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 tim e. Here the old Baculoid 
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 
richly-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 Dahish, 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. 
X Ibid. Vol. iii. p. 131. 
