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Wonders of the Sea
VERY sounding in depth of the ocean is full of beauty by the depths of the night and by day. ocean shows that Sea-weeds are quite different from land there are shining plants, though they have leaves and a creatures and fan-root. The root holds the sea-weed to its tastic forms as beau- place on the rock. But it does not suck tiful and curious as up the moisture as the root of the land any on the land. plant does. There are no little cells in The sea is a world the leaf of the sea-weed to carry the in itself, and is subject to its moisture all over it. It must be plunged own laws. Animals, plants entirely in water, if it is wanted to live, and insects have a home but it will retain its color when taken within its waters, far beyond from its briny home, and preserve its the domain or even the reach beauty a long time. of man.
Mermaidens and mermen have from The sea is full of plants early ages been reckoned among the that float about in the water, wonders of the sea. Poets have sung of or else are attached to some rock at the their wondrous beauty and power, histobottom of the ocean. For a long time rians of the most irreproachable veracity nobody cared about sea-weeds, or took have chronicled their appearance; writers the trouble to examine them, but now of natural history have asserted most they are as carefully studied as the plants decidedly a belief in their existence, and that grow on the land. Many of them even in the present day there are men of are of delicate formation, and very beauti- education and science who believe that if ful. They make gardens at the bottom Nature has not produced a mermaid, she of the ocean. Their colors are red, and has been wanting in her duty, as not green, and yellow, and purple. All man- having completed the chain of vertebrate ner of living creatures dart about among animals. It will not be thought surthem. The scene is as varied and as gay prising that the idea of the poet differed as if it were on land. Indeed, it is almost considerably from that of the man of like fairy-land. When night comes, mil- science. There is an old story extant of lions of tiny creatures shine and sparkle the fishing-up of a merman on the Sussex like the glow-worm or the fire-fly. The coast in 1187. This creature, who acted like a man in every respect but that of blushing as the warm sun sinks to their speech, was kept by the governor for six embraces, the blue sea on the left, the months, when we are left to infer that it interminable forest on his right, and the died, but the chronicle sayeth not. creamy sea-sand curving in delicate trac- The sea, however, produces inhabitants ery between-a picture and a child of sufficiently wonderful without our manu- Nature! Delightedly he plunges into the facturing from imagination any such foam, and swims to the bald crown of a curiosities as mermen and mermaids, rock that uplifts itself above the waves. which are simply freaks of fancy, and nothing more.
