THE ORIGIN OF THE OLDEST FOSSILS, ETC. 46 1 



flying fish or a wandering sea bird or a floating tuft of sar- 

 ijassum, and we never think of the ocean as the home of vegetable 

 life. It contains plant-like animals in abundance, but these are 

 true animals and not plants, although they are so like them in 

 form and color. At Nassau, in the Bahama Islands, the visitor 

 is taken in a small boat, with windows of plate-glass set in the 

 bottom, to visit the "sea-gardens" at the inner end of a channel 

 through which the pure water from the open sea flows between 

 two coral islands into the lagoon. Here the true reef-corals 

 grow in quiet water, where they may be visited and examined. 



When illuminated by the vertical sun of the tropics and by 

 the light which is reflected back from the white bottom, the 

 pure transparent water is as clear as air, and the smallest object 

 forty or fifty feet down is distinctly visible through the glass 

 bottom of the boat. 



As this glides over the great mushroom-shaped coral domes 

 which arch up from the depths, the dark grottoes between them 

 and the caves under their overhanging tops are lighted up by the 

 sun, far down among the anthozoa or flower animals and the 

 zoophytes or animal plants, which are seen through tjie waving 

 thicket of brown and purple sea fans and sea feathers as they 

 toss before the swell from the open ocean. 



There are miles of these "sea gardens" in the lagoons of 

 the Bahamas, and it has been my good fortune to spend many 

 months studying their wonders, but no description can convey 

 any conception of their beauty and luxuriance. 



The general effect is very garden-like, and the beautiful 

 fishes of black and golden yellow and iridescent cobalt blue 

 hover like birds among the thickets of yellow and lilac gor- 

 gonias. 



The parrot fishes seem to be cropping the plants like rabbits, 

 but more careful examination shows that they are biting off the 

 tips of the gorgonias and branching madrepores or hunting for 

 the small Crustacea which hide in the thicket and that all the ap- 

 parent plants are really animals. 



The delicate star-like flowers are the vermillion heads of 



