File:The American Museum journal (c1900-(1918)) (17971983448).jpg

Title: The American Museum journal
Identifier: americanmuseumjo06amer (find matches)
Year: c1900-(1918) (c190s)
Authors: American Museum of Natural History
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: New York : American Museum of Natural History
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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A GUIDE TO THE SPONGE ALCOVE IN THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. ' By Roy Waldo Miner, Assistant Curator Department of Invertebrate Zoology. PONGES are among the most abundant and most widely distributed of sea-animals. With the exception of one family, the fresh-water sponges, they are found in all seas of the globe ranging from shallow waters to beyond a depth of 1,300 feet. The bath-sponges of commerce, with which the word "sponge" is associated in the minds of most people, although from a commercial point of view the most important of the group, form but a single family, i. e., the Spongidae. The rest of the subkingdom with its great multiplicity of forms is doubtless comparatively unknown to the average person. Even the commercial sponge as it reaches us gives but little idea of what a sponge really is, as it is only the supporting or skeletal part of the animal colony denuded of its fleshy coat of living tissue. The li\'ing sponge is either a single animal or a colony of animals. It is always sessile, that is, attached to the sea bottom, and incapable of locomotion. For this reason it has often been regarded as a plant. But since, in more recent years, its life processes and larval history have become better known, especially since it has come under the eye of the compound microscope, its animal nature has become clearly established. Sponges show all variations of form, size, and color. There are cake-like sponges, dome-shaped sponges, and fan-shaped sponges. Some are branched like trees; in others the branches reunite to form a complicated network. Some are shaped like huge cups or goblets; some gather in clusters of trumpet- and ' Issued also in separate form as Guide Leaflet No 23. 219 '

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