302 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



in convoluted spirals, — each twig crowned with its vase- 

 shaped zooid, wreathed with a whirling glory of never-resting 

 cilia ; there is the contractile heart ; there the circling round 

 of moving fluids that ceases not but with life. 



Within the branching galleries of these sponges, uprooted 

 and driven landward by the hissing tide, lurk tiny Polythalms, 

 strange and beautiful forms, the microtypes of things that 

 lived in the cloudy dawn of earliest time. Here theoldBaculoid 

 and Hamoid and Nautiloid models appear again in the beaded 

 wands and spirals of these many-chambered shells — each a 

 city whose indwellers are but little patches of slime. No 

 bright-eyed Nautilus puts forth its clasping arms from these 

 rich]y-sculptured habitations ; they are built up by a shape- 

 less and unorganised glair — a living glair, which streams as 

 a filmy network from all their thousand openings, and spreads 

 afar its glutinous meshes, whose touch is death — a formless 

 mystery, beneath whose plastic force lie moulding the solid 

 mountain chains and continents of a future world.* 



Amidst the crannies and furrows of these stones and 

 broken shells, dredged from the deep, the wildest stories 

 of Arabian romance are imaged forth in facts of every- 

 day experience. From the delicate and fluted flasks of these 

 Lagense issue beings no less wonderful than those cloudlike 

 Marids whom, sealed in bottles of brass, Solomon plunged 

 beneath the waters of El Karker ; f while these silvery 

 Ephelotas, seated on their tall and glassy watch-towers, 

 stretch forth arms deadly as those of Danish, an Efreet 

 of the Jinn, whom, rebellious, Ed Dimiryat fixed on his 

 lofty pillar of carnelian for ever. J 



Thus the vile things of Nature teem with the beauty of 

 invisible existences, — mutter to the attentive ear myste- 



* The Oolite and Chalk, especially the latter, are in a great measure made 

 up of accumulations of Polythalamian shells. While, in the Tertiary period, 

 a vast Polythalamian formation (the Nummulitic) attained to a thickness of 

 many thousand feet, and extended itself over great tracts, passing through the 

 continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Similar deposits are now in process 

 of formation over vast areas of sea bottom, especially in the Atlantic, Mediter- 

 ranean, and Australian seas. 



t The Thousand and One Nights. Lane. Vol. iii. p. 136. 



% Ibid. Vol. iii. p. 131. 



