than ever plummet sounded, is life, everywhere life; fauna after
fauna, and flora after flora, arranged in zones, according to the
amount of light and warmth which each species requires, and to the
amount of pressure which they are able to endure. The crevices of
the highest rocks, only sprinkled with salt spray in spring-tides
and high gales, have their peculiar little univalves, their crisp
lichen-like sea-weed, in myriads; lower down, the region of the
Fuci (bladder-weeds) has its own tribes of periwinkles and limpets;
below again, about the neap-tide mark, the region of the corallines
and Algae furnishes food for yet other species who graze on its
watery meadows; and beneath all, only uncovered at low spring-tide,
the zone of the Laminariae (the great tangles and ore-weeds) is
most full of all of every imaginable form of life. So that as we
descend the rocks, we may compare ourselves (likening small things
to great) to those who, descending the Andes, pass in a single day
from the vegetation of the Arctic zone to that of the Tropics. And
here and there, even at half-tide level, deep rock-basins, shaded
from the sun and always full of water, keep up in a higher zone the
vegetation of a lower one, and afford in nature an analogy to those
deep "barrancos" which split the high table-land of Mexico, down
whose awful cliffs, swept by cool sea-breezes, the traveller looks
from among the plants and animals of the temperate zone, and sees
far below, dim through their everlasting vapour-bath of rank hot
steam, the mighty forms and gorgeous colours of a tropic forest.

"I do not wonder," says Mr. Gosse, in his charming "Naturalist's
Rambles on the Devonshire Coast" (p. 187), "that when Southey had
an opportunity of seeing some of those beautiful quiet basins
hollowed in the living rock, and stocked with elegant plants and
animals, having all the charm of novelty to his eye, they should