beds, or rather banks, of the salt-water flower
garden, the gaudiest of shell-less sea-anemones, such as we have on
our coasts, rooted in the cracks, and live shells and sea-slugs, as
gaudy as they, crawling about, with fifty other forms of fantastic
and exuberant life. You must not overlook, too, the fish, especially
the parrot-fish, some of them of the gaudiest colours, who spend
their lives in browsing on the live coral, with strong clipping and
grinding teeth, just as a cow browses the grass, keeping the animal
matter, and throwing away the lime in the form of an impalpable white
mud, which fills up the interstices in the coral beds.

The bottom, just outside the reef, is covered with that mud, mixed
with more lime-mud, which the surge wears off the reef; and if you
have, as you should have, a dredge on board, and try a haul of that
mud as you row home, you may find, but not always, animal forms
rooted in it, which will delight the soul of a scientific man. One,
I hope, would be some sort of Terebratula, or shell akin to it. You
would probably think it a cockle: but you would be wrong. The
animal which dwells in it has about the same relationship to a cockle
as a dog has to a bird. It is a Brachiopod; a family with which the
ancient seas once swarmed, but which is rare now, all over the world,
having been supplanted and driven out of the seas by newer and
stronger forms of shelled animals. The nearest spot at which you are
likely to dredge a live Brachiopod will be in the deep water of Loch
Fyne, in Argyleshire, where two species still linger, fastened,
strangely enough, to the smooth pebbles of a submerged glacier,
formed in the open air during the age of ice, but sunk now to a depth
of eighty fathoms. The first time I saw those shells come up in the
dredge out of the dark and motionless abyss, I could sympathise with
the feelings of mingled delight and awe which, so my companion told
me, the great Professor Owen had in the same spot first beheld the
same lingering remnants of a primaeval world.

The other might be (but I cannot promise you even a chance of
dredging that, unless you were off the coast of Portugal, or the
windward side of some of the West India Islands) a live Crinoid; an
exquisite starfish, with long and branching arms, but rooted in the
mud by a long stalk, and that stalk throwing out barren side
branches; the whole a living plant of stone. You may see