take one of them home, and put it in a jar of water, it will expand
into a delicate compound flower, which can neither be described nor
painted, of long pellucid tentacles, hanging like a thin bluish
cloud over a disk of mottled brown and grey.

Here, adhering to this large whelk, is another, but far larger and
coarser. It is Sagartia parasitica, one of our largest British
species; and most singular in this, that it is almost always (in
Torbay, at least,) found adhering to a whelk: but never to a live
one; and for this reason. The live whelk (as you may see for
yourself when the tide is out) burrows in the sand in chase of
hapless bivalve shells, whom he bores through with his sharp tongue
(always, cunning fellow, close to the hinge, where the fish is),
and then sucks out their life. Now, if the anemone stuck to him,
it would be carried under the sand daily, to its own disgust. It
prefers, therefore, the dead whelk, inhabited by a soldier crab,
Pagurus Bernhardi (Pl. II. Fig. 2), of which you may find a dozen
anywhere as the tide goes out; and travels about at the crab's
expense, sharing with him the offal which is his food. Note,
moreover, that the soldier crab is the most hasty and blundering of
marine animals, as active as a monkey, and as subject to panics as
a horse; wherefore the poor anemone on his back must have a hard
life of it; being knocked about against rocks and shells, without
warning, from morn to night and night to morn. Against which
danger, kind Nature, ever MAXIMA IN MINIMIS, has provided by
fitting him with a stout leather coat, which she has given, I
believe, to no other of his family.

Next, for the babies' heads, covered with prickles, instead of
hair. They are sea-urchins, Amphidotus cordatus, which burrow by