10
THE HYALONEMA MIRABILIS,
BY
HENRY HADLOW, Surgeon, R.N.
Read before the Asiatic Society of Japan,
on the 30th, October, 1872.
———o———
The Glass Plant, Glass Coral, or as it is now more generally and more correctly termed, the “Glass Rope Sponge” of Japan,—Hyalonema Mirabilis, as it was christened by Dr. Gray, and is termed by systematic writers,—is tolerably familiar in appearance to most residents in the East, cither in its complete form, in which it presents a spongy expansion, sometimes large, sometimes small and of variable shape, having springing from it a very beautiful twisted coil of vitreous-looking cords, which itself is, for a part of its extent, invested and covered by a brown, warty bark-like structure; or as, perhaps, it is more commonly met with, in an imperfect condition, presenting only the glass rope and its attached bark without any trace of the spongy expansion from which it has probably been torn. We also sometimes meet with portions of the glass coil most ingeniously attached to and grouped with corals, shells and other marine products, which I need only refer to to remind you that such arrangements are entirely artificial, notwithstanding that they are often so artistically done as to have a most deceptively natural appearance, and that the way in which the coil is placed, with the free ends of the plume upward, has had, I imagine, considerable influence in persuading people that that was its ordinary mode of growth.
