80 LIFE, IN ITS LOWER FORMS. 
phoresceut light. Tkaumantias pilosella, occasionally so 
abundant on our western shores, is a hemisphere of 
hyaline jelly, as large 
as a shilling, the edge 
of which is studded 
with black or rather 
dark purple eye- 
specks. If we irri- 
tate one of these 
creatures in the 
dark, by touching it 
with a stick, for in- 
Thaumantias pilosclla— (magnified.) stance, instantly a 
circle of bright tiny lamps is lighted up, every eye-speck 
becoming a spark, like a coronet of glittering diamonds, 
or like a circular figure of gas-jets, lighted at a public 
illumination, and seen from a distance ; more especially 
as some of the constituent sparks appear to go out and 
revive again, just as do the gas-flames if the night be 
windy. And the beautiful JEquorea Forbesiana, a flat 
species resembling in form and size a cake or bun, on 
being disturbed gives out its light in a marginal ring, 
which suddenly becomes vividly luminous, like those 
circles of glory with which the Italian painters delight to 
crown their saints and sacred personages. 
But these examples yield to some of those that swim at 
large in the boundless ocean ; where the mariner, in his 
lonely watch, occasionally secs, far below the keel of his 
ship, what look like swimming globes of fire, or cannon- 
balls heated to incandescence : theso are believed to be 
some globose species of Medusa; of large dimensions. 
