There are a few other true cellepore corals round the coast. The largest of all, Cervicornis, may be dredged a few miles outside on the Exmouth bank, with a few more Tubulipores: but all tiny things, the lingering and, as it were, expiring remnants of that great coral-world which, through the abysmal depths of past ages, formed here in Britain our limestone hills, storing up for generations yet unborn the materials of agriculture and architecture. Inexpressibly interesting, even solemn, to those who will think, is the sight of those puny parasites which, as it were, connect the ages and the æons: yet not so solemn and full of meaning as that tiny relic of an older world, the little pear-shaped Turbinolia (cousin of the Madrepores and Sea-anemones), found fossil in the Suffolk Crag, and yet still lingering here and there alive in the deep water of Scilly and the west coast of Ireland, possessor of a pedigree which dates, perhaps, from ages before the day in which it was said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” To think that the whole human race, its joys and its sorrows, its virtues and its sins, its aspirations and its failures, has been rushing out of eternity and into eternity again, as Arjoon in the Bhagavad Gita beheld the race of men issuing from Kreeshna’s flaming mouth, and swallowed up in it again, “as the crowds of insects swarm into the flame, as the homeless streams leap down into the ocean bed,” in an everlasting heart-pulse whose blood is living souls—and all that while, and ages before that mystery began, that humble coral, unnoticed on the dark sea-floor, has been “continuing as it was at the beginning,” and fulfilling “the law which cannot be broken,” while races and dynasties and generations have been “Playing such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As make the angels weep.” Yes; it is this vision of the awful permanence and perfection of the natural world, beside the wild flux and confusion, the mad struggles, the despairing cries of the world of spirits which man has defiled by sin, which would at moments crush the naturalist’s heart, and make his brain swim with terror, were it not that he can see by faith, through all the abysses and the ages, not merely “Hands, From out the darkness, shaping man;” but above them a living loving countenance, human and yet Divine; and can hear a voice which said at first, “Let us make man in our image;” and hath said since then, and says for ever and for ever, “Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world.”