WONDERS AND RICHES OF THE SEA. 



31 



the sea-shore. We shall find both beauty for the eye and food 

 for the body, in the varieties of shell-fish which adhere in 

 myriads to the rocks or form their close dark burrows in the 

 sands. In some parts of the world we shall see those houses of 

 stone, which the little coral-insect rears up with patient in- 

 dustry from the bottom of the waters, till they grow into for- 

 midable rocks and broad forests whose branches never wave 

 and whose leaves never fall. In other parts we shall see those 

 pale, glistening pearls which adorn the crowns of princes and 

 are woven in the hair of beauty, extorted by the relentless 

 grasp of man from the hidden stores of ocean. And spread 

 round every coast there are beds of flowers and thickets of 

 plants; which the dew does not nourish, and which man has not 

 sown, nor cultivated, nor reaped, but which seem to belong to 

 the floods alone and the denizens of the floods, until they are 

 thrown up by the surges, and we discover that even the dead 

 spoils of the fields of ocean may fertilize and enrich the fields 

 of earth. They have a life, and a nourishment, and an economy 

 of their own ; and we know little of them, except that they are 

 there, in their briny nurseries, reared up into luxuriance by 

 what would kill, like a mortal poison, the vegetation of the land. 



" There is mystery in the sea. There is mystery in its depths. 

 It is unfathomed, and, perhaps, unfathomable. ..Who can tell, 

 who shall know, how near its pits run down to the central core 

 of the world? Who can tell what wells, what fountains, are 

 there, to which the fountains of the earth are but drops ? Who 

 shall say whence the ocean derives those "nexhaustible supplies 

 of salt which so impregnate its waters that all the rivers of 

 the earth, pouring into it from t'ae time of the creation, have 

 not been able to freshen them? What undescribed monsters, 

 what unimaginable shapes, may be roving in the profoundest 

 places of the sea, never seeking — and perhaps, from their 

 nature, never able to seek — the upper waters and expose them- 

 selves to the gaze of man ! What glittering riches, what heaps 



