36 RAMBLES OF A NATURALIST. 



and detach from its rocky sides the millions of oysters 

 which daily load our tables : none of these are re- 

 quired; we need only walk along the shores from 

 which the sea has just retreated. An indifferent or 

 careless observer might, indeed, perceive nothing 

 more than sand, mud, and stones. But pause a 

 a moment, stoop, and look down at your feet, and 

 everywhere you will see life teeming around you in 

 the form of myriads of strangely shaped and mar- 

 vellously organised beings. First there are bodies 

 formed like stones, then there are stones which have 

 been in turn transferred from the animal to the 

 vegetable kingdom*; here we meet with plants so 

 nearly allied to animals that they have long been 

 classed amongst them f ; next we encounter animals, 

 which so closely resemble plants in respect to their 

 stems, branches, and buds, that naturalists for ages 

 believed in their vegetable nature. J On every side 

 the sands and mud have been disturbed, tracked, 

 burrowed, and pierced by marine worms ; the stones 

 are covered with molluscs, polypes, and zoophytes of 

 every kind, and even the very rocks seem rent 



* The greater part of the Nullipores, which were at one time 

 ranked amongst plants, and subsequently among the Polypes, by the 

 side of the Millepores, have been found by M. Decaisne to be mere 

 stony concretions. 



f The Corallina, which has successively been placed in the three 

 kingdoms of nature, is decidedly an alga, and consequently a plant, 

 as M. Decaisne has shown by his researches. These plants, how- 

 ever, become very rapidly encrusted with calcareous salts, a circum- 

 stance which explains the difficulties attending their examination, 

 and the errors to which it has given rise. 



"^ [A brief notice of the history of this controversy is given in the 

 Appendix, Note V.] , 



