124 GLAUcus ; ou, 



deep for another haul, while we set eagerly to 

 work with fingers and eyes on the heap before us. 

 " "What a pleasure it is to examine a tolerably 

 prolific dredge-haul! I am not going to enu- 

 merate all the things that we found; it would 

 make a pretty long list. Numbers of rough 

 stones, and of old worm-eaten shells, half a bro- 

 ken bottle, and other strange matters, were there, 

 — every one, however rude, worthy of close ex- 

 amination, because studded with elegant zoo- 

 phytes, the tubes of serpulas and other anneUdse, 

 bright-colored pellucid ascidians, graceful nudi- 

 branch molluscae, the spawn of fishes, and end- 

 less other things. Brittle-stars, by scores, were 

 twining their long spiny arms, like lizard's tails, 

 among the tangled mass, arrayed in the most 

 varied and most gorgeous hues of all varieties of 

 kaleidoscope patterns, (see plate IV.,) * and sand- 

 stars not a few. The latter are much more deli- 

 cate in constitution than the former, being very 

 difficult to keep alive, and also much more brit- 

 tle ; the former, notwithstanding their English 

 name, I have not found so particularly fragile. 

 Among other members of this wonderful class 

 of animals, we obtained, in the course of our 



* Gosse's " Aquarium." 



