“It is a beautiful and fascinating sight for those who have never seen it before, to see the little shrubberies of pink coralline—‘the arborets of jointed stone’—that fringe those pretty pools. It is a charming sight to see the crimson banana-like leaves of the Delesseria waving in their darkest corners; and the purple fibrous tufts of Polysiphonia and Ceramia, ‘fine as silkworm’s thread.’ But there are many others which give variety and impart beauty to these tide-pools. The broad leaves of the Ulva, finer than the finest cambric, and of the brightest emerald-green, adorn the hollows at the highest level, while, at the lowest, wave tiny forests of the feathery Ptilota and Dasya, and large leaves, cut into fringes and furbelows, of rosy Rhodymeniæ. All these are lovely to behold; but I think I admire as much as any of them, one of the commonest of our marine plants, Chondrus crispus. It occurs in the greatest profusion on this coast, in every pool between tide-marks; and everywhere—except in those of the highest level, where constant exposure to light dwarfs the plant, and turns it of a dull umber-brown tint—it is elegant in form and brilliant in colour. The expanding fan-shaped fronds, cut into segments, cut, and cut again, make fine bushy tufts in a deep pool, and every segment of every frond reflects a flush of the most lustrous azure, like that of a tempered sword-blade.”—GOSSE’S _Devonshire Coast_, pp. 187–189. And the sea-bottom, also, has its zones, at different depths, and its peculiar forms in peculiar spots, affected by the currents and the nature of the ground, the riches of which have to be seen, alas! rather by the imagination than the eye; for such spoonfuls of the treasure as the dredge brings up to us, come too often rolled and battered, torn from their sites and contracted by fear, mere hints to us of what the populous reality below is like. Often, standing on the shore at low tide, has one longed to walk on and in under the waves, as the water-ousel does in the pools of the mountain burn, and see it all but for a moment; and a solemn beauty and meaning has invested the old Greek fable of Glaucus the fisherman: how eating of the herb which gave his fish strength to leap back into their native element, he was seized on the spot with a strange longing to follow them under the waves, and became for ever a companion of the fair semi-human forms with which the Hellenic poets peopled their sunny bays and firths, feeding “silent flocks” far below on the green Zostera beds, or basking with them on the sunny ledges in the summer noon, or wandering in the still bays on sultry nights amid the choir of Amphitrite and her sea-nymphs:— “Joining the bliss of the gods, as they waken the coves with their laughter,” in nightly revels, whereof one has sung,—