218 HIGHWATER MARK. 



With all these vegetative characters, it is hard to 

 believe that the Creeping Canda, for so it is desig- 

 nated by naturalists, can be anything else than a 

 plant. And yet a brief examination, combined with 

 a little knowledge, will suffice to convince you of its 

 animal nature ; nay, that it is an animal not at the 

 very extremity of the scale, but with many a grade 

 interposed between it and the lowest. It is in fact 

 one of the same group of animals as the Tubulipora, 

 and belongs to the same grand division of animate 

 being as the Oyster, the Cowry, and the Snail. 



I must tell you the life-history of this little shrub. 

 Some time ago, how long I 'do not exactly know, 

 for we have not yet achieved any very reliable statis- 

 tics on the age and rate of growth of these creatures 

 perhaps last summer, an atom of living flesh, 

 scarcely discernible by the unassisted eye, even if you 

 had been present to watch it, might have been de- 

 tected, by means of a lens, swimming in giddy circles 

 and rotating on its own axis in the open sea. Under 

 the microscope, you would have found it a roundish 

 or pear-shaped animalcule, of a soft, yielding consist- 

 ence, and therefore capable of changing its form at 

 win by irregular contraction. The whole surface was 

 beset with strong bristling cilia, or waving hairs, 

 which, acting as so many oars, rowed the little argo- 

 naut along on his circumnavigatory explorations. 



After having pursued this course of wild freedom 

 for a while, it at length approached this broad frond 

 of Oarweed waving to and fro in the swell of the sea. 



