316 MAN OF SCIENCE. 



artificial grotto-work in which corals and shells are 

 made to mingle with flowers and mosses. The 

 massy cyathophyllum sticks out of the sides of grey 

 lichened rocks, enclasped by sprigs of ivy, or overhung 

 by twigs of thorn and hazel ; deep-sea terebratulae 

 project in bold relief from amid patches of the delicate 

 wood sorrel ; here a macerated oak leaf, with all its 

 skeleton fibres open as a net, lies glued by the damps 

 beside some still more delicately reticulated festinella ; 

 there a tuft of graceful harebells projects over some 

 prostrate orthoceratite ; yonder there peeps out from 

 amid a drapery of green liver-wort, like a heraldic 

 helmet from a mantling, the armed head of some trilo- 

 bite : the deep-sea productions of the most ancient of 

 creations lie grouped, as with an eye to artistic effect, 

 amid the floral productions of our own times/ 



He lies down on an English hill-side, and as he 

 gazes musingly upon the landscape spread below, and 

 thinks of the time when it was the bottom of a broad 

 ocean sound washing the rocky island that was one 

 day to constitute the Highlands of Wales, rises into 

 this serene flight of prose poetry : ' Was it the sound of 

 the distant surf that was in mine ears, or the low moan 

 of the breeze, as it crept through the neighbouring 

 wood? Oh, that hoarse voice of Ocean, never silent 

 since time first begun, where has it not been uttered ! 

 There is stillness amid the calm of the arid and rainless 

 desert, where no spring rises and no streamlet flows, 

 and the long caravan plies its weary march amid the 

 blinding glare of the sand, and the red unshaded rays of 

 the fierce sun. But once and again, and yet again, has 

 the roar of ocean been there. It is his sands that the 

 winds heap up ; and it is the skeleton remains of his 

 vassals, shells and fish and the stony coral, that the 



