262 BY THE DEEP SEA. 



The Cook or Cuckoo Wrasse (Labrus mixtus) is another 

 common kind, not so large as the Ballan, but more striking 

 in its vivid colouring. This varies from yellow to red as a 

 ground tint, with two roughly parallel purple or bright blue 

 thick lines running from above the eye nearly to the tail. 

 The large eye is crimson with a purple ring round it, from 

 which run off three short bands of blue or purple across the 

 gill-covers. All the fins red, the fore part of the dorsal 

 suffused with blue ; a triangular patch of blue also on the 

 upper and lower parts of the tail. The dorsal fin has eighteen 

 spines and thirteen soft rays. 



Should we desire to see the life of the rocks without 

 troubling to obtain " specimens," it is a good plan to repair 

 at low tide to the edge of a drang, and, selecting a station 

 where we shall have a high rock in front of us and a channel 

 between ourselves and that, wait until the tide turns. At first 

 there is nothing but the rough floor of the drang, with stones 

 and rocks of all sorts and sizes scattered untidily over it. The 

 great broad, leathery fronds of oarweed and the smaller 

 fronds of bladder-wrack and knotted-wrack hang over the 

 rocks in great shaggy masses, and here and there, as though in 

 utter collapse, . are the flaccid forms of the green and drab 

 Opelet Anemone. But as we are taking stock of the sur- 

 roundings, there comes a ripple of water along the deeper 

 ruts and pools of the drang. Silently it streams along filling 

 the holes, and then gradually spreading right across the stony 

 floor, and creeping up and up the rocks until there is an inch 

 or more of it. Then what a change ensues. The free ends 

 of the weeds float in the stream, the smaller weeds on the 

 bottom pick themselves up, and shapeless masses become 

 forms of elegance and beautiful colour. What a few minutes 

 ago looked like the " abomination of desolation," is now full 

 of life. The waters are teeming with forms that seem to rise 

 out of the ground. Certainly they did not many of them 

 come in with the tide. No, they were hidden in holes, under 



