How the Jelly-Fish Lost Its Shell

PARTS of the seas of the Japanese Archipelago are speckled with thousands of round white jelly-fish, that swim a few feet below the surface. One can see the great steamer go ploughing through them as through a field of frosted cakes. The huge paddle-wheels make a perfect pudding of thousands of them, as they are dashed against the paddle-box and whipped into a froth like white of eggs or churned into a thick cream by the propeller blades. Sometimes the shoals are of great breadth, and then it veritably looks as though a crockery shop had been upset in the ocean, and ten thousand white dinner-plates had broken loose. Around the bays and harbors the Japanese boys at play drive them with paddles into shoals, and sometimes they poke sticks through them. This they can do easily, because the jelly-fish has no jacket of shell or bone like the lobster, nor any skin like a fish, and so always has to swim naked, exposed to all kinds of danger. Sometimes great jelly-fishes, two or three feet in diameter, sail gaily along near the shore, as proud as the long-handled-umbrella of a daimiō, and as brilliantly colored as a Japanese parasol. Floating all around their bodies, like the streamers of a temple festival, or a court lady’s ribbons, are their long tentacles or feelers. No peacock stretching his bannered tail could make a finer sight, or look prouder than these floating sun-fishes, or bladders of living jelly.

But alas for all things made of water! Let but a wave of unusual force, or a sudden gust of wind come, and this lump of pride lies collapsed and stranded on the shore, like a pancake upset into a turnover, in which batter and crust are hopelessly mixed together. When found fresh, men often come down to the shore and cutting huge slices of blubber, as transparent as ice, they eat the solid water with their rice, in lieu of drink.

A jelly-fish as big as an umbrella, and weighing as much as a big boy, will, after lying a few hours in the sun leave scarcely a trace on the spot for their bodies are little more than animated masses of water. At night, however where a jelly-fish has stranded, the ground seems to crawl and emit a dull fire of phosphorescence which the Japanese call “dragon’s light.”

But the jelly-fish once had a shell, and was not so defenceless, say the fairy tales. How it lost it is thus told.

In the days of old, the jelly-fish was one of the retainers in waiting upon the Queen of the World under the Sea, at her palace in Riu Gu. In those days he had a shell, and as his head was hard, no one dared to insult him, or stick him with their horns, or pinch him with their claws, or scratch him with their nails, or brush rudely by him with their fins. In short, this fish instead of being a lump of jelly, as white and helpless as a pudding, as we see him now, was a lordly fellow that could get his back up and keep it high when he wished to. He waited on the queen and right proud was he of his office. He was on good terms with the King’s dragon, which often allowed him to play with his scaly tail but never hurt him in the least.