The Savannah morning news., 1902-03-21

carbonate of lime inhabited by an an
inal, which can be readily detected
under the microscope in any piece of
live coral freshly taken from the
water. Corals are male and female,
reproduce by means of eggs, and an
nually send new colonies of their
children to set up business for them
selves on the rocky banks near by
their original home. The coral is not
an enterprising race. 1t grows slow
ly but surely, perhaps an inch in 100
years, and ometimeS, under circum-
stances that are not favorable. it is a
little slow. The Bay of Naples, be-
tween the city of that name and the
famous Island of Capri. has bed
which furnishes about $75O,OOO worth
of coral every year. The fishermen
use old nets, UNFINISHED rope ends and
other things of that sort, which are
dragged across the bottom of the sea.
The coral branches become entangled
in them break off and are pulled up
The oyster belongs to the same fam
lily as the coral, although he does his
work in a different way and has a
broader career in life, although it is
hardly right to say that he is either
higher or lower in the scale of exist
ence. Before we express judgment on
that subject we must await the final
decision of whether it is better to be
beautiful or useful. The Mediterran-
can oysters are by no means as good
as ours, but are considered a great
luxury here, and have been eaten ever
since any one can remember. The ar
tificial culture of oysters was prac-
ticed among the ancient Romans in the
Bay of Naples very much as it is in
Chesapeake bay to-day.
In a recent letter l told you of some
1shl nil in Of
pis, in the old town of Baya, which
were perforated with holes in a most
extraordinary manner. These holes
were bored by a sort of snail called
the lithodomus, which is often found
in coral reefs and is a favorite deli
cacy in the Neapolitan market. 1t is
not yet understood how it bores its
Way INTO stone. Its shell is per-
fectly smooth, and there is no evidence
of a file or cold chisel or a drill about
its organism. The head man at the
aquarium here told me the other day
that the boring is probably done by a
fluid which dissolves the marble. The
lithodomus, having attached itself to
the side of a pillar or block of stone,
soaks the spot with a secretion until
the crystal dissolves and floats away.
Thus it gradually bores a hole the size
of its shell and crawls into it. The
holes are always very smooth, and in
some of them the shells of the litho-
domus have been found.
One of the most curious forms of
life hauled up by the nets of the Ma
pies fishermen are sea cucumbers"-
slug-shaped bodies about the size and
shape of the vegetables of that name,
of a PUPPY flesh covered with a leath-
cry skin and small calcareous scales of
carbonate of lime. They belong to
the same family as the star
fish and sea urchins, and feed on
small crabs and other floating animal
life that they can capture. They have
no teeth, but the walls of their alimen-
tary canals secrete strong juices that
kill and dissolve the fibers of the ami
mails which have been caught with
their sucker feet and brought to their
mouths. They suck in sand and mud
and digest the nourishing particles
while those which are of no use to
them are rejected. Sea cucumbers are
very common in the Bay of Naples
and are often found more than a foot
long. One variety, known as the Gu
Cumari planci,' has a tail. When the
animal is alive the tentacles of the tail
are soft and pliable and adhere to the
rock but with death they harden like
the arms of starfish and the spines of
sea urchins. with which we are more
familiar.
The Bay of Naples abounds in me-
dusae, or jelly fish, as we call Them
often growing as large as two feet in
diameter and weighing fifty and sixty
pounds. Some of them shine at night
with a greenish light and are known
as ''noctiluca" might lanterns) by the
'natives. The jelly fish sometimes make
migrations in great groups, sometimes
so large and so thick as to impede the
navigation of vessels, like the floating
plants in the Saragossa sea of the trop-
les. These shoals of medusae, as they
are called, may be so dense that piece
of timber plunged in among them will
be held upright as if stuck in the mud,
and ordinary rowboats cannot force
their way through them. The migra-
lions have never been explained. They
are irregular and occur at no partic-
ular season of the year and under no
particular influences. They are not af-
fected by heat or cold and the currents
of the ocean DO not seem to control
them. When the head chief or leader
OF a jelly FISH colony takes a notion
to move, he issues his orders, which are
communicated somehow from one to
another, and. at the time appointed
the entire colony begins to move. It
| travels very slowly, compared with 9TH