Page:The Book of the Aquarium and Water Cabinet.djvu/84

74 the Actinia take precedence of all the ordinary inhabitants of the tank, because of their exquisite beauty, strange habits, and still more general certainty attending their preservation.

Actinia mesembryanthemum is the common Smooth Anemone which abounds on every part of our coast. Its colour varies considerably, but it is usually of a deep, warm chocolate, dotted all over with small yellow spots, and when closed has the best possible resemblance to a large ripe strawberry. Every stone about the sea-beach is studded with this anemone, and a collector may secure any required number in a few hours, slipping each from its base, and dropping the whole into a jar with some fragments of fresh wet weed to keep them moist.

When it expands, a circle of bright blue beads, or tubercules, resembling torquoisesturquoises [sic], is seen just within the central opening; and, as the expansion proceeds, a number of coral-like fingers, or tentacles, unfold from the centre, and at last spread out on all sides like the hundred petals of a Peri flower, reminding one of Hinda’s boon:—

This anemone will remain expanded for many days together, if the water be kept bright and pure; but if the