These Sertularians were noticed and drawn many years ago, and were called Corallines. This is a great mistake, because the Coralline is a plant covered with carbonate of lime. The correct name would be the Garland polypes. When we get a bunch of these creatures from the seaside they are dead, and the hard and preservable outside parts alone are left, all the beauty of color and the wonderful inside structure are gone. But even then it can be noticed that the stems of the creature arise from a network of tubes fixed on to stones, sea-weeds, and shells. This resembles a root, but it does not absorb nourishment like the root of a plant. The stems, often not bigger than hairs, are hollow, and the branches also. The surface of the branches is covered on one, or often on both sides, by minute cups. These give almost a saw-edge look to it, in some of the creatures; and among these cups, which are open at their free end, are some larger ones, which are closed where free, and often ribbed and ornamented on their outside. It is noticed that the hollow of the stem and branches is continued into the cups, but not into the closed ones, and that these are shut off from it by a very delicate layer of tissue. This is the minute structure of these things when dead; but when alive, the inside of the stem and branches is filled with a soft substance, which reaches up to the part where each of the cups is attached to the outside. The cups, hundreds in number, on each stem and branch, contain a most beautiful flower-like polype. Variously colored, according to the kind, it has a bell shape, and has a spot for the mouth, which leads to a stomach, whose floor is connected with the pith of the whole branch. Around the mouth are numerous tentacles excessively irritable, capable of stinging and paralyzing prey; and the spectacle of hosts of these, all working for the common good of the branching animal, is very beautiful. Sometimes there is much red in the color, at other times green, yellow, or a dull tint; and in order to relieve the sameness of outline presented by thousands of cups, their horny margin is spined or toothed. In full vigor during the summer, and living through the winter and probably for several years, these cups with their tentacled polypes contribute to the growth and nutrition of the whole. They all work for a common end, and that is for the persistence of the life of the colony. They live on microscopic things in the water, such as minute ova, or the young of things like unto themselves, and on animalcules, and probably on the moving spores of sea-weeds. As the spring advances, the larger and closed cups begin to grow by budding from the stem, and they become filled with a gummy substance with a few granules in it, and somewhat resembling the pith of the stem. As the closed cup grows, it often becomes marked on the outside with rings or belts, and it becomes a very prominent object on the horny-looking Garland polype.