CHAPTER XII. 
Corals and Coral Reefs. The Marvelous Beauty of the “‘ Marine Garden." 
Its Corals, Coralines, Gorgonias, Algw, Sponges, and Wonderfully Colored 
Fishes. Water Glasses, Natural Aquariums. Cvral Bowers and Grottoes. 
Sea Urchins. The Colored Divers. Life in the Rock. 
“There with a light and easy motion 
The fan-coral sweeps through the clear deep sea, 
And life, in rare and beautiful forms, 
Is sporting amid the bowers of stone, 
While the waters murmur tranquilly 
Through the bending twigs of the coral groves.”’—PERorvaL 
WHI zat Nassau it was our happy destiny to make the partial 
acquaintance of some of the members of a family of the most 
ceaseless, and indefatigable builders that have ever existed since 
the world first commenced to keep step to the ‘‘music of the 
spheres,” and sweep in grand cycles around the sun. Called into 
existence by the fiat of Jehovah, in that vague and mysterious 
“beginning ” when “‘ the earth was without form,” and ‘dark- 
ness was upon the face of the deep,” the little corals, with the 
first peep of creation’s early dawn, commenced, in the warm clear 
waters of the great primeval sea, their silent, unobtrusive and 
apparently insignificant work—evidences of which, clear and in- 
disputable, the researches of modern scientists have discovered 
far inland, hundreds and thousands of miles from where the 
‘Western Atlantic billows “beat the sounding shore.” In an 
unbroken line of descent, from the depths of a past so vast and 
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