More exquisite each moment shew,
As fainter grows the strife.”
Portuguese men-of-war—Physalia physalis—have also been floating past us. These are molluscæ with long feelers, and furnished with an air-bag which they have the power of inflating at pleasure when moving on the surface. This is provided with apertures at either end, by which they can expel the air, or take in sail, as a seaman would say, when they wish to sink. This air bag, when inflated, is of an oval shape, and of the tenuity almost of a soap-bubble, and exhibits like it, though in stronger shades, many of the hues of the prism. The beauty discoverable in many of these animals is said by naturalists to equal any thing in organic nature.
A passage in Montgomery’s Pelican Island applied to the convoluted nautilus, which rises and floats on the surface of the water, but spreads no sail, is perhaps more truthfully descriptive of this man-of-war:
“Light as a flake of foam upon the wind,
Keel upwards, from the deep emerged a shell,
Shaped like the moon ere half her horn is filled;
Fraught with young life, it righted as it rose,
And moved at will along the yielding water.
The native pilot of this little bark,