On these islands, as Arthur Adams tells us, the seals sport, the spoonbill, quail, curlew, titmouse, wagtail, teal, crane and innumerable birds thrive. The woody peaks are rich in game, and the shores are happy hunting-grounds for the naturalist. Sponges are very plentiful, and in some places may be gathered in any quantity. There are a number of well-marked species. Some are flat and split into numerous ribbon-like branches, others are round and finger-shaped, some cylindrical, and others like hollow tubes. Though some have dense white foliations, hard or horny, others are loose and flexible, and await only the hand of the diver. The Corean toilet requisites perhaps do not include these useful articles, which lie waste in the sea. The coral-beds are also very splendid in their living tints of green, blue, violet, and yellow, and appear, as you look down upon them through the clear transparent water, to form beautiful flower-gardens of marine plants. In these submarine parterres, amid the protean forms of the branched corals, huge madrepores, brain-shaped, flat, or headed like gigantic mushrooms, are interspersed with sponges of the deepest red and huge star-fishes of the richest blue. Seals sport and play unharmed on many of the islands, and the sea-beach is at times blue with the bodies of lively crabs. An unfailing storehouse of marine food is found in this archipelago. The eight provinces take their names from their two chief cities, as Mr. Carles has shown. Whang Hai Dō, for instance, is formed by uniting the initial syllables of the largest cities, Whang-chiu and Hai-chiu. In the case of Chulla-Dō, the Chon and Nai in Chon-chiu and Nai-chiu (or Chung-jiu and Na-jiu) become, by euphony, Chulla or Cholla. Hamel tells of the great cayman or “alligator,” as inhabiting this region, asserting that it was “eighteen or twenty ells long,” with “sixty joints in the back,” and able to swallow a man. [8] The soil of Chulla is rich and well cultivated, and large quantities of rice and grain are shipped to the capital. The wide valleys afford juicy pasture for the herds of cattle that furnish the beef diet which the Coreans crave more than the Japanese. The visiting or shipwrecked foreign visitors on the coast speak in terms of highest praise of fat bullocks, and juicy steaks which they have eaten. Considerable quantities of hides, bones, horns, leather, and tallow now form a class of standard exports to Japan, whose people now wear buttons and leather shoes. As a beef market, Corea exceeds either China or Japan—a point of importance to the large number of foreigners living at the ports, who require a flesh diet. Troops of horses graze on the pasture lands.