64 GLAUCUS: OR, 
grey prickles instead of hair? The great red star- 
fish, which Ulster children call “the bad man’s 
hands;” and the great whelks, which the youth 
of Musselburgh know as roaring buckies, these we 
have seen before; but what, oh what, are the red 
capsicums ?— 
Yes, what are the red capsicums ? and why are 
they poking, snapping, starting, crawling, tumbling 
wildly over each other, rattling about the huge 
mahogany cockles, as big as a child’s two fists, out 
of which they are protruded? Mark them well, 
for you will perhaps never see them again. They 
are a Mediterranean species, or rather three species, 
left behind upon these extreme south-western coasts, 
probably at the vanishing of that warmer ancient 
epoch, which clothed the Lizard Point with the 
Cornish heath, and the Killarney mountains ‘with 
Spanish saxifrages, and other relics of a flora whose 
home is now the Iberian peninsula and the sunny 
cliffs of the Riviera. Rare on every other shore, 
even in the west, it abounds in Torbay at certain, 
or rather uncertain, times, to so prodigious an 
