The ocean / By P. H. Gosse.

  • Gosse, Philip Henry, 1810-1888.
Date:
[pref. 1845]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The ocean / By P. H. Gosse. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    some were not unlike lobsters or prawns in shape, but soft, and not above two inches long.”* Some of the animals thus described by the Captain, were doubtless intruders that had sought shelter or food in the interstices of the coral: the true architects of these wronderful structures are polypes of minute size, which, though of many varying species, and even genera, agree in the simplicity of their form and structure. They consist of a little oblong bag of jelly, closed at one end, but having the other ex- tremity open, and surrounded by tentacles, usually six or eight in number, set like the rays of a star. Multitudes of these tiny creatures are associated in the secretion of a common stony skeleton, the coral, or madrepore ; in the minute orifices of which they reside, protruding their mouths and tentacles when under water, but withdrawing themselves by sudden contraction into their holes the moment they are molested. It was for a long time supposed that all the islands of coral formation were reared from their bases, fathomless depths in the ocean, by the unaided efforts of these minute creatures ; and from exaggerated notions of the rapidity with which the process was going on, anticipations were frequently uttered that a large portion of the Pacific might, at no very dis- tant period, be occupied by the spreading structures united into a vast coral continent. More accurate observations have, however, satisfactorily proved, that the living animals cannot exist at a greater depth than twenty or thirty fathoms, so that the whole of * Voyage to Loo-Choo, p. 175. (Constable’s edit.)