THE INTELLECTUAL OBSERVED 



OOTOBE R, 1863. 



THE BLUE CYAN^EA. 



BY PHILIP HENEY GOSSE, P.E.S. 

 (With a Coloured Plate.) 



Op all the varied forms of strange life which, the prolific sea 

 carries in her bosoni, few are more calculated to attract and 

 rivet interested attention than the Medusce. Globose forms of 

 translucent jelly, clear as crystal, or bearing alternate bands of 

 frosted surface, like a lamp-globe of clear and ground glass 

 commingled, colourless as the water which bears them, or dyed 

 with the loveliest hues, moulded with the most elegant sym- 

 metry — they appear and vanish, now urging their solitary course 

 with an unintelligible energy, now associated in immense 

 groups, rising and falling helplessly on the lazy swell of the 

 summer sea, now eluding the most diligent search. Whence 

 they come, whither they go, why they congregate, why they 

 separate, we know not. We land from the steamer in one of 

 our western watering-places, and as we bustle about the pier, 

 watching our luggage, we cannot help seeing that the surface 

 of the little harbour is thronged with the elegant jelly-fishes. 

 The oars of the busy boatmen push them about, or cut them 

 through unheeded ; they rotate with undignified agility in the 

 swirl of the steamer's screw; they repose in motionless majesty 

 between the piles of the wharf, where, as we look down per- 

 pendicularly upon them in the shadowed water, every line and 

 every tint is discerned to advantage, and we wonder at their 

 beauty. Or we take our stand on some rocky headland, and 

 gazing into the transparent depth, see far below the surface a 

 great sphere of painted glass, vigorously yet heavily making- 

 way by alternate pump-liko expansions and contractions, and 

 dragging in its oblique wake a tangled crowd of cords. Or, in 

 the dazzling twinkling haze of an August noon, we take a pull 

 in a boat a mile or two off shore, and, taking our station in the 

 bow, break the glistening surface of the mirrory sea with re- 

 VOL. IV. — NO. III. M 



