2. It is stocked with _Serpulae_.
Sea-anemones are well-known to most people, but tube-worms are not such
familiar friends; so I will try to describe this particular kind of
"sea-gentlemen." The tube-worms are so called because, though they are
true worms (sea-worms), they do not trust their soft bodies to the sea,
as our common earth-worms trust theirs in a garden-bed, but build
themselves tubes inside which they live, popping their heads out at the
top now and then like a chimney-sweep pushing his brush out at the top
of a tall round chimney. Now if you can fancy one of our tall round
manufactory chimneys to be white instead of black, and the round
chimney-sweep's brush to have lovely gay-coloured feathers all round it
instead of dirty bristles, or if you can fancy the sweep letting off a
monster catherine-wheel at the chimney's mouth, you may have some idea
what a tube-worm's head is like when he pokes it out of his tube.
The _Serpulae_ make their tubes of chalky stuff, something like
egg-shell; and they stick them on to anything that comes to hand down
below. Those in the Great Aquarium came from Weymouth. They were dredged
up with the white pipes or tubes sticking to oyster-shells, old bottles,
stones, and what not, like bits of maccaroni glued on to old crockery
sherds.
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