v.] THE LIME IS THE MORTAR. 117 



them. If you want to see them, go to the Coral Rooms 

 of the British or Liverpool Museums, and judge for 

 yourselves. Only remember that you must re-clothe 

 each, of those exquisite forms with a coating of live 

 jelly of some delicate hue, and put back into every one 

 of the thousand cells its living flower ; and into the 

 beds, or rather banks, of the salt-water flower garden, 

 the gaudiest of shell-less sea-anemones, such as we have 

 on our coasts, rooted in the cracks, and live shells and 

 sea-slugs, as gaudy as they, crawling about, with fifty 

 other forms of fantastic and exuberant life. You must 

 not overlook, too, the fish, especially the parrot-fish, 

 some of them of the gaudiest colours, who spend their 

 lives in browsing on the live coral, with strong clipping 

 and grinding teeth, just as a cow browses the grass, 

 keeping the animal matter, and throwing away the 

 lime in the form of an impalpable white mud, which 

 fills up the interstices in the coral beds. 



The bottom, just outside the reef, is covered with 

 that mud, mixed with more lime-mud, which the surge 

 wears off the reef ; and if you have, as you should have, 

 a dredge on board, and try a haul of that mud as you 

 row home, you may find, but not always, animal forms 

 rooted in it, which will delight the soul of a scientific 

 man. One, I hope, would be some sort of Terebratula, 

 or shell akin to it. You would probably think it a 

 cockle : but you would be wrong. The animal which 

 dwells in it has about the same relationship to a cockle 

 as a dog has to a bird. It is a Brachiopod ; a family 

 with which, the ancient seas once swarmed, but which 

 is rare now, all over the world, having been supplanted 

 and driven out of the seas by newer and stronger forms 

 of shelled animals. The nearest spot at which you are 



