of living stone," which swarmed in the ancient seas, in vast
variety, and in such numbers that whole beds of limestone are
composed of their disjointed fragments; but which have vanished out
of our modern seas, we know not why, till, a few years since,
almost the only known living species was the exquisite and rare
Pentacrinus asteria, from deep water off the Windward Isles of the
West Indies.

Of this you will see a specimen or two both at Liverpool and in the
British Museum; and near them, probably, specimens of the new-old
Crinoids, discovered of late years by Professor Sars, Mr. Gwyn
Jeffreys, Dr. Carpenter, Dr. Wyville Thomson, and the other deep-
sea disciples of the mythic Glaucus, the fisherman, who, enamoured
of the wonders of the sea, plunged into the blue abyss once and for
all, and became himself "the blue old man of the sea."

Next look at the corals, and Gorgonias, and all the sea-fern tribe
of branching polypidoms, and last, but not least, at the glass
sponges; first at the Euplectella, or Venus's flower-basket, which
lives embedded in the mud of the seas of the Philippines, supported
by a glass frill "standing up round it like an Elizabethan ruff."
Twenty years ago there was but one specimen in Europe: now you may
buy one for a pound in any curiosity shop. I advise you to do so,
and to keep - as I have seen done - under a glass case, as a
delight to your eyes, one of the most exquisite, both for form and
texture, of natural objects.

Then look at the Hyalonemas, or glass-rope ocean floor by a twisted
wisp of strong flexible flint needles, somewhat on the principle of
a screw-pile. So strange and complicated is their structure, that