naturalists for a long while could literally make neither head nor
tail of them, as long as they had only Japanese specimens to study,
some of which the Japanese dealers had, of malice prepense, stuck
upside down into Pholas-borings in stones. Which was top and which
bottom; which the thing itself, and which special parasites growing
on it; whether it was a sponge, or a zoophyte, or something else;
at one time even whether it was natural, or artificial and a make-
up, - could not be settled, even till a year or two since. But the
discovery of the same, or a similar, species in abundance from the
Butt of the Lows down to Setubal on the Portuguese coast, where the
deep-water shark fishers call it "sea-whip," has given our savants
specimens enough to make up their minds - that they really know
little or nothing about it, and probably will never know.

And do not forget, lastly, to ask, whether at Liverpool or at the
British Museum, for the Holtenias and their congeners, - hollow
sponges built up of glassy spicules, and rooted in the mud by glass
hairs, in some cases between two and three feet long, as flexible
and graceful as tresses of snow-white silk.

Look at these, and a hundred kindred forms, and then see how nature
is not only "maxima in minimis" - greatest in her least, but often
"pulcherrima in abditis" - fairest in her most hidden works; and
how the Creative Spirit has lavished, as it were, unspeakable
artistic skill on lowly-organized creature, never till now beheld
by man, and buried, not only in foul mud, but in their own
unsightly heap of living jelly.

But so it was from the beginning; - and this planet was not made
for man alone. Countless ages before we appeared on earth the