<Ped, pod> (foot): (1) pedal, pedestrian, pedestal, expedite, expediency, expedition, quadruped, impediment, biped, tripod, chiropodist, octopus, pew; (2) centiped, pedicle, pedometer, velocipede, sesquipedalian, antipodes, podium, polypod, polyp, Piedmont.

Coral is also the hard skeleton of a little animal, known as the Coral Polyp.

The rest of the polyp's body is soft jelly, which many fish regard as good food.

The Sea Anemoneanother jelly-animalis first cousin to the Coral Polyp.

Coral, as you know, looks like a solid rock; it is really made of needles of lime, fastened together into a solid mass by the little Coral Polyp.

The buds become perfect polyps, and then they, too, begin to bud.

This kind of polyp can live only in warm, clear water.

These marvellous works of the polyp are of great use, for they break the force of the waves, and so make a calm shelter for vessels.

Others have teeth like millstones, fit for crushing the hard Coral, and eating the fleshy body of the polyp within.

On a yellow carpet of calcareous polyps and sponges, groups of leather-like stalks, finger-thick, lift themselves up like stems of vegetable growth; their upper ends thickly covered with polyps (Sarcophyton pulmo Esp.), which display their roses of tentacula wide open, and resplendent with the most beautiful varying colors, looking, in fact, like flowers in full bloom.

On a yellow carpet of calcareous polyps and sponges, groups of leather-like stalks, finger-thick, lift themselves up like stems of vegetable growth; their upper ends thickly covered with polyps (Sarcophyton pulmo Esp.), which display their roses of tentacula wide open, and resplendent with the most beautiful varying colors, looking, in fact, like flowers in full bloom.

The tiny polyp, in its unconscious life, builds the everlasting coral; each citizen is little more than the industrious insect.

And, like snakes, the roots of trees Coil themselves from rock and sand, Stretching many a wondrous band, Us to frighten, us to seize; From rude knots with life embued, Polyp-fangs abroad they spread, To snare the wanderer!

In 1003, Sweyn, with revenge in his heart, began a war of extermination or subjugation, and never yielded till he was, in fact, king of England, while the royal intellectual polyp, known as Ethelred the Unwholesome, fled to Normandy, in the 1013th year Anno Domini.

The transformation of the deserted cases of numberless minute insects into a constituent part of a solid rock, first formed at the bottom of a lake, then constituting the sides of deep valleys, and the tabular summits of lofty hills, is a phenomenon as striking as the vast reefs of coral constructed by the labours of minute polyps.

So affairs went on swimmingly between the Professor of Mathematics and the Junior Class at Polyp University.

In the lowest class of this division of the Animal Kingdom there is a group so similar to the Polyps, that, until recently, they have been associated with them,the Bryozoa.

Now Corals possess, in an extraordinary degree, the power of assimilating to themselves the lime contained in the salt water around them; and as soon as our little Coral is established on a firm foundation, a lime deposit begins to form in all the walls of its body, so that its base, its partitions, and its outer wall, which in the Sea-Anemone remain always soft, become perfectly solid in the Polyp Coral and form a frame as hard as bone.

It is by its soft parts alonethose parts which are seen only in its living state, and when the animal is fully openthat its Acalephian character can be perceived, and this accounts for its being so long accepted as a Polyp, when studied in the dry Coral stock.

But to establish the fact that one of the Corals represented from the earliest period till now, and indeed far more numerous in the beginning than any other, was in truth no Polyp, but an Acaleph, the glimpse I had was all-sufficient.

Before leaving the subject of the Coral Reefs, I would add a few words on the succession of the different kinds of Polyp Corals on a Reef as compared with their structural rank and also with their succession in time, because we have here another of those correspondences of thought, those intellectual links in Creation, which give such coherence and consistency to the whole, and make it intelligible to man.

But independence may mean either simple isolation, or independence of action; and the life of a single Polyp is no more independent in the sense of action than that of a community of Polyps.

When the little Polyp Coral, the Astraean or Madrepore, for instance, is born from the egg, it is as free as the Actinia, which remains free all its life.

By this nature, man is a selfish and intellectual animal; a polyp with arms that go round the world; a sponge with eyes and energies and delights; a cunning ego, to whom all outside of himself is but for a prey.

They are afraid of polyps, which are greedy for oyster meat and are always grouped about the places where they are.