88 GLAUCUS ; OR, 
Liverpoo] or at the British Museum, for the Hol- 
tenias and their congeners,—hollow sponges built 
up of glassy spicules, and rooted in the mud by 
glass hairs, in some cases between two and three 
feet long, as flexible and graceful as tresses of 
snow-white silk. 
Look at these, and a hundred kindred forms, and 
then see how nature is not only “maxima in 
minimis”—greatest in her least, but often “ pul- 
cherrima in abditis”—fairest in her most hidden 
works; and how the Creative Spirit has lavished, 
as it were, unspeakable artistic skill on lowly- 
organized creature, never till now beheld by man, 
and buried, not only in foul mud, but in their 
own unsightly heap of living jelly. 
But so it was from the beginning ;—and this planet 
was not made for man alone. Countless ages before 
we appeared on earth the depths of the old chalk- 
ocean teemed with forms as beautiful and perfect 
as those, their lineal descendants, which the dredge 
now brings up from the Atlantic sea-floor; and if 
there were—as my reason tells me that there must 
