68 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 



nor the picture he sketches too highly colored. I need not hesitate, 

 therefore, to place before you the extract I have taken from an 

 eloquent and interesting work recently published, bearing the title of 

 " Odd Quarters." " The smooth sand below high water mark was 

 a parterre of sponges, green and red, and purple-blue intermixed 

 with coral. Corals ! Imagine their beauty in the spot where Nature 

 placed them, every lip and hollow on the cream white surface traced 

 out in vividest penciUings of green, with the sea-flowers of sponge 

 around them. After the first impulse of delight, one almost comes 

 to overlook the charming foreground ; for beneath the water lies a 

 tangle and a maze of all things lovely, for shape and color, for growth 

 and motion. Coral takes a hundred flowery forms, weeds branch 

 like trees or wave like serpents. Sponges are cups of amethyst and 

 ruby. One sees just as clearly into the depths below as into the air 

 above, and almost as far as it seems there are corals shaped like an 

 Egyptian lily and as white, three feet in diameter, in which a mermaid 

 might take her bath ; others in a thicket, have each branch covered 

 with showy rosettes which bear a morsel of green velvet in their 

 bosoms ; small fish, as quick as hummingbirds and almost as gay, 

 dart to and fro." 



Such a scene as Mr. Boyle so eloquently describes may also have 

 presented itself by the shore of the ancient Devonian Sea. If we 

 except the fishes — the latter widely differ from their predecessors, 

 but there is one in the North Pacific, Mo7iocentris Carinata, possess- 

 ing so many characteristics of the fossiHzed remains discovered in 

 Paleozoic rocks, that research or accident may reveal its existence, 

 also at the olden time, when the empire of the sea was fiercely con- 

 tested by mail-clad fishes with bony armour, gigantic cuttles, and 

 crustaceans whose size may be estimated not only by feet but yards. 

 Its coat of scale mail is so hard as to resist the most powerful thrust 

 of any sharp instrument, and this would insure its preservation in the 

 stony sediment of the ancient seas, if it really existed then. Little 

 was known of the Devonian fishes until Hugh Miller's discoveries in 

 the old red sandstone of Scotland. Their prodigious abundance 

 there now led Sir Archibald Geikie to infer that they were essentially 

 inhabitants of lakes and rivers. " Some," he adds, " found their way 

 to the sea, as indicated by the occurrence of the remains with the true 

 marine fauna." The various colors so characteristic of the family in 



