180 CHANNEL ISLANDS OF CALIFORNIA 



kelp, and towed the boat three miles before it was 

 landed. This was exceptional, as the fish generally 

 lie in well-distributed schools from one to three miles 

 offshore and never in numbers close in. They seem 

 to affect situations about thirty or forty feet from the 

 surface, in water so blue and beautiful that an ade- 

 quate description is difficult; and that the}^ seem 

 adapted in tint, tone, and color to their radiant environ- 

 ment is evident at once. 



I have seen many waters, but none so really beauti- 

 ful as those affected by this fish. You can see so deep 

 into it, it is so eternally limitless, so pure and unsul- 

 lied, so receptive to the sun, whose rays play upon 

 it, branching out like some marvellous aurora. Here 

 and there, floating on this liquid sapphire, are jelly- 

 fishes, framed as if by fancy in delicate sha,pes; some 

 solid, in striking lavender hues, from which stream 

 behind splendid trains thirty feet long. Others are 

 so small and delicate the eye can scarcely distinguish 

 them, classic in every outline, with dainty appendages. 

 Then there are the salpae, fiery ascidians, which fill 

 the ocean v/ith fight at night. I have seen them so 

 massed in the Santa Catalina Channel that they 

 pushed one another above the surface, where, the 

 sun striking them, they glistened and scintillated in a 

 marvellous way. 



If now we lean over and examine this water we shall 

 see that it is filled with millions of living things. There 

 are great masses of hair-like forms, minute diatoms, 

 shoals of the glorious infusorians, as the peridinium, 

 which cannot be seen with the naked eye, with count- 

 less congeners capable of making their presence felt 

 only at night when their soft light blazes up and fills 



