ish. The prevailing color of this attractive
creature is dark green, but the tinted margins of its scales so
reflect the light as to show all the colors of the rainbow, and hence
its name. When bottled in alcohol, these fairy-like denizens of the
deep lose their brilliancy, which they exhibit only in their native
element. This unique display is greatly enhanced in beauty by the
clearness of the Bahama waters, and the reflected light from the
snow-white sandy bottom, dotted here and there by curious and delicate
shells of opalescent lustre. One longs to descend among these coral
bowers,--these mermaid-gardens,--and pluck of the submarine flora in
its purple, yellow, and scarlet freshness.

It will be remembered that Columbus wrote home to his royal patrons
that the fish which abounded in the seas partook of the same novelty
which characterized everything else in the New World. This was about
four hundred years ago, before the great Genoese had discovered Cuba.
"The fish," as he wrote, "rivaled the birds in tropical brilliancy of
color, the scales of some of them glancing back the rays of light like
precious stones, as they sported about the ships and flashed gleams of
gold and silver through the clear water."

The surface life of these translucent waters is also extremely
interesting. Here the floating jelly-fish, called, from its
phosphorescence, the glow-worm of the sea, is observed in great
variety, sheltering little colonies of young fishes within its
tentacles, which rush forth for a moment to capture some passing mite,
and as quickly return again to their shelter. One takes up a handful
of the floating gulf-weed and finds, within the pale yellow leaves and
berries, tiny pipe-fish, sea-horses, and the little nest-building
antennarius, thus forming a buoyant home for parasites, crabs, and
mollusks, itself a sort of mistletoe of the ocean. The young of the
mackerel and the herring glance all about just beneath the surface
near the shore, like myriad pieces of silver. Now and again that
particolored formation of marine life, the Portuguese man-of-war, is
observed, its long ventral fins spread out like human fingers to
steady it upon the surface of the water. Verily, the German scientist
who says there is more of animal life beneath the surface of the sea
than above it cannot be far amiss. This seems to be the more
reasonable when we consider the relative proportions of land and
water. The whole surface of the globe i