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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: which helped to make this bit of stone are called coral-insects:
but they are not really insects, and are no more like insects than
you are. Coral-polypes is the best name for them, because they
have arms round their mouths, something like a cuttle-fish, which
the ancients called Polypus. But the animal which you have seen
likest to most of them is a sea-anemone.
Look now at this piece of fresh coral--for coral it is, though not
like the coral which your sister wears in her necklace. You see
it is full of pipes; in each of those pipes has lived what we will
call, for the time being, a tiny sea-anemone, joined on to his
brothers by some sort of flesh and skin; and all of them together
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