y 49 
intense delight. All the living objects of an aqua- 
rium would excite interest, but the animal sea- 
flowers would engross the mind with wonder, Out- 
wardly to nature and inwardly to ourselves our 
thoughts are or ought to be ever with Him ‘* whose 
righteousness is like the great mountains, and whose 
judgments are a great deep;” but in the preservation 
of man and beast, the ‘ fountain of life in whose light 
we see light,” gives wonderful expansion to the oute 
pourings of the mind, when we turn to objects that 
hold such an ambiguous relation among living ors 
ganisms that we feel ourselves equally right whether 
we speak of them as plants or animals. Notwith- 
standing the designation of sea-weeds given to horny 
articulations, ramified into arborescent forms, im- 
moveable on rocky bases, those branches and stems 
are animal products denuded of their cortical poly- 
piarie. Whether the caliciferous corallines of Las 
mouroux should he absolutely ranked with plants, 
s9 equivocal is their character, so uncertain, they are 
not considered to be rightly placed with corticiferous 
_polyps. The actiniz, the most showy of the animal 
sea-flowers, (expressly excluded from the class of 
polypi, though closely related to them,) are placed 
with them by Dr. Johnsbn, as radiated zoophytz. 
Sponges are described by physiologists as dubiously 
admissible into the animal series, and the jointed 
and disjointed alge, enumerated as true sea- weeds, 
are of habits so paradoxical that naturalists are far 
from agreed whether they are not minute animals, 
