after a storm on any shore. You have a beautiful madrepore or
brain-stone on your mantel-piece, brought home from some Pacific
coral-reef. You are to believe that its first cousins are the
soft, slimy sea-anemones which you see expanding their living
flowers in every rock-pool - bags of sea-water, without a trace of
bone or stone. You must believe it; for in science, as in higher
matters, he who will walk surely, must "walk by faith and not by
sight."

These are but a few of the wonders which the classification of
marine animals affords; and only drawn from one class of them,
though almost as common among every other family of that submarine
world whereof Spenser sang -


"Oh, what an endless work have I in hand,
To count the sea's abundant progeny!
Whose fruitful seed far passeth those in land,
And also those which won in th' azure sky,
For much more earth to tell the stars on high,
Albe they endless seem in estimation,
Than to recount the sea's posterity;
So fertile be the flouds in generation,
So huge their numbers, and so numberless their nation."


But these few examples will be sufficient to account both for the
slow pace at which the knowledge of sea-animals has progressed, and
for the allurement which men of the highest attainments have found,
and still find, in it. And when to this we add the marvels which