Page:The Book of the Aquarium and Water Cabinet.djvu/90

80 himself. Like most lazy dignitaries, this showy Actinia attracts more attention than the lively servant who drags it from place to place, for its form and colouring are beautiful in the extreme.

It is of large size, frequently attaining to a height of four inches with a diameter of two and a half. Mr. Gosse’s description of this fine creature is so minute and interesting, that I must beg the reader to accept it in preference to any that I can write. He says, the “ground colour is a dirty white, or drab, often slightly tinged with pale yellow; longitudinal bands of dark wood-brown, reddish, or purplish brown, run down the body, sometimes very regularly, and set so closely as to leave the intermediate bands of ground colour much narrower than themselves; at other times these bands are narrower, more separated, and variously interrupted or broken. I have seen a variety in which the bands took the form of chains of round dark spots, the effect of which was handsome. Immediately round the base the bands usually subdivide, and are varied by a single series of upright, oblong spots of rich yellow, which are usually marginal, with deeper brown than the bands. The whole body is surrounded by close-set faint lines of pale blue, sometimes scarcely distinguishable, except near the summit, where they cut the bands in such a manner as to form, with other similar lines which there run lengthwise, a reticulated pattern.

“The disk is somewhat wider than the diameter of the body, which it over-arches on all sides. Its margin is somewhat thin, and occasionally thrown into puckered