CHAPTEPi XII. 



ComU and Coral Reefs. The Marvelom Beauty »f the ' ' Marine Garden. " 

 Its Corals, CoraUnes, Gargonias, Algm, Sponges, and Wonderfully Colored 

 Fishes. Water Glasses. Natural Aquariums. Coral Bowers and Grottoes. 

 Sea Urchins. The Colored Divers. Life in the Rock. 



"There with a light and easy motion 

 The fan-coral sweeps througli the clear deep sea, 

 And life, in rare and beautiful forms, 

 Is sporling amid the bowers of stone. 

 While the waters murmur tranquilly 

 Through the bending twigs of the coral groves." — Peeoival. 



While at Nassau it was our happy destiny to make the partial 

 acquaintance of some of the members of a family of the most 

 ceaseless, and indefatigable builders that have ever existed since 

 the world first commenced to keep step to the "music of the 

 spheres," and sweep in grand cycles around the sun. Called into 

 existence by tlie fiat of Jehovah, in that vague and mysterious 

 "beginning" when "the earth was without form," and "dark- 

 ness was upon the face of the deep," the little corals, with the 

 first peep of creation's early dawn, commenced, in the warm clear 

 waters of the great primeval sea, their silent, unobtrusive and 

 apparently insignificant work — evidences of wliich, clear and in- 

 disputable, the researches of modern scientists have discovered 

 far inland, hundreds and thousands of miles from where the 

 Western Atlantic billows "beat the sounding shore." In an 

 unbroken line of descent, from tlic depths of a past so vast and 



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