The white coral of two kinds (Lophohelia and Amphihelia) is accompanied by beautiful purple and salmon-coloured softer kinds of coral (Alcyonarians), known as Primnoa, and by the gigantic Paragorgia. On one occasion our dredge became fast. For long nothing would move it, and we feared we should have to cut it and lose some 300 fathoms of rope. At last the efforts of four men at the oars set it free, and we wound it in. As the dredge came up we found entangled in the rope an enormous tree-like growth, as thick as a man's arm, seven feet long, and spreading out into branches, the whole of a pale vermilion colour (like pink lacquer)--a magnificent sight! It was a branch of the great tree-coral of these waters--the Paragorgia--and we preserved many pieces of it in alcohol and dried the rest. But the gorgeous colour could not be retained. One day the green worm, Hamingia (named after a Norwegian hero--Haming) was dredged by us at the mouth of Lervik Harbour, in 40 fathoms. A somewhat similar worm lives in holes in the limestone rocks of the Mediterranean, and is named Bonellia (after the Italian naturalist, Bonelli). All the specimens of this Mediterranean worm, which is as large as a big walnut, and has a trunk, or proboscis, a foot long, were found to be females. The male was unknown until my friend the late Alexander Kowalewsky, the most remarkable of Russian zoologists, discovered that it is a tiny threadlike green creature, no bigger than the letter "i" on this page. Three or four are found crawling about on the body of the large female. I found the same diminutive kind of male crawling on my Norwegian Hamingia, at Lervik, and published a drawing and description of him. I was also able to show that, unlike Bonellia, the Norwegian worm has red blood-corpuscles, like those of a frog, and impregnated with hæmoglobin, the same oxygen-carrying substance which colours our own blood-corpuscles. The identity of the worm's hæmoglobin with that in our own blood was proved by its causing two dark bands of absorption in the solar spectrum when light was passed through it and then through the spectroscope--dark bands exactly the same in position and intensity as those caused by the red substance of my own blood and changing into one single band intermediate in position between the two--when deprived by an appropriate chemical of the oxygen loosely combined with it. [Illustration: On the Fiord near Lervik.] Of many other things we caught and many other delights of that long-past summer on the Norwegian fiords, of the great waterfalls, the vast forests, the delightful swimming in the sea, the trout-fishing, and the very trying food approved and provided for us by the natives, I must not now tell. My hope is that I may have enabled my readers to understand some of the enjoyment open to the marine zoologist, even when he dispenses with the aid of a big steamship, and modestly pursues his quarry in a sportsmanlike spirit. CHAPTER II NATURE-RESERVES