SYSTEMATIC RANK OF ZOOPHYTES. 19 



pellucid olive, but the tentacles are spotless snowy 

 white, as if carved out of ivory, or rather as if mo- 

 delled in the purest white wax. Its appearance, as it 

 hangs on the side of a glass vessel, with the long and 

 slender tentacles arching and drooping downward in 

 the most graceful curves, is exquisitely attractive. 



These objects are, it is true, among the humblest 

 of creatures that are endowed with organic life. They 

 stand at the very confines, so to speak, of the vital 

 world, at the lowest step of the animate ladder that 

 reaches up to Man; aye, and beyond him. Creatures 

 linked in the closest alliance with these were long 

 reckoned among the sea-weeds and mosses, even by 

 the most eminent philosophers ; and to this day the 

 collectors who make sea-weeds into pretty baskets, 

 arrange the hydroid polypidoms among them without 

 a misgiving of their identity. Nay, the madrepores 

 and corals, nearer kindred still to the Actinia, were 

 supposed even by the immortal Kay, to be inanimate 

 stones, with " a kind of vegetation and resemblance 

 to plants." 



The lamp of vitality, then, is just going out in these 

 forms ; or, if you please, here we catch the first kind- 

 ling of that spark, which glows into so noble a flame 

 in the Aristotles, the Newtons, and the Miltons of our 

 heaven-gazing race. What then ? shall Ave despise 

 these glimmering rays ? Shall we say they are mean 

 creatures, beneath our regard ? Surely no : God does 

 not despise them. The forecasting of their being 



