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the moving prow wells out little waves surging with tints of 
green and gold. Darkness, all the more intense by contrast, 
succeeds, to be again and again suddenly turned into transient 
light. In the offing, the sailors say the sea is “ briny,” and they 
watch the rippling radiance in their wake, and note the sudden 
gleams which, commencing at some disturbed spot of the sur- 
face, flash out on all sides. At anchor watch, whilst the night 
is as dark as pitch and the sea is hardly visible, the cable may 
often look white hot during the intervals of the faint illumina- 
tion of the surface. 
A bucket is lowered, and wood, ropes, hands and arms are 
alight with liquid heatless fire, and myriads of tiny globes may 
be seen occasionally in the water, intensely luminous. On going 
ashore up the wet sands, often enough every footstep is a focus 
of radiating glimmers, and remains luminous for a while. 
These common sights, passed by by most people, are supremely 
interesting to the thoughtful, and they are the feeble Northern 
extension of similar phenomena, which are grand indeed in the 
sub-tropical and torrid regions of the globe, and which, even 
at some depth in the great oceans, may relieve the eternal 
darkness. But even on the verge of the sea, Nature’s pyrotechny 
is superb, and Neptune is jealous of Nox, for in the short hour 
or two between the summer’s daylight, spray, waves, and all they 
wash, are often intensely, long or momentarily, bright. 
The dredge brings up, out of comparatively shallow water, 
Actinozoa, which, hitherto buried up to their tentacular ring, 
are light-emitting. A diver sees a luminous spot on the sub- 
merged limestone rock he is examining, and finds a boring shell 
smeared with luminosity. The weary sailor, tired with the 
• monotony and the great heat of the tropical day, peering into 
the depths near the coral banks of North Australia and New 
Caledonia, sees long tracks of wandering light, and wonders at 
the graceful evolutions and fierce attacks of the sea-snakes, lit 
up as they are with a fiery path. Or, dreamily watching, he 
marvels at the radiant course of the predaceous fish as they rise 
to the surface and rush beneath, after their prey. Some whalers, 
when the ship is hove to and gently rolling in the dark nights 
of the Southern Ocean, see the mighty monsters shoot up above 
the gleaming surface amidst a fountain of lurid phosphorescent 
spray, and fall splashing again and again in ponderous play, as if 
they loved to show their strength amidst showers and waves of 
light. Sights such as these are not the invariable accompaniment 
of the darkness far away in Northern seas; for there the spreading 
phosphorescence of the surface often pales with the rising moon, 
or the display of the Aurora. But even then, mid-ocean becomes 
luminous as the tide carries the host of Medusae along. Even 
when the moon is at its full, and the sea is bright with its lustre, 
