That is
the general structure of one of these sea anemones. If you touch it it
contracts immediately into a heap. It looks at first quite like a
flower in the sea, but if you touch it you find that it exhibits all
the peculiarities of a living animal; and if anything which can serve as
its prey comes near its tentacles, it closes them round it and sucks
the material into its stomach and there digests it and turns it to the
account of its own body.
These creatures are very voracious, and not at all particular what they
seize; and sometimes it may be that they lay hold of a shellfish which
is far too big to be packed into that interior cavity, and, of course,
in any ordinary animal a proceeding of this kind would give rise to a
very severe fit of indigestion. But this is by no means the case in the
sea anemone, because when digestive difficulties of this kind arise he
gets out of them by splitting himself in two; and then each half builds
itself up into a fresh creature, and you have two polypes where there
was previously one, and the bone which stuck in the way lying between
them! Not only can these creatures multiply in this fashion, but they
can multiply by buds.
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