If the disk were spread out and gave rise to little anemones without tearing--so that they remained in continuity with the parent--we should get a composite or compound animal, made up of many anemones, all connected at the base. This actually happens in a whole group of polyps resembling the sea-anemones. They grow into "stocks," "tree-like" or "encrusting" masses, consisting of hundreds and even thousands of individuals, each with its mouth and tentacles, but with their inner cavities and bases united. These are the "coral polyps," or "coral-insects" of old writers, of so many varied kinds. One further feature of great importance in a "coral" is the production of a hard deposit of calcite, or limestone, which is thrown down by the surface of the adhesive disk, and is also formed in deep, radiating "pockets," pushed in to the soft animal from the disk. The hard deposit of calcite is continuous throughout the "stock," or "tree," and when the soft sea-anemone-like animals die, the hard, white matter is left, and is called "coral." Very commonly this white coral shows star-like cups on its surface, which correspond to the lower ends or disks of the soft sea-anemone-like creatures which deposited the hard coral. In a less common group (represented commonly on our coast by the so-called "Dead men's fingers" found growing on the overhanging edges of low-tide rocks) the hard coral material does not form cups for the minute sea-anemones which secrete it, but takes the form of a supporting central or axial rod (sea-pens), or branched tree (sea-bushes), upon which the fleshy mass of polyps are tightly set. This is the case with the precious red and pink coral of the Mediterranean (which is now being "undersold" actually in the Mediterranean markets by a similar red coral from Japan, usually offered as the genuine article, which it is not!). On the British coast you do not, as a rule, find coral-forming polyps. A small kind, consisting of two or three yellow and orange-red anemone-polyps united and producing a small group of hard calcite cups (Caryophyllia and Balanophyllia) is not uncommon at Plymouth at a few fathoms depth. But you have to go to the Norwegian fiords or else far out to sea where you have 300 fathoms of sea-water in order to get really luxuriant white corals--the beautiful Lophohelia (Fig. 3, p. 9), which I used to dredge in the Nord Fiord near Stavanger, as branching, shrub-like masses of a foot cube in area, each white marble cup standing out from the stem, an inch long and two-thirds of an inch across, and the stems giving support to a whole host of clinging growths (among them Rhabdopleura!) and sheltering wonderful deep-water worms and starfish.