But to these features must be added others more extraordinary—forms that the elder naturalists imagined to be links between the animal and vegetable creation, but which are now known to have no affinity whatever with plants, though they exhibit the appearance of expanded flowers of various hues, displaying the forms of the Carnation, the Anemone, the Mesembryanthemum, and other beautiful flowers whose names they bear. These curiously beautiful Zoöphytes, the wonderful Actiniæ, exhibit every tone of colour, from purple and scarlet, to green and white, and might be taken in their picturesquely-placed groups for rare exotic flowers, planted among the rosy-tinted shrubs expressly to add the last touch of richness and effect to the scenery of an ocean flower-show.
Yet they are not flowers, but animals—sea monsters, whose seeming delicate petals are but their thousand Briarean arms, disguised as the petals of a flower, and expanded to seize the unconscious victim as he passes near the beautiful form—fatal to him as the crater of a volcano; in which he is soon engulphed by the closing tentacles of his unsuspected enemy. And if he pass not near enough for that deadly floral embrace, those pretty crimson tubercles that dot so gracefully the seeming stalk, beneath the seeming flower, can shoot forth a thread, armed, like the fisher’s line, with a barbed hook, which strikes and secures the distant prey; and so the unwary Annelid or Infusory is captured and devoured. In this capacity the creature has been compared to Pope’s spider, who
“Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.”
But then the living thread of the Actinia (or of the Cirriped, which has a similar power) is a fact, while the sensitive gossamer of the poet is a fiction.
But notwithstanding these ogre-like attributes, the lovely Actinia long deceived our naturalists as to its true nature—and of course the poets—from whom his flower-like disc and petaloid tentacles completely concealed his grosser nature. Then, as the tide recedes, he so meekly closes his beautiful oubliette, with so much grace, and looking so much like those shrinking flowers that close at eve, as though they dared not to look on the black darkness of the night, that it is no wonder poets were beguiled, and that the romantic Southey sings of the Actinia as of some lily of the deep that, on the retiring of the ocean,
“Sinks down within its purple stem to sleep.”
To add to the wonders of this strange landscape come the creeping Nudibranchs and Tectibranchs, gliding over the gracefully-waving Algæ; their elegant forms decorated with their external breathing apparatus, like the pale skeleton of some delicate flower, so fine are its milk-white filaments, arranged nearly always in a symmetrical and star-like form. And then there are the singular and shadowy Medusæ floating past, in the form of parachutes, with low suspended cars, just as though the science of ballooning had been carried to perfection under the sea; and that they were made of elastic glass, instead of silk, though richly flushed with iridescent and varying tinges, sometimes metallic azure, and anon emerald green; hues that seem added by some delicate process which the glass-blowers above the water have not yet discovered. Some of these creatures are fragile as a soap-bubble, to which their transparency and prismatic flashes of colour give them a curious resemblance; and their ephemeral existence, dependent upon the will of even an angry ripple of the element in which they live, is doubtless as brief.
The deep has even its butterflies, as well as the land. The fluttering of the fins of some small and brightly-coloured fish has been compared to the action of the wings of moths—as also the members, likewise used for locomotive purposes, of some of the animals of the univalve shells. Then there are minute phosphorescent animals, which represent the fire-flies of the south, pouring a living flood of light as they glide along—some emitting silvery, and others golden flashes, like floating lamps that seem hurrying to light up the darkness of the far ocean depths.
Even the worms are gorgeous and wonderful in this subaqueous world. The Serpulæ, with their radiating coronets of crimson branchiæ; the Pectinaria, with its golden comb, glittering in burnished brightness; and the Nereis, with white and crimson stripes—are all wonderful as well as beautiful objects. But the Halithea, or sea-goddess, as Lamark has named it, from the extraordinary beauty and the gorgeous colours that radiate from the silky hairs with which it is clothed, surpasses them all.
These, and other wonders of still greater beauty, will reward the persevering student who learns to see them; but then he must learn. Even the intellectual giant, Shakspeare, could not see clearly many of the minuter things of Nature. In his line upon the slow-worm, for instance, vulgarly called the blind-worm, which he describes as