But notwithstanding these ogre-like attributes, the lovely _Actinia_ long deceived our naturalists as to its true nature—and of course the poets—from whom his flower-like disc and petaloid tentacles completely concealed his grosser nature. Then, as the tide recedes, he so meekly closes his beautiful _oubliette_, with so much grace, and looking so much like those shrinking flowers that close at eve, as though they dared not to look on the black darkness of the night, that it is no wonder poets were beguiled, and that the romantic Southey sings of the _Actinia_ as of some lily of the deep that, on the retiring of the ocean, “Sinks down within its purple stem to sleep.” To add to the wonders of this strange landscape come the creeping _Nudibranchs_ and _Tectibranchs_, gliding over the gracefully-waving _Algæ_; their elegant forms decorated with their external breathing apparatus, like the pale skeleton of some delicate flower, so fine are its milk-white filaments, arranged nearly always in a symmetrical and star-like form. And then there are the singular and shadowy _Medusæ_ floating past, in the form of parachutes, with low suspended cars, just as though the science of ballooning had been carried to perfection under the sea; and that they were made of elastic glass, instead of silk, though richly flushed with iridescent and varying tinges, sometimes metallic azure, and anon emerald green; hues that seem added by some delicate process which the glass-blowers above the water have not yet discovered. Some of these creatures are fragile as a soap-bubble, to which their transparency and prismatic flashes of colour give them a curious resemblance; and their ephemeral existence, dependent upon the will of even an angry ripple of the element in which they live, is doubtless as brief. The deep has even its butterflies, as well as the land. The fluttering of the fins of some small and brightly-coloured fish has been compared to the action of the wings of moths—as also the members, likewise used for locomotive purposes, of some of the animals of the univalve shells. Then there are minute phosphorescent animals, which represent the fire-flies of the south, pouring a living flood of light as they glide along—some emitting silvery, and others golden flashes, like floating lamps that seem hurrying to light up the darkness of the far ocean depths. Even the worms are gorgeous and wonderful in this subaqueous world. The _Serpulæ_, with their radiating coronets of crimson _branchiæ_; the _Pectinaria_, with its golden comb, glittering in burnished brightness; and the _Nereis_, with white and crimson stripes—are all wonderful as well as beautiful objects. But the _Halithea_, or sea-goddess, as Lamark has named it, from the extraordinary beauty and the gorgeous colours that radiate from the silky hairs with which it is clothed, surpasses them all.