76 
LIFE, IN ITS LOWER FORMS. 
CHAPTER VIII. 
Acalepm; ( Sea-blubbers ). 
In walking through the crowdod thoroughfares of London 
on a clear winter’s evening, we have often admired the 
beauty of the lamps that illuminate the shops and cast 
such a flood of radiance on the thronged streets. The 
elegant forms of the glass shades, the beauty of the 
material of which they are composed, and the various de- 
grees of translucency which they are made to assume by 
the roughness or polish of their surface, in particular, have 
often attracted our attention ; and we have been inter- 
ested by tracing their very obvious resemblance to certain 
living creatures that swim in the vast deep, — creatures 
which the poet describes as 
“ Figured by hand Divine ; there’s not a gem 
Wrought by man’s art to be compared to them ; 
Soft, brilliant, tender, through the wave they glow, 
And make the moonbeam brighter where they flow.” * 
We refer of course to the Medusce. The forms given to 
our lamp-shades, — spherical, hemispherical, umbrella- 
like, saucer-like, spheroids either oblate or prolate, and 
* Crabbe. 
