THE OCEAN WORLD. 
21(5 
objects, so forbidding in some of their aspects, rank, in their natural 
localities, among the most elegant productions of Nature. We could 
not better commence our studies of these children of the sea than by 
quoting a passage from the poet and historian Michelet : “ Among 
the rugged rocks and lagunes, where the retiring sea has left many 
little animals which were too sluggish or too weak to follow, some 
shells will be there left to themselves and suffered to become quite dry. 
In the midst of them, without shell and without shelter, extended at 
our feet, lies the animal which we call by the very inappropriate name 
of the Medusa. Why was this name, of torrible associations, given to 
a creature so charming ? Often have I had my attention arrested by 
these castaways which we see so often on the shore. They are small, 
about the size of my hand, hut singularly pretty, of soft light shades, 
of an opal white ; where it lost itself as in a cloud of tentacles— a 
crown of tender lilies — the wind had overturned it ; its crown of lilac 
hair floated above, and the delicate umbel, that is, its proper body, 
was beneath ; it had touched the rock — dashed against it ; it was 
wounded, torn in its fine locks, which are also its organs of respira- 
tion, absorption, and even of love The delicious creature, with 
its visible innocence and the iridescence of its soft colours, was left 
like a gliding, trembling jelly. I paused beside it, nevertheless : 1 
glided my hand under it, raised the motionless body cautiously, and 
restored it to its natural position for swimming. Putting it into the 
neighbouring water, it sank to the bottom, giving no sign of life. I 
pursued my walk along the shore, hut at the end of ten minutes I 
returned to my medusa. It was undulating under the wind ; really it 
had moved itself, and was swimming about with singular grace, its 
hair flying round it as it swam 5 gently it retired from the rock, not 
quickly, hut still it went, and I soon saw it a long way off.” 
01 all the zoophytes which live in the ocean there is none more 
numerous in species or more singular in their matter, more odd in 
their form or more remarkable in their mode of reproduction, than 
those to which Linnaeus gave the name of Medusa, from the mythical 
chief of the Gorgons. 
The seas of every latitude of the globe furnish various tribes of 
these singular beings. They live in the icy waters which bathe 
Spitzbergen, Greenland, and Iceland ; they multiply under the fires 
of the Equator, and the frozen regions of the south nourish nume- 
