

In these, the formerly so abundant remains of the cave-bear are wholly wanting, those of the mammoth very rare. The common animals are the giant-elk, primitive ox, aurochs, horse, chamois, steinbok, moose, monkey, and various species at present confined to arctic and high Alpine and Pyrenean tracts. The characteristic animal of the time, however, is the reindeer, heretofore absent or very rare, and hence the name—the Age of Reindeers.

The continued prevalence of a northern and Alpine fauna in the 