Page:The aquarium - an unveiling of the wonders of the deep sea.djvu/304

Rh stomach, throat, or proboscis is furnished with a formidable apparatus of horny grasping jaws, variously modified into teeth, hooks and knife-blades, for seizing, tearing and cutting prey; but in Phyllodoce, there are none of these, the elegant animals feeding probably on the fluid juices of dead animals, or on their soft parts, which need no violence. The very tip, however, which of course is perforated, is surrounded by a muscle, by means of which it contracts forcibly on whatever it is applied to, and thus holds it firmly while the inversion of the sac drags it into the body to be digested. The disappearance of the organ is as astonishing as its extrusion; beginning at the tip, which is quickly turned in, the whole rapidly returns to its cavity in the same order as it came out, and then we wonder how so enormous a proboscis can be enclosed in so slender a body.

There is one species of this genus, very common in the situations I have mentioned, named ''Ph. lamelligera''; which is of a yellowish-green, sometimes verging to an olive hue. But a much more beautiful kind has been sent me alive from Torquay, by the courtesy of Mr. Kingsley, who found it beneath a stone at the edge of the laminarian level. I can find nothing corresponding to it either in Audouin and M. Edwards, or in Dr. Johnston's papers on the British Annelida, and shall therefore describe it under the appellation of P. marginata.

Its length varies from five to three inches, according as it is elongated or contracted; the body is composed of about 170 segments, nearly of equal diameter throughout, and abruptly rounded at both