Page:The American Boy's Handy Book edition 1.djvu/92

game from a lobster to the minute little crustacean found among the algæ.

You should time your excursion so as to be on the hunting-ground at extreme low tide. As soon as you reach the beach wade right into your work; look under the stones, scoop up the sand or mud with your net from the bottom of all the pools left by the tide, examine every promising-looking bunch of sea-weed, and before the tide comes in you will have material enough to stock forty aquariums. When you reach home sort out your specimens, discard all weak and sickly animals, and put the healthy ones in flat earthenware dishes of salt water, where they may be examined at leisure, and the proper ones taken out and put into your aquarium. In the mud and sand between the tides, or in the shallow water at extreme low tide, live many curious creatures.

If you should discover among the dirt in the bottom of your dip-net some queer-looking tubes, preserve them carefully, for they may contain some of those odd and often brilliantly colored marine worms. The inland boy, who is accustomed to see only the unsightly angle-worm, has no idea what really beautiful creatures some of the marine worms are. See, for instance, there is something in the mud that looks like a drop of blood. Put it in a plate of salt water and watch how one by one it begins to put forth its tentacles until its whole appearance is changed. This is a worm with a long scientific^[1] name, which you may learn by and by if you become interested enough in your recreation to make a study of it.

Do not neglect to collect a few barnacles for your aquarium, and you will find yourself amply repaid for the trouble you found in detaching them from their native posts or rocks, when you see them each put forth an odd hand-shaped member, open-