The fact of this inequality has been throughout life a valuable lesson to me, _i.e._ that a punishment which will nearly, if not quite, kill one man, will be no punishment at all to another. Of course I cannot answer for the effects of these very minute cnidæ upon others, but I can state that they nearly killed _me_, and that if I had been forced to swim another hundred yards, I should have collapsed, sunk, and had a coroner’s jury return a verdict of “Found drowned in consequence of cramp.” On me the effects were as follows:--First a slight, and then a severe, tingling on the parts which had been struck. Then sharp, darting pangs. Then a sudden shock as if a bullet had passed through the breast from one side to the other. Consequent collapse, and suspension of the office of both heart and lungs. I once had to walk nearly two miles after being stung by one of these dread animals, and how often I fell before reaching my lodgings I dare not say, but certainly once in every two hundred yards. Even after partial recovery I should not have known my own face. It was that of an old and wearied man of seventy, grey, wrinkled, and withered; and many months elapsed before I felt myself sure that the weird-like bullet would not drive through my breast, and leave me lying on the ground gasping and speechless. These dreaded tentacles can sting as fiercely when separated from the animal as when they are conjoined to it, as I can also testify from personal experience. I have a natural alacrity in damaging myself, and there is scarcely a representative bone in the body that I have not fractured or dislocated, or both. Fortunately the cerebral vertebræ have hitherto escaped. I have broken the right leg, right arm, two ribs, and right collar-bone; dislocated the right ankle, and smashed nearly every bone of the right hand. At present, the damage to the left side is restricted to two ribs; and I hope that the Genius of Ossifraction may now be content with his work. But I equally seem to have a natural affinity for the tentacles of the Stangers, which deliver their envenomed darts just as fiercely when they are separated from the Medusa as when they are connected with it.