Page:The aquarium - an unveiling of the wonders of the deep sea.djvu/289

234 an inch in diameter at one end and gradually tapering to one fifth of an inch at the other, whence it abruptly terminated in a short cone, perforated in the centre. The whole length was an inch and a half, and its texture was that of an elegant mosaic, composed of grains of fine sand of various colours, and excessively minute fragments of shell, agglutinated together so as to be pretty strong, though not more than one grain thick. It was only with a lens that this structure could be seen; to the naked eye it seemed an uniform substance, slightly rough, and of a pale red hue, dotted with black.

On looking into the larger end of this tube, I could see what looked like a stopper of white flesh, exactly fitting the calibre, and moving up and down in the tube like a piston. Occasionally it was protruded a little beyond the edge, when its extremity was seen to be truncate, or, as it were, cut straight off, so that it was just like a cork that moves freely up and down in the neck of a bottle. But from the summit of this fleshy cork two organs were projecting, each of which exactly resembled a lady's back comb, the teeth being curved in the same manner; only we must suppose them to be bevelled off on each side, the central teeth of each comb being much the longest; their surface is highly metallic, reflecting the light exactly like burnished gold. These two combs are placed side by side, (or edge to edge) so that together they extend nearly all across the flat end of the "cork"; not however in a straight but an angled line, so as to cut off about 120°, or one third of the circle.

When the creature had overcome in some degree