Then look at the Hyalonemas, or glass-rope ocean floor by a twisted wisp of strong flexible flint needles, somewhat on the principle of a screw-pile. So strange and complicated is their structure, that naturalists for a long while could literally make neither head nor tail of them, as long as they had only Japanese specimens to study, some of which the Japanese dealers had, of malice prepense, stuck upside down into Pholas-borings in stones. Which was top and which bottom; which the thing itself, and which special parasites growing on it; whether it was a sponge, or a zoophyte, or something else; at one time even whether it was natural, or artificial and a make-up,—could not be settled, even till a year or two since. But the discovery of the same, or a similar, species in abundance from the Butt of the Lows down to Setubal on the Portuguese coast, where the deep-water shark fishers call it “sea-whip,” has given our savants specimens enough to make up their minds—that they really know little or nothing about it, and probably will never know. And do not forget, lastly, to ask, whether at Liverpool or at the British Museum, for the Holtenias and their congeners,—hollow sponges built up of glassy spicules, and rooted in the mud by glass hairs, in some cases between two and three feet long, as flexible and graceful as tresses of snow-white silk. Look at these, and a hundred kindred forms, and then see how nature is not only “maxima in minimis”—greatest in her least, but often “pulcherrima in abditis”—fairest in her most hidden works; and how the Creative Spirit has lavished, as it were, unspeakable artistic skill on lowly-organized creature, never till now beheld by man, and buried, not only in foul mud, but in their own unsightly heap of living jelly. But so it was from the beginning;—and this planet was not made for man alone. Countless ages before we appeared on earth the depths of the old chalk-ocean teemed with forms as beautiful and perfect as those, their lineal descendants, which the dredge now brings up from the Atlantic sea-floor; and if there were—as my reason tells me that there must have been—final moral causes for their existence, the only ones which we have a right to imagine are these—that all, down to the lowest Rhizopod, might delight themselves, however dimly, in existing; and that the Lord might delight Himself in them.