COLOUR OF THE RED SEA.
M. Ehrenberg, while navigating the Red Sea, observed that the red colour of its waters was owing to enormous quantities of a new animal, which has received the name of oscillatoria rubescens, and which seems to be the same with what Haller has described as a purple conferva swimming in water; yet Dr. Bonar, in his work entitled The Desert of Sinai, records:
Blue I have called the sea; yet not strictly so, save in the far distance. It is neither a red nor a blue sea, but emphatically green,—yes, green, of the most brilliant kind I ever saw. This is produced by the immense tracts of shallow water, with yellow sand beneath, which always gives this green to the sea, even in the absence of verdure on the shore or sea-weeds beneath. The blue of the sky and the yellow of the sands meeting and intermingling in the water, form the green of the sea; the water being the medium in which the mixing or fusing of the colours takes place.
WHAT IS SEA-MILK?
The phenomena with this name and that of “Squid” are occasioned by the presence of phosphorescent animalcules. They are especially produced in the intertropical seas, and they appear to be chiefly abundant in the Gulf of Guinea and in the Arabian Gulf. In the latter, the phenomenon was known to the ancients more than a century before the Christian era, as may be seen from a curious passage from the geography of Agatharcides: “Along this country (the coast of Arabia) the sea has a white aspect like a river: the cause of this phenomenon is a subject of astonishment to us.” M. Quatrefages has discovered that the Noctilucæ which produce this phenomenon do not always give out clear and brilliant sparks, but that under certain circumstances this light is replaced by a steady clearness, which gives in these animalcules a white colour. The waters in which they have been observed do not change their place to any sensible degree.
THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA A BURIAL-PLACE.
Among the minute shells which have been fished up from the great telegraphic plateau at the bottom of the sea between Newfoundland and Ireland, the microscope has failed to detect a single particle of sand or gravel; and the inference is, that there, if any where, the waters of the sea are at rest. There is not motion enough there to abrade these very delicate organisms, nor current enough to sweep them about and mix them up with a grain of the finest sand, nor the smallest particle of gravel from the loose beds of débris that here and there strew the bottom of the sea. The animalculæ probably do not live or die there. They would have had no light there; and, if they lived there, their frail textures would be subjected in their growth to a pressure upon them of a column of water 12,000 feet high, equal to the weight of 400 atmospheres. They probably live and sport near the surface, where they can feel the genial influence of both light and heat, and are buried in the lichen caves below after death.
It is now suggested, that henceforward we should view the surface of the sea as a nursery teeming with nascent organisms, and its depths as the cemetery for families of living creatures that outnumber the sands on the sea-shore for multitude.
Where there is a nursery, hard by there will be found also a graveyard,—such is the condition of the animal world. But it never occurred to us before to consider the surface of the sea as one wide nursery, its every ripple as a cradle, and its bottom one vast burial-place.—Lieut. Maury.