THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 30 
flowers. Yet, after all, there are excuses for them. 
Without our improved microscopes, and while the 
sciences of comparative anatomy and chemistry 
were yet infantile, it was difficult to believe what 
was the truth; and for this simple reason: that, as 
usual, the truth, when discovered, turned out far 
more startling and prodigious than the dreams 
which men had hastily substituted for it; more 
strange than Ovid’s old story that the coral was 
soft under the sea, and hardened by exposure to 
air; than Marsigli’s notion, that the coral-polypes 
were its flowers; than Dr. Parsons’ contemptuous 
denial, that these complicated forms could be “ the 
operations of little, poor, helpless, jelly-like animals, 
and not the work of more sure vegetation ;” than 
Baker the microscopist’s detailed theory of their 
being produced by the crystallization of the mineral 
salts in the sea-water, just as he had seen “the 
particles of mercury and copper in aquafortis assume 
tree-like forms, or curious delineations of mosses 
and minute shrubs on slates and stones, owing 
to the shooting of salts intermixed with mineral 
D 2 
