126 AUTUMNS IN ARGYLESHIRE 



I have observed, and Professor Bell called my 

 attention to the trail he had left behind him. 

 The sea-pen is a beautiful object, its great 

 feather-like pinnae expanded and waving, with 

 all their little flower-like polyps out and on 

 the alert, and its semi-transparent quill expand- 

 ing and contracting, and its general appearance 

 exactly resembling the feather of some curious 

 bird. The Latin names, with their English 

 equivalents, sea-rope, sea-pen, sea-rush, are a 

 true boon to the unscientific naturalist, and I 

 could wish that all other species were christened 

 as suggestively, according to their appearance, 

 instead of merely commemorating by their names 

 the vanity of their first discoverers, and illus- 

 trating the difficulty of coining European sur- 

 names into tolerable Latin. 



With regard to these creatures the older 

 opinion invariably was, that they often swam 

 about near the surface. The curious may read 

 the various statements of earlier observers, col- 

 lected to be contradicted in John stone's work. 

 Bodasch, the original discoverer of the Funiculina, 

 asserts that he saw the sea-pens swimming in 

 a beautiful phosphorescent light in 1749, when 

 going to Marseilles. I lighted upon a curious 

 confirmation of this when searching the Museum 

 for the virgularia Darwin saw at Bahia. Among 

 the collection of sea-pens, I found what was 

 evidently the calcareous centre of one, described 



