but they grow to a much larger size, some of them measuring eighteen, twenty, or even twenty-four inches across the disc, and thick and heavy in proportion, large enough, when fresh from the sea, to fill a tub of considerable size. If one of these wretches comes in contact with the human skin, it is found to sting like a nettle, only much more severely, and hence its scientific name. A swimmer stung by contact with an acaleph feels not only the cruel smarting of the nettle-like and burning stinging, but he is in a few minutes frequently overcome by a feeling of languor and sickness, that lasts for a considerable time, and is sometimes only relieved by a violent fit of vomiting, just as if he was a sufferer for the moment under the influence of a powerful emetic. We have more than once been stung by an acaleph, and can speak feelingly on the subject. Only last season a boy on the opposite coast of Appin was, while bathing, so severely stung by one or more acalephs that he was for some days confined to bed, seriously ill, and under medical treatment. This power of stinging seems to be a wise provision in the economy of the animal, for the purpose of rendering helpless and numbing its prey, to make them easier of capture and subsequent deglutition, just as the Mysotis, or electric eel, with like purpose puts to a very important and practical use its electro-battery shocks. The true acaleph may generally be distinguished from the more harmless jelly-fish by having a good deal of colour in its tissues, being striated with red, pink, and pale green, which gives it a very beautiful appearance as under the bright sunlight it floats about, contracting and expanding with the regularity of a pendulum beat, near the surface of the calm, unruffled sea. The amount of solid matter in a jelly-fish of any kind, however large, is amazingly small. Within a thin, filmy skin, they are entirely made up of water, with a few threads spider-net-wise running through it to keep it in shape, like the ropes on which was stretched the immense velarium of an ancient amphitheatre. After a summer storm we have seen the sea-beach covered with a considerable wall of jelly-fish that had been cast ashore, a yard in breadth, perhaps, and a couple of feet in height; and before the evening of the next day, during which the sun shone out hot and clear, the whole had melted away like so much snow, leaving only a thin film of gelatinous matter, which, if gathered together in a single heap, wouldn't have filled our venerable but still useful "Clachnacuddin" hat. There is a good story told of a farmer, somewhere from the altitudes of Druimuachdar, who took some land by the sea, not a hundred yards from our own neighbourhood. One morning he saw the beach covered with a deep ring of jelly-fish as above, and being an eident body, he got his horses and carts in order, and commenced to cart them afield, in the belief that they could not but prove excellent manure for the land.