424 THE INHABITANTS OF THE SHA. 
lion island, Saint George, to Unalaschka, Chamisso admired as 
beautiful a phosphorescence of the ocean as he had ever witnessed 
in the tropical seas. Sparks of light, remaining attached to the 
sails that had been wetted by the spray, continued to glow in 
another element. Near the south point of Kamtschatka, at a 
water-temperature hardly above freezing point, Ermann saw 
the sea no less luminous than during a seven months’ sojourn ip 
the tropical ocean. This distinguished traveller positively 
denies that warmth decidedly favours the luminosity of the sea. 
At Cape Colborn, one of the desolate promontories of the deso 
late Victoria Land, the phosphoric gleaming of the waves on 
the 6th September, when darkness closed in, was so intense that 
Simpson assures us he had seldom seen anything more brilliant. 
The boats seemed to cleave a flood of molten silver, and the spray 
dashed from their bows, before the fresh breeze, fell back in 
glittering showers into the deep. 
Mr. Charles Darwin paints in vivid colours the magnificent 
spectacle presented by the sea, while sailing in the latitudes 
of Cape Horn on a very dark night. 
There was a fresh breeze, and every part of the surface, which 
during the day is seen as foam, now glowed with a pale light. 
The vessel drove before her bows two billows of liquid phospho- 
rus, and in her wake she was followed by a milky train. As far 
as the eye reached, the crest of every wave was bright, and the 
sky above the horizon, from the reflected glare of these livid 
flames, was not so utterly obscure as over the rest of the 
heavens. 
While “ La Venus” was at anchor before Simon’s Town, the 
breaking of the waves produced so strong a light that the room 
in which the naturalists of the expedition were seated was 
illumined as by sudden flashes of lightning. Although more 
than fifty paces from the beach where the phenomenon took place, 
they tried to read by this wondrous oceanic light, but the 
successive glimpses were of too short duration to gvatify their 
wishes. 
Thus we see the same nocturnal splendour which shines forth 
in the tropical seas, and gleams along our shores, burst forth 
from the arctic waters, and from the waves that bathe the 
southern promontories of the old and the new worlds. 
But what is the cause of the beautiful phenomenon so widely 
