The Physalia is the natural enemy of the cuttle-fish and the flying-fish. One an inch in length will numb and kill a fish larger than a herring. “Each tentacle, by a movement as rapid as a flash of light, or sudden as an electric shock, seizes and benumbs them, winding round their bodies as a serpent winds itself round its victim.” Mr. Bennet, who accompanied the expedition under Admiral Fitzroy as naturalist, describes them as seizing their prey by means of the tentacles, which are alternately contracted to half an inch, and then shot out with amazing velocity to several feet, dragging the helpless and entangled prey to the sucker-like mouth and stomach-like cavities among the tentacles. Others have observed bold little fish unharmed among the feelers, a proof that even a Physalia can be good-natured sometimes.
An attendant satellite of the Physalia is the Velella, a smaller animal of the same family, especially abundant in tropical seas, but often seen elsewhere. It also possesses stinging powers.
It is to the moderns we must look for anything like scientific study of these lower forms of Nature. The later poets, too, have caught the spirit of the age, and in some phases their utterances are artistically truer, and therefore truer to nature, than those of the merely hard scientists. Crabbe has beautifully described this boon of our age, the study of Nature aided by the light of science. It is nowadays the privilege as well as it is to the profit of any intelligent person—
“The ocean’s produce to explore.
As floating by, or rolling on the shore,
Those living jellies which the flesh inflame,
Fierce as a nettle, and from that their name:
Some in huge masses, some that you may bring
In the small compass of a lady’s ring;
Figured by hand Divine—there’s not a gem