these men were no less sensible than we; and if we know better, it
is only because other men, and those few and far between, have
laboured amid disbelief, ridicule, and error; needing again and
again to retrace their steps, and to unlearn more than they learnt,
seeming to go backwards when they were really progressing most:
and now we have entered into their labours, and find them, as I
have just said, more wondrous than all the poetic dreams of a
Bonnet or a Darwin. For who, after all, to take a few broad
instances (not to enlarge on the great root-wonder of a number of
distinct individuals connected by a common life, and forming a
seeming plant invariable in each species), would have dreamed of
the "bizarreries" which these very zoophytes present in their
classification?

You go down to any shore after a gale of wind, and pick up a few
delicate little sea-ferns. You have two in your hand, which
probably look to you, even under a good pocket magnifier, identical
or nearly so. (1) But you are told to your surprise, that however
like the dead horny polypidoms which you hold may be, the two
species of animal which have formed them are at least as far apart
in the scale of creation as a quadruped is from a fish. You see in
some Musselburgh dredger's boat the phosphorescent sea-pen (unknown
in England), a living feather, of the look and consistency of a
cock's comb; or the still stranger sea-rush (VIRGULARIA MIRABILIS),
a spine a foot long, with hundreds of rosy flowerets arranged in
half-rings round it from end to end; and you are told that these
are the congeners of the great stony Venus's fan which hangs in
seamen's cottages, brought home from the West Indies. And ere you
have done wondering, you hear that all three are congeners of the
ugly, shapeless, white "dead man's hand," which you may pick up