graceful to grotesque, from almost
colorless to gaudy-hued. To your dilated pupils the light itself has
the weird glow of unreality. It is all like the wonders of the Arabian
Nights made tangible or like a strange spectacular dream. If one were in
a great diving-bell at the bottom of the veritable ocean he could hardly
feel more detached from the ordinary aerial world of fact.

As one recovers his senses and begins to take definite note of things
about him he sees that each one of the many grottos has a different set
of occupants, and that not all of the creatures there are as unfamiliar
as at first they seemed. Many of the fishes, for example, and the
lobsters, crabs, and the like, are familiar enough under other
conditions, but even these old acquaintances look strange under these
changed circumstances. But for the rest there are multitudes of forms
that one had never seen or imagined, for the sea hides a myriad of
wonders which we who sail over its surface, and at most glance dimly
a few feet into its depths, hardly dream of. Even though one has seen
these strange creatures "preserved" in museums, he does not know
them, for the alleged preservation there has retained little enough of
essential facies of the real creature, which the dead shell can no more
than vaguely suggest.

Here, however, we see the real thing. Each creature lives and moves in a
habitat as nearly as may be like that which it haunted when at
liberty, save that tribes that live at enmity with one another are here
separated, so that the active struggle for existence, which plays
so large a part in the wild life of sea as well as land, is not
represented. For the rest the creatures of the deep are at home in these
artificial grottos, and disport themselves as if they desired no other
residence. For the most part they pay no heed whatever to the human
inspectors without their homelike prisons, so one may watch their
activities under the most favorable conditions.

It is odd to notice how curiously sinuous are all the movements, not
alone of the fish, but of a large proportion of the other forms of
moving life of the waters. The curve, the line of beauty, is the symbol
of their every act; there are no angles in their world. They glide
hither and yon, seemingly without an effort, and always with wavy,
oscillating gracefulness. The acme of this sinuosity of movement is
reached with those long-drawn-out fishes the eels. Of these there are
two gigantic