Page:The aquarium - an unveiling of the wonders of the deep sea.djvu/108

Rh jelly, dead and stiff, with uncoiled arms, on the naked floor of his prison. But introduce him while in health into an Aquarium, where living sea-plants are perpetually revivifying the water, and where the bottom, varied with sand, gravel, and peicespieces [sic] of rock, imitates the natural floor of the sea, and you will soon see other particulars in the economy of our little friend, which will, I doubt not, charm you as much as they have pleased me.

The Sepiola is a burrower; and very cleverly and ingeniously does it perform a task which we might at first suppose a somewhat awkward one,—the insertion of its round corpulent body into the sand or gravel. Watch it as it approaches the bottom, after a season of hovering play, such as I have described. It drops down to within an inch of the sand, then hangs suspended, as if surveying the ground for a suitable bed. Presently it selects a spot; the first indication of its choice being that a hollow about the size of a silver fourpence is forcibly blown out of the sand immediately beneath the group of pendent arms. Into the cavity so made the little animal drops; at that instant the sand is blown out on all sides from beneath the body backward, and the abdomen is thrust downward before the cloud of sand which has been blown up settles, but which presently falls around and upon the body. Another forcible puff in front, one on each side, and another behind, follow in quick succession, the fine sand displaced at each blast settling round the animal, as it thrusts itself into the hollow thus more and more deepened.

I was not at first quite sure by what agency these