"I saw the living pile ascend The mausoleum of its architects, Still dying upwards as their labour closed: Slime the material, but the slime was turned To adamant by their petrific touch." MONTGOMERY'S _Pelican Island_. The zoophytes which constitute the class _Zoantharia_ are quite great personages. Some of them are eighteen or twenty inches long; at the same time, others scarcely exceed the eighth part of an inch in length. They live in all seas, and seem to have existed through many ages of the earth's history; they appear at an early geological period, and they have performed an important part in its formation; we shall see that, with great numbers of them, parts cut off from their bodies continue to live and become new individuals. The name of _Zoantharia_ was first given to the class by Gray; but here we give it a somewhat wider signification, embracing under it the madrepores and starred stones of Lasueur, who is reminded of a field enamelled with small flowers when he sees the little polyp of _Porites Astroïdes_ in full blow. "But it is only," says Johnston, "when they lie with their upper disk expanded, and their tentacula displayed, that they solicit comparison with the boasts of Flora; for, when contracted, the polyp of the madrepores conceal themselves in their calcareous cups, and the actiniæ hide their beauty, assuming the shape of an obtuse cone or hemisphere of a fleshy consistence, or elongating themselves into a sort of flabby cylinder that indicates a state of relaxation and indolent repose." These zoophytes are flesh-eaters, and consume quantities truly prodigious, of animals such as the crustaceans, worms, and small fishes. They are all marine, nearly all attached to the same spot for life, and they live in colonies. Some few are isolated and live by themselves, either free or attached to the soil. They differ altogether from the animals belonging to the _Alcyonaria_ by their disposal of, and mode of multiplying, tentacula. These appendages in the _Zoantharia_ never present the _bipinnate_ arrangement which is observable in the _Alcyonaria_. They are habitually simple, and, if they present ramifications, these are only exceptional. In nearly every instance, the tentacles exist to the number of twelve, eighteen, twenty-four, and even larger numbers, which form a sort of concentric crown to the animal.