Then, if he has a passion for polyps, and
wishes to imagine how they could ingulf good-sized ships in the ages of
fable, he can see one of the hideous things float from its torpor in the
bottom of its tank, and seize Avith its hungry tentacles the food
lowered to it by a string. Still awfuller is it to see it rise and reach
with those prehensile members, as with the tails of a multi-caudate ape,
some rocky projection of its walls and lurk fearsomely into the hollow,
and vanish there in a loathly quiescence. The carnivorous spray and
bloom of the deep-sea flowers amid which drowned men's "bones are coral
made" seem of one temperament with the polyps as they slowly, slowly
wave their tendrils and petals; but there is amusement if not pleasure
in store for the traveller who turns from them to the company of shad
softly and continuously circling in their tank, and regarding the
spectators with a surly dignity becoming to people in better society
than others. One large shad, imaginably of very old family and
independent property, sails at the head of several smaller shad, his
flatterers and toadies, who try to look like him.
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