When the coral has become in this way permeated with lime, all parts of the body are rigid, with the exception of the upper margin, the stomach, and the tentacles.  The tentacles are soft and waving, projected or drawn in at will; they retain their flexible character through life, and decompose when the animal dies.  For this reason the dried specimens of corals preserved in museums do not give us the least idea of the living corals, in which every one of the millions of beings composing such a community is crowned by a waving wreath of white or green or rose-colored tentacles.

As soon as the little coral is fairly established and solidly attached to the ground, it begins to bud.  This may take place in a variety of ways, dividing at the top or budding from the base or from the sides, till the primitive animal is surrounded by a number of individuals like itself, of which it forms the nucleus, and which now begin to bud in their turn, each one surrounding itself with a numerous progeny, all remaining, however, attached to the parent.  Such a community increases till its individuals are numbered by millions, and I have myself counted no less than fourteen millions of individuals in a coral mass of Porites measuring not more than twelve feet in diameter.  The so-called coral heads, which make the foundation of a coral wall, and seem by their massive character and regular form especially adapted to give a strong, solid base to the whole structure, are known in our classification as the Astraeans, so named on account of the little [star-shaped] pits crowded upon their surface, each one of which marks the place of a single more or less isolated individual in such a community.

Selections used by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Company, Publishers.

AGATHIAS

(536-581)

Agathas tells us, in his ‘Prooemium,’ that he was born at Myrina, Asia Minor, that his father’s name was Memnonius, and his own profession the law of the Romans and practice in courts of justice.  He was born about A.D. 536, and was educated at Alexandria.  In Constantinople he studied and practiced his profession, and won his surname of “Scholasticus,” a title then given to a lawyer.  He died, it is believed, at the age of forty-four or forty-five.  He was a Christian, as he testifies in his epigrams.  In the sketch of his life prefixed to his works, Niebuhr collates the friendships he himself mentions, with his fellow-poet Paulus Silentiarius, with Theodorus the decemvir, and Macedonius the ex-consul.  To these men he dedicated some of his writings.