What scenery is formed by that translucent and miniature forest of _Delesseria sanguinea_, how lovely in its tones of soft rich crimson; and those fan-like shrubs, in crisply graceful tufts, the bright and singular _Padina pavonia_; and the tree-like masses of _Callithamnion arbuscula_, and the delicate _Ptilota plumosa_, and the purple-tinted _Corallines_, forming those “Arborets of jointed stone.” And then the high waving fronds of the grandly graceful _Porphyra vulgaris_, the deep carmine of the _Iridæa edulis_, the nacreous tinges of the _Chondrus crispus_, and the blood-red of the splendid _Rhodymenia lacinata_, with its embroidered and lace-like edges; these, with the gorgeous tufts of the rich purple _Bangia_, and other objects which form the elements of still life in a submarine landscape, surely cannot be surpassed, either for magnificence of colour or variety of structure. But to these features must be added others more extraordinary—forms that the elder naturalists imagined to be links between the animal and vegetable creation, but which are now known to have no affinity whatever with plants, though they exhibit the appearance of expanded flowers of various hues, displaying the forms of the Carnation, the Anemone, the Mesembryanthemum, and other beautiful flowers whose names they bear. These curiously beautiful Zoöphytes, the wonderful _Actiniæ_, exhibit every tone of colour, from purple and scarlet, to green and white, and might be taken in their picturesquely-placed groups for rare exotic flowers, planted among the rosy-tinted shrubs expressly to add the last touch of richness and effect to the scenery of an ocean flower-show. Yet they are not flowers, but animals—sea monsters, whose seeming delicate petals are but their thousand Briarean arms, disguised as the petals of a flower, and expanded to seize the unconscious victim as he passes near the beautiful form—fatal to him as the crater of a volcano; in which he is soon engulphed by the closing tentacles of his unsuspected enemy. And if he pass not near enough for that deadly floral embrace, those pretty crimson tubercles that dot so gracefully the seeming stalk, beneath the seeming flower, can shoot forth a thread, armed, like the fisher’s line, with a barbed hook, which strikes and secures the distant prey; and so the unwary _Annelid_ or _Infusory_ is captured and devoured. In this capacity the creature has been compared to Pope’s spider, who “Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.” But then the living thread of the _Actinia_ (or of the _Cirriped_, which has a similar power) is a fact, while the sensitive gossamer of the poet is a fiction.