APPENDIX. 285 



" Softly, like spirits of the deep, the delicate milk-white or bluish 

 bells of the jelly-fishes float through this charmed world. Here 

 the gleaming violet and gold-green Isabelle, and the flaming yel- 

 low, black, and vermilion-striped Coquette, chase their prey ; 

 there the band-fish shoots, snake-like, through the thicket, like a 

 long silver ribbon, glittering with rosy and azure hues. Then 

 come the fabulous cuttle-fish, decked in all colors of the rainbow, 

 but marked by no definite outline, appearing and disappearing, in- 

 tercrossing, joining company and parting again, in most fantastic 

 ways ; and all this in the most rapid change, and amid the most 

 wonderful play of light and shade, altered by every breath of wind, 

 and every slight curling of the surface of the ocean. When day 

 declines, and the shades of night lay hold upon the deep, this fan- 

 tastic garden is lighted up in new splendor. Millions of glowing 

 sparks, little microscopic Medusas and Crustaceans, dance like 

 glow-worms through the gloom. The sea-feather, which by day- 

 light is vermilion-colored, waves in a greenish, phosphorescent 

 light. Every corner of it is lustrous. Parts which by day were 

 perhaps dull and brown, and retreated from the sight amid the 

 universal brilliancy of color, are now radiant in the most wonder- 

 ful play of green, yellow, and red light ; and to complete the won- 

 ders of the enchanted night, the silver disk, six feet across, of the 

 moon-fish,* moves, slightly luminous, among the crowd of little 

 sparkling stars. 



" The most luxuriant vegetation of a tropical landscape can not 

 unfold as great wealth of form, while in the variety and splendor 

 of color it would stand far behind this garden landscape, which is 

 strangely composed exclusively of animals, and not of plants ; for, 

 characteristic as the luxuriant development of vegetation is of the 

 sea bottom of the temperate zones, the fullness and multiplicity 

 of the marine Fauna is just as prominent in the regions of the trop- 

 ics. Whatever is beautiful, wondrous, or uncommon in the great 

 classes of fish and Echinoderms, jelly-fishes and polypes, and the 

 molluscs of ail kinds, is crowded into the warm and crystal wa- 

 ters of the tropical ocean — rests in the white sands, clothes the 

 rough cliffs, clings, where the room is already occupied, like a par- 

 asite, upon the first comers, or swims through the shallows and 

 depths of the elements — while the mass of the vegetation is of a 

 far inferior magnitude. It is peculiar in relation to this, that the 

 law valid on land, according to which the animal kingdom, being 

 better adapted to accommodate itself to outward circumstances, 

 has a greater diflfusion than the vegetable kingdom ; for the Polar 

 seas swarm with whales, seals, sea-birds, fishes, and countless 

 numbers of the lower animals, even where every trace of vegeta- 

 tion has long vanished in the eternally frozen ice, and the cooled 



* Orthagoriscus mola. 



