36 GLAUCUS; OR, 



more startling and prodigious than the dreams 

 which men had hastily substituted for it; more 

 strange than Ovid's old story that the coral was 

 soft under the sea, and hardened by . exposure to 

 air ; than Marsigli's notion, that the coral-polypes 

 were its flowers ; than Dr. Parsons' contemptuous 

 denial, that these complicated forms could be " the 

 operations of little, poor, helpless, jelly-like animals, 

 and not the work of more sure vegetation ;" than 

 Baker the microscopist's detailed theory of their 

 being produced by the crystallization of the mineral 

 salts in the sea- water, just as he had seen "the 

 particles of mercury and copper in aquafortis assume 

 tree-like forms, or curious delineations of mosses 

 and minute shrubs on slates and stones, owing 

 to the shooting of salts intermixed with mineral 

 particles :" — one smiles at it now : yet these men 

 were no less sensible than we of the year 1854 ; 

 and if we know better, it is only because other men, 

 and those few and far between, have laboured amid 

 disbelief, ridicule and error ; needing again and 

 again to retrace their steps, and to unlearn more 



