Loaded with feminine implications, these curiously beautiful Zoophytes are not flowers, but animals - sea monsters, whose seemingly delicate petals are but their thousand Briarean arms, disguised as the petals of a flower, and expanded to seize the unconscious victim as he passes near the beautiful form - fatal to him as the crater of a volcano, in which he is soon engulfed by the closing tentacles of his unsuspected enemy.

The survival skills of sea anemones as "engines of war" were only relatively rivaled by the reproductive powers of starfish, whose self-destructive tendencies intrigued aquarianists: "For sentimental performances we have the Sea Cucumber and the Starfish. Some of the former, when irritated, deliberately commit suicide by expectorating the whole of their intestines, leaving their empty shells behind. Some of the latter...suddenly explode themselves into fragments, as though filled with gunpowder, and touched off by electricity."