Submarine Architecture. 345 



when the bottle sank slowly and in a perpendicular position, 

 and rested upon them, and from that day to the present hauling 

 up of the bottle by the dredge, the bottle never once changed 

 its position. It has been proved, says he, that old shells never 

 drift about the sea-bottom ; there are no tides or currents there, 

 but a profound stillness reigns as in chaos, though not lifeless. 

 The deep sea-bottom is a place of eternal calm. Hereat he 

 defiantly inverts the bottle again to remind us that there are 

 no incrustations there, not even an abrasion of the smooth 

 surface to show that after its deposition it ever once shifted 

 from its place. The bottle evidently stood upright at the 

 bottom, was undisturbed during the whole period of its sub- 

 mergence. The shells were already there, empty and decaying, 

 in contact with its edge, and the cementing animals wrought 

 between the angles of the contiguous surfaces, and soon 

 cemented both together. We see no escape from these con- 

 clusions. Emilius is avowedly no naturalist, but he insists on 

 logical deductions from all proven facts. We leave it to him 

 to wind up the discourse, and he observes — 



What a close analogy does this case afford to the method 

 by which Nature appropriates the works of man on terra firma. 

 The grass grows upon the rock or on the crumbling marble of 

 the temple only after the surface has been prepared by suc- 

 cessive colonies of confervge, lichens, liverworts, and mosses. 

 These form the foundations. As in the sea sponges and 

 lepralise form a crust, so on the dry land the little liver- 

 worts form a stratum of soil which becomes a nidus for higher 

 forms, and the humbler flowering plants follow and are suc- 

 ceeded by trees and shrubs. The 420 plants found by Dr. 

 Deakin among the ruins of the Colosseum have an analogous 

 position to the oysters and the serpulse on our beautiful marine 

 bottle. And to carry the analogy another step, when men ' 

 build cities, they apportion to the humblest of their race, the 

 miner, excavator, and mason, the task of forming the foundations 

 on which noble forms of architecture are to be superimposed 

 by skilful hands, and with all the aids of art and science. But in 

 man's works the whole design is first prepared, the work of the 

 miners and excavators is marked out as no less necessary, and 

 as indeed the first essential for the erection of the fluted shaft 

 and the capital, and when the city Las ceased to be, Nature 

 goes over her work in the old way, according to the vaster 

 designs of the Great Architect, under whose guidance the 

 meanest things perform services which are essential to the 

 life of the noblest. 



VOL. II. — NO. V. B B 



