W. K. BROOKS ON THE GENUS SALPA. 141 



Here the true reef corals grow in quiet water where they may be visited 

 and examined. 



The bottom of the boat is below the surface ripples and reflections. 

 When illuminated by the vertical sun of the tropics, and by the light 

 which is reflected back from the white bottom, the pure transparent 

 ocean water is as clear as air, and the smallest object, forty or fifty feet 

 down, is seen distinctly. 



As the boat glides over the great mushroom-shaped coral domes 

 which arch up from the depths, the dark grottoes between them, and 

 the caves under their overhanging tops, are lighted up by the sun far 

 down among the flower-animals or anthozoa and the animal plants or 

 zoophytes which are seen through the waving thickets of brown and 

 purple sea fans and sea feathers as they toss before the swell from the 

 ocean. 



There are miles of these "sea-gardens" in the lagoons of the Bahamas, 

 and it has been my good fortune to spend many months studying their 

 wonders, but no description can convey any conception of their beauty 

 and luxuriance, and I never spent a day among the reefs without longing, 

 at every turn, for the skill to copy with a brush the new beauties which 

 never ceased to present themselves. 



The general effect is very garden-like, and the beautiful fishes of 

 black and golden yellow and iridescent cobalt blue hover like birds 

 among the thickets of yellow and lilac gorgonias. The parrot fishes 

 (Diodon and Ballistes) seem to be cropping the plants like rabbits, but 

 more careful examination shows that they are biting off the tips of the 

 gorgonias and branching madrepores, or hunting for the small Crustacea 

 which hide in the thicket, and that all the apparent plants are really 

 animals. The delicate star-like flowers are the vermilion heads of boring 

 annelids, or the scarlet tentacles of actinias, and the thicket is made up of 

 pale lavender bushes of branching madrepores and green and yellow and 

 olive masses of brain coral, of alcyonarians of all shades of yellow and 

 lilac and purple and red, and of red and brown and black sponges. Even 

 the lichens which incrust the rocks are hydroid corals, and the whole 

 sea-garden is a dense jungle of animals where plant life is represented 

 only by a few calcareous alga3, so strange in shape and texture that they 

 are much less plant-like than the true animals. 



The scarcity of vegetation becomes still more noticeable when we 

 study the ocean as a whole. 



On land, herbivorous animals are always much more abundant and 



