“Thanks, Somebody,” said the boy named Billy, “I’m going over to tell Bob White all about those wonderful cotton flowers he thinks he saw!”
About Coral
“UNCLE BOB has just returned from California,” said the boy named Billy, “and has brought Big Sister a necklace of very beautiful coral beads; not a bit like the dark red branchy looking ones that she has had since she was a baby! These are rose pink with little hand-carved roses all over them. What sort of a stone is coral, and where is it found? It’s lovely!”
“Strictly speaking,” said Somebody, “although coral has all the appearance of stone it isn’t that at all, although it is just as dangerous to a ship to run aground on a reef of it as it would be to run on the rocks—it’s so jagged and sharp. It is really the bones you might say of living creatures which made their homes in that particular spot for ages and dying have left their skeletons behind them for a monument.
“These little sea animals are called polyps and the coral grows inside their soft outer structure just as your bones do inside your flesh. Among the greatest architects in the world are the little coral-making animals, creatures of shallow water in the warmer seas. Some kinds live all alone, but the commoner ones live in colonies of many individuals united by a stalk with many branches—sort of a family tree you might say—indeed they were once called plant animals. They have a very helpful and economical way of living,” went on Somebody, “for when something good to eat swims or floats within reach of one little polyp’s mouth he sucks it in, swallows it, and all his hungry relatives get the benefit of it.”
“That’s what I’d call being real chummy,” said the boy named Billy. “How do they manage that?”
“They have a sort of family stomach,” said Somebody, “or reservoir into which all food absorbed by the colony goes.”
“I don’t believe I’d like that very well,” said Billy. “One fellow might have to eat all the things he didn’t care about and another would get all the pie.”