The view on the surface was even more magnificent. The sea at first assumed the light tawny or yellowish red of sherry wine. Anon this wine-color grew instinct with richer radiance: as far as eye could see, and flashing in the crystalline splendor of the Arabian sun, was a glorious sea of rose. The dusky red sandstone hills, with a border of white sand and green and flowered foliage, like an elaborately wrought cup of Bohemian glass enameled with brilliant flowers, held the sparkling liquid petals of that rosy sea. The surface, on examination, proved to be covered with a thin brickdust layer of infusoriae slightly tinged with orange. Placed in a white glass bottle, this changed to a deep violet, but the wide surface of the external sea was of that magnificent and brilliant rose-color. It was a new and pleasing example of the lustrous, ever-varying beauty of the ocean world. It was caused by diatomaceae, minute algae, which under the microscope revealed delicate threads gathered in tiny bundles, and containing rings, like blood-disks, of that curious coloring-matter in tiny tubes. This miracle of beauty is not without its analogies in other seas. The medusae of the Arctic seas, an allied existence, people the ultramarine blue of the cold, pure sea with vivid patches of living green thirty miles in diameter. These minute organisms are doubly curious from their power of astonishing reproduction and the strange electric fire they display. Minute as these microscopic creatures are, every motion and flash is the result of volition, and not a mere chemic or mechanic phosphorescence. The _Photocaris_ lights a flashing cirrus, on being irritated, in brilliant kindling sparks, increasing in intensity until the whole organism is illuminated. The living fire washes over its back, and pencils in greenish-yellow light its microscopic outline. Nor do these little creatures lack a beauty of their own. Their minute shields of pure translucent silex are elaborately wrought in microscopic symbols of mimic heraldry. They are the chivalry of the deep, the tiny knights with lance and cuirass, and oval bossy shield carved in quaint conceits and ornamental fashion. Nor must we despise them when we reflect upon their power of accretion. The _Gallionellae_, invisible to the naked eye, can, of their heraldic shields and flinty armor, make two cubic feet of Bilin polishing slate in four days. By straining sea-water, a web of greenish cloth of gold, illuminated by their play of self-generated electric light, has been collected. Humboldt and Ehrenberg speak of their voracity, their power of discharging electricity at will, and their sporting about, exhibiting an intelligent enjoyment of the life God has given to them. Man and his works perish, but the monuments of the infusoriae are the flinty ribs of the sea, the giant bones of huge continents, heaped into mountain-ranges over which the granite and porphyry have set their stony seal for ever. Man thrives in his little