III. A Sea Flower That Eats With Its Petals and Moves When It Wants To
The sponge, the jelly fish and the coral builder are hollow-bodied animals. They are higher than the amoeba because they have more different parts. The locomotive is a higher order of machine for moving things than baby brother's go-cart. So, the sea-anemone is higher than the sponge. It is very puzzling, but you like to study puzzles and find the answers, don't you?
Here's puzzle number one: Does the sea-anemone look most like an animal or a vegetable? You will see from the picture that the answer is very easy. But—
Why does it look so much like a vegetable? Well, why do your own lungs, that you breathe with, look like a vegetable?
Your lungs are shaped a good deal like a tree with trunk, limbs and branches; and, we might almost say, twigs and leaves. The lungs are spread out in this way to get the oxygen from the air that you breathe. The lungs digest air as your stomach digests its food. Because the air is not so solid as the food your stomach digests, it takes a good deal more of it for the lungs to get the amount of oxygen you need. So they are spread out to catch as much of this oxygen as possible every time you breathe. Leaves are the lungs of the plant. There must be a great many of them, and they must spread out to take in enough air and sunshine.
If you lived in the water all the time, as the sea-anemone does, and had to get oxygen out of the water, and had no special place inside of you in which to keep your lungs, you would have to be spread out as the anemone is, into as many branches as possible, and do all of your breathing through your skin. Then—if you were a sea-anemone—you would eat as it does. The way in which the anemone eats is something like the way in which the amoeba eats but yet is quite an improvement.
The anemone lies all spread out like a flower, until a fish or some other of the little animals, upon which it lives, comes swimming along. As soon as it touches the arms of the sea-anemone, which look like the petals of a flower, these "petals" close around it, just as your fingers close around an apple. They gather in the food and push it into the anemone's mouth. Then the anemone wraps its whole self around its food and shrinks up so that it looks like a
