sissippi, flourished on the great submarine plateau luxuriant plantations of these little lily-animals. And these were interspersed with other plant-like forms-the coral animals

-which reared their marble domes and uplifted their arborescent structures upon the same soil which supported the encrinite and formed the grazing-ground of tribes of molluscous beings.

"Deep in the wave is a coral grove,

Where the purple mullet and goldfish rove;

Where the sea-flower spreads its leaves of blue,
That never are wet with falling dew,

But in bright and changeful beauty shine,
Far down in the green and grassy brine.
The floor is of sand, like the mountain drift,
And the pearl-shells spangle the flinty snow;
From coral rocks the sea-plants lift

Their boughs where the tides and billows flow;

Through the bending twigs of the coral grove."

Here was beauty, here was sensitive enjoyment, lavished by Nature upon these humble forms at this remote age of

Fig. 41. Asaphus gigas of the Trenton period.

the world, and in these "dark, unfathomed caves of ocean," with the same liberal hand which adorns the modern landscape for the admiration of intelligent man. Here again were trilobites.

-not the same species as had been swept from being by the convulsions which marked the close of the last epoch--but articulated animals, conformed to the same family plan and features as their extinct predecessors, yet as easily distinguished as a wasp from a bumble-bee. And what, still,

are these new and anomalous forms, which move their sullen and sinister visages among the other tribes with the mien of conscious and insolent superiority? Predaceous creatures, they despoil at a meal the most beautiful bed of encrinites, while the trilobite, alarmed, shoots with a quick stroke of his tail under cover of some coral crag. These are Orthoceratites. They were so numerous and powerful, being, withal, the monarchs of the period, that we must pause to look into their family connections.

CHAPTER XI.

THE FAIRY SAILOR AND HIS COUSINS.

WHO has not heard of the argonaut, or paper nautilus?

One of the most vivid recollections of our early reading presents us with a little boatman, in his "shelly bark,"

wafted over the placid surface of a summer sea. With tiny sail upraised, the favoring breeze bears him securely onward; but let the winds escape from their Æolian caves, and the billows wake from their liquid slumbers, and down glides our tiny boatman with his shelly bark, and finds a safe retreat among the marble corridors of the millepores and the madrepores. Montgomery, in his "Pelican Island," has thus embalmed the fable:

Fig. 42. The Paper Nautilus (Argonauta Argo).

66

Light as a flake of foam upon the wind,

Keel upward, from the deep emerged a shell,
Shaped like the moon ere half her orb is filled.
Fraught with young life, it righted as it rose,
And moved at will along the yielding wave.
The native pilot of this little bark

Put out a tier of oars on either side,

Spread to the wafting breeze a twofold sail,
And mounted up and glided down the billow
In happy freedom, pleased to feel the air,
And wonder in the luxury of light."

It seems a pity to spoil so pretty a fable, and one, too, that has lived since the days of Aristotle. But the fable of the argonaut has been spoiled by the industry of a lady.

Madame Jeannette Power, a French lady residing in Sicily, has transmitted to the learned societies of Europe accounts of observations made by herself upon the argonaut of the Mediterranean,

which prove that the "native pilot" is the rightful and original owner of the "little bark," while the latter, in

stead of being de

voted to the pur

poses of fairy navigation, is but a coat

of mail for protection against ugly foes, and the "two

Fig. 43. The Paper Nautilus (Argonauta Argo), with the arms of the animal extended.

fold sail" is the "mantle" extended over the animal's back, a secretion from which forms and enlarges the shell with the growth of the animal. The propulsive power of the animal, instead of Æolian breezes, is a jet of water squirted from a tube or "funnel," which, like a rocket-power, drives the argonaut backward; and its "tier of oars” is used with the animal inverted, crawling, like a snail, with his house upon his back.

Something still more familiar to every reader is the "cuttle-fish bone," which the apothecary sells for canaries. This substance is not a "bone," and does not come from a "fish," but is a rudimentary shell formed beneath the skin which covers the back of a molluscous animal. The calamaries are similar to the cuttle-fishes, but their shell is horny instead of stony. The poulp, or cuttle-fish of the southern coast of Europe, has been longest known. It was called "polypus" by Homer and Aristotle, because it has

many feet or arms. The aspect of all these animals is strange and uncouth (Fig. 44). Their staring eyes, their

Fig. 44. The Eight-armed Cuttle-fish (front view).

long and flexible arms, and their formidable pair of sharp and horny mandibles, combine to render them unpleasant.