STRICTLY INCOG. 57 



when one begins to recover from the first bout of sea-sickness, 

 we come upon a certain sluggish tract of ocean, uninvaded 

 by either Gulf Stream or arctic current, but slowly stag- 

 nating in a sort of endless eddy of its own, and known to 

 sailors and books of physical geography as the Sargasso Sea. 

 The sargasso or floating seaweed from which it takes its 

 poetical name is a pretty yellow rootless alga, swimming 

 in vast quantities on the surface of the water, and covered 

 with tiny bladder-like bodies which at first sight might 

 easily be mistaken for amber berries. If you drop a bucket 

 over the ship's side and pull up a tangled mass of this 

 beautiful seaweed, it will seem at first to be all plant alike ; 

 but, when you come to examine its tangles closely, you will 

 find that it simply swarms with tiny crabs, fishes, and 

 shrimps, all coloured so precisely to shade that they look 

 exactly like the sargasso itself. Here the colour about is 

 less uniform than in the arctic snows, but, so far as the 

 sargasso-haunting animals are concerned, it comes pretty 

 much to the same thing. The floating mass of weed is 

 their whole world, and they have had to accommodate 

 themselves to its tawny hue under pain of death, immedi- 

 ate and violent. 



Caterpillars and butterflies often show us a further step 

 in advance in the direction of minute imitiaton of ordinary 

 surroundings. Dr. Weismann has published a very long 

 and learned memoir, fraught with the best German erudi- 

 tion and prolixity, upon this highly interesting and] obscure 

 subject. As English readers, however, not unnaturally object 

 to trudging through a stout volume on the larva of the sphinx 

 moth, conceived in the spirit of those patriarchal ages of 

 Hilpa and Shalum, when man lived to nine hundred and 

 ninety-nine years, and devoted a stray century or so without 

 stint to the work of education, I shall not refer them to Dr. 

 Weismann' s original treatise, as well translated and still 



