Lucifers and the Poets. 249 



out with the arm to the haunts of the water-people, the 

 Mediterranean's bay-indented coasts, resounding Scandina- 

 vian fiords, or labyrinths of Grecian archipelagos. But the 

 veritable hollows of the sea, its more prodigious depths, 

 were a mystery that lay below even the soundings of fancy ; 

 so they remained a blank of intense darkness, these inmost 

 recesses of ocean. 



Now, however, we have learned something of the truth ; 

 and one of the secrets that science has discovered is certainly 

 as fascinating as anything even in astronomy. For it is 

 known that (in many places at any rate) the ocean depths 

 are not dark at all, but illuminated perpetually by myriads 

 of living lamps ; and what is true of the known may possibly 

 be true of the unknown. 



Down, down, down you may go till the sea is nearly at 

 freezing-point, the pressure two or three tons to the square 

 inch, and some four miles of water rolls between you and 

 the keels of over-passing ships; and yet all through the 

 descent, and when you can get no deeper, you will find that 

 the sea is still faintly luminous, and that the creatures about 

 you live in twilight, seeing each other come and go. 



Myriads of tiny things, living closer than blades of grass 

 in a meadow, than leaves on forest trees, illustrate each their 

 own specks of space, till the whole territory is luminous, and 

 speck by speck, and inch by inch, cubic miles of sea glow 

 incandescent. Among these atoms, these motes of light, 

 move other and larger bodies, ranging from the great cyanea 

 with sparkling tentacles that trail fifty yards behind it, to the 

 monads invisible to the naked eye, yet which if a tumbler is 

 filled with them show light enough to read by. One jellyfish, 

 the largest invertebrate animal ever seen (it weighed two tons) 

 was stranded near Bombay, and for several nights its body 

 was visible half a mile away as a shapeless luminous mass. 

 Darwin tells us how his nets sparkled brightly the night after 

 they had been used to drag the deeps. A dead aurelia put 



