film of gelatinous flesh, so tightly stretched as to be reduced to an invisible tenuity. In these massive or arborescent Corals, each single pit must be considered as the habitation of a single animal; and the whole body bears the same relation to the little simple Madrepores of the European seas, as the compound Laomedea, with its numerous branches and cells, bears to the solitary Hydra. The elegant Coral that studs the rocks of Devonshire and Cornwall (Cyathina Smithii) is an instructive example of the simple species. It consists of a stony cylinder or inverted cone, the summit of which, hollowed into a shallow cup, is formed by the edges of thin plates that radiate towards the centre. While in its native element, a pellucid gelatinous flesh emerges from between the plates, sometimes rising to the height of an inch above their level; exquisitely formed and coloured tentacles fringe the sides of the cup-shaped cavity, across which stretches the oral disk, marked with a star of some rich and brilliant colour surrounding the central mouth, —a slit with white crenated lips, like the orifice of one of those elegant cowry-shells that we put upon our mantelpieces. In this condition the affinity between a Madrepore and an Actinia is seen to be very close. Indeed, if we imagine calcareous particles to be deposited on the surfaces of the radiating membranous partitions of the latter, we should have the stony plates, and the Actinia would be in every essential point turned into a Coral. The habits and economy of the two forms coincide exactly, except that the Madrepore is permanently attached to the rock by the adhesion of its stony skeleton, while the attach ment of the Actinia, as we have already observed, is voluntary. What a storehouse of life is the vast ocean! what a prodigious Alma Mater! What varied forms of being are borne in her prolific womb, and nourished on her expansive bosom! "This great and wide sea! wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts." -(Ps. civ. 25.) CHAPTER VIII. ACALEPHE (Sea-blubbers). IN walking through the crowded thoroughfares of London on a clear winter's evening, we have often admired the beauty of the lamps that illuminate the shops and cast such a flood of radiance on the thronged streets. The elegant forms of the glass shades, the beauty of the material of which they are composed, and the various degrees of translucency which they are made to assume by the roughness or polish of their surface, in particular, have often attracted our attention; and we have been interested by tracing their very obvious resemblance to certain living creatures that swim in the vast deep,-creatures which the poet describes as "Figured by hand Divine; there's not a gem We refer of course to the Medusa. The forms given to our lamp-shades,-spherical, hemispherical, umbrellalike, saucer-like, spheroids either oblate or prolate, and * Crabbe. others which no single or compound term can express,— are the very counterparts of those of the sea-blubbers, They, too, look as if they were blown in glass; the perfect transparency of some, and the dimly pellucid, and as it were granulated, texture of others, accurately represents the polished or ground condition of that substance; while in some species (as in the genus Equorea, for example) we find both conditions, arranged in alternate longitudinal bands, exactly as we have seen stripes of clear and ground glass in some lamps at the west end. And further, as we occasionally see these shades made of stained glass, and arrayed in colours whose brilliancy is heightened by the translucency of the material; so, while most of the animals of which we speak are devoid of positive colour, there are a few which add a gay hue to a hyaline clear ness. Among the forms which find their true affinities among the Sea-Anemones, there is a genus nared Lucernaria, which departs very considerably from the ordinary appearance of its fellows. It is a gelatinous animal, of the shape of a vase, cup, or trumpet, affixed to the stems of sea-weeds by a narrow foot, but so slightly as to be detached on the least disturbance. The margin of the cup bears at certain symmetrical points clusters of slender tentacles, and a little mobile protrusile proboscis stands up in the bottom of the vase-like cavity. All these particulars indicate this delicate animal as the connecting link between the Actinia and the Medusæ. The most ordinary form assumed by a Medusa is that of an umbrella or a mushroom, of greater or less thickness, composed of a tender jelly of so little consistence that almost the whole may be resolved into simple water, or a fluid which no chemical analysis has been able to distinguish from sea-water. A large sea-blubber weighing fifty ounces is cast upon the beach, and after lying exposed to a day's hot sun, all that remains is a subtile and impalpable film spread over the sand where it lay, which, if carefully collected, will not weigh five grains. The texture appears to be a collection of cells formed of the most attenuated membrane and filled with seawater. Yet out of these simple elements, according to the researches of Professor Agassiz, the muscular, the vascular the nervous, and other tissues are composed; various organs, some of them sufficiently complex, are formed; and different functions are originated. By a periodical succession of alternate expansions and contractions, the apparently helpless animal contrives to pump itself along through the waves with force and precision; by the elastic threads which lie coiled up in innumerable capsules, ready to be darted into the flesh of its intended prey, it can instantly arrest, benumb, and paralyse the lithe worm and the arrowy fish; by the contractility of its fimbriated membranes it can drag the prey to its protrusile mouth, in which it is speedily engulphed, and almost as speedily digested. Feeble and inert as they appear, some of these animals are truly to be dreaded for their power of stinging, whence the whole class have derived their appellation of Acalephæ, or nettles. "Among them," says Professor Edward Forbes, "Cyanaa capillata of our seas is a most formidable creature, and the terror of tender-skinned bathers. With its broad, tawny, fes |