Among these worms are masons and architects that build the houses in which they pass their lives brick by brick and pebble by pebble, with an exquisite craftsmanship hardly rivaled among animals. The blossoms and architecture have, so far as known, no utilitarian function. Nature is a painter and a poet. Forever she probes with intellect, instinct, and emotion to capture fleeting fragments of colors, lights, and harmonies of the ineffable which can be woven into the material garments of life. Among her notable successes are the sabellids and serpulids and terefillids. They are tube-dwellers—thus distinguished from their free-wandering kin—polychaetes such as the fearsome Aphrodites. Many of them have been given the names of the golden-haired nymphs who, mounted on sea horses, formed the retinue of Poseidon in mythology. Loveliest of these nymphs was Amphitrite, who became the bride of the sea god and queen of the coral-forested deep. Quite appropriately, among the fairest of the sabellids is the amphitrite, essentially world-wide in distribution. These worms are especially facile as builders. One, for example, makes the brick with which it erects the cylindrical house that is its home for life. Extending from its head are sixteen tentacles, eight on each side, fringed with petal-like outgrowths. These tentacles are joined by membranes at the base so that, when extended, they have the appearance of two fans. When the fans are brought in contact, they form a funnel with which the animal collects mud. At the bottom of this funnel is “a singular organ by which the mud, mixed with a cement-like secretion of the worm itself, is moulded into pellets. These pellets are laid, one by one, like bricks, to form the walls of a flexible tube from twelve to fifteen inches long and about as thick as a goose quill.” This particular British sea worm, Amphitrite ventilabrum, is almost as notable for the beauty of its blossom as for its masonry. Each of the tentacles has about a thousand of the petal-like processes and each of these, it is claimed, is capable of some degree of independent action. “It is no exaggeration to affirm,” wrote the eighteenth-century British biologist Sir John Dalyell, “that the will of this lowly, defenseless creature is fulfilled by control of at least twenty thousand living parts.” The color of the petals is basically straw-yellow, dotted and banded with brown, rouge, red, and green. “While dredging in the river Roach,” Dalyell reported, “I have come upon banks where these worms existed in hundreds of thousands and appear in masses of large extent growing erect like standing fields of corn.”