Page:The Book of the Aquarium and Water Cabinet.djvu/91

Rh folds to a small extent. Thus it appears to approach the peculiar form of A. bellis. The disk is nearly flat, or slightly hollowed, but rises in the centre into a stout cone, in the middle of which is the mouth, edged with crenated lips. The tentacles are arranged in seven rows, of which the innermost contains about twenty, the second twenty-four, the third forty-eight, the fourth ninety-six; the other rows are too closely set, and too numerous to be distinguished. Probably the whole number of tentacles, in a full-grown specimen, may be considered as certainly not less than 500.”

Actinia Dianthus.—This is the Plumose anemone of Mr. Grosse, and sometimes bears the very appropriate name of the Carnation anemone. It is the most superb of our native Actinias—a gorgeous creature, that in itself more than realizes our brightest imaginings of the hidden splendours of the ocean floor, and of the gems that bedeck the caves of Neptune. How will future poetry be affected by the revelations of the aquarium, and how far will the sober facts of scientific research influence the pictures and the incidents of romance? Even Keats’s glowing description of “God Neptune’s palaces” becomes tame in the presence of this splendid creature, which carries the fancy—

and peoples the dark slippery slopes with wondrous forms of life and beauty, as if the lost argosies and the perished