g its crimson calyx for a
smothering-pit in which to seal and devour the victim of its beauty;
the rainbow-colored jellyfish that spreads its prismed tentacles like
streamers of great beauty, only to sting and torture all that falls
within their radiant folds. Man himself is busy digging the pit and
fashioning the snare, but he will not believe it. His feet are in the
trap of circumstance; his eyes are on an illusion.

Mycteroperca moving in its dark world of green waters is as fine
an illustration of the constructive genius of nature, which is
not beatific, as any which the mind of man may discover. Its great
superiority lies in an almost unbelievable power of simulation, which
relates solely to the pigmentation of its skin. In electrical mechanics
we pride ourselves on our ability to make over one brilliant scene into
another in the twinkling of an eye, and flash before the gaze of an
onlooker picture after picture, which appear and disappear as we look.
The directive control of Mycteroperca over its appearance is much more
significant. You cannot look at it long without feeling that you are
witnessing something spectral and unnatural, so brilliant is its power
to deceive. From being black it can become instantly white; from being
an earth-colored brown it can fade into a delightful water-colored
green. Its markings change as the clouds of the sky. One marvels at the
variety and subtlety of its power.

Lying at the bottom of a bay, it can simulate the mud by which it is
surrounded. Hidden in the folds of glorious leaves, it is of the same
markings. Lurking in a flaw of light, it is like the light itself
shining dimly in water. Its power to elude or strike unseen is of the
greatest.

What would you say was the intention of the overruling, intelligent,
constructive force which gives to Mycteroperca this ability? To fit it
to be truthful? To permit it to present an unvarying appearance which
all honest life-seeking fish may know? Or would you say that subtlety,
chicanery, trickery, were here at work? An implement of illusion one
might readily suspect it to be, a living lie, a creature whose business
it is to appear what it is not, to simulate that with which it has
nothing in common, to get its living by great subtlety, the power of its
enemies to forefend against which is little. The indictment is fair.

Would you say, in the face of this, that a beatific, beneficent
creative, overruling power never wills that which