habit tropical seas, but few
people know that in the nearest pond there are real sponges, growing
sometimes as large as one's head and which are not very dissimilar to
those taken from among the corals of the Bahamas. We may bring home a twig
covered with a thick growth of this sponge; and by dropping a few grains
of carmine into the water, the currents which the little sponge animals
set up are plainly visible. In winter these all die, and leave within
their meshes numbers of tiny winter buds, which survive the cold weather
and in the spring begin to found new colonies. If we examine the sponges
in the late fall we may find innumerable of these statoblasts, as they are
called.

Scattered among them will sometimes be crowds of little wheels, surrounded
with double-ended hooks. These have no motion and we shall probably pass
them by as minute burrs or seeds of some water plant. But they, too, are
winter buds of a strange group of tiny animals. These are known as
Polyzoans or Bryozoans; and though to the eye a large colony of them
appears only as a mass of thick jelly, yet when placed in water and left
quiet, a wonderful transformation comes over the bit of gelatine....
"Perhaps while you gaze at the reddish jelly a pink little projection
appears within the field of your lens, and slowly lengthens and broadens,
retreating and reappearing, it may be, many times, but finally, after much
hesitation, it suddenly seems to burst into bloom. A narrow body, so
deeply red that it is often almost crimson, lifts above the jelly a
crescentic disc ornamented with two rows of long tentacles that seem as
fine as hairs, and they glisten and sparkle like lines of crystal as they
wave and float and twist the delicate threads beneath your wondering gaze.
Then, while you scarcely breathe, for fear the lovely vision will fade,
another and another spreads its disc and waves its silvery tentacles,
until the whole surface of that ugly jelly mass blooms like a garden in
Paradise--blooms not with motionless perianths, but with living animals,
the most exquisite that God has allowed to develop in our sweet waters."
At the slightest jar every animal-flower vanishes instantly.

A wonderful history is behind these little creatures and very different
from that of most members of the animal kingdom. While crabs, butterflies,
and birds have evolved through many and varied ancestral forms, the tiny
Bryozoans, or, being interpreted, moss-animals, seem thro