around the rocks which they make alive and vocal by their numbers and their clanging cries. "We shall behold new wonders and riches when we investigate the sea-shore. We shall find both beauty for the eye and food for the body, in the varieties of shell-fish which adhere in myriads to the rocks or form their close dark burrows in the sands. In some parts of the world we shall see those houses of stone which the little coral-insect rears up with patient industry from the bottom of the waters, till they grow into formidable rocks and broad forests whose branches never wave and whose leaves never fall. In other parts we shall see those pale, glistening pearls which adorn the crowns of princes and are woven in the hair of beauty, extorted by the relentless grasp of man from the hidden stores of ocean. And spread round every coast there are beds of flowers and thickets of plants, which the dew does not nourish, and which man has not sown, nor cultivated, nor reaped, but which seem to belong to the floods alone and the denizens of the floods, until they are thrown up by the surges, and we discover that even the dead spoils of the fields of ocean may fertilize and enrich the fields of earth. They have a life, and a nourishment, and an economy of their own; and we know little of them, except that they are there, in their briny nurseries, reared up into luxuriance by what would kill, like a mortal poison, the vegetation of the land. "There is mystery in the sea. There is mystery in its depths. It is unfathomed, and, perhaps, unfathomable. Who can tell, who shall know, how near its pits run down to the central core of the world? Who can tell what wells, what fountains, are there, to which the fountains of the earth are but drops? Who shall say whence the ocean derives those inexhaustible supplies of salt which so impregnate its waters that all the rivers of the earth, pouring into it from the time of the creation, have not been able to freshen them? What undescribed monsters, what unimaginable shapes, may be roving in the profoundest places of the sea, never seeking--and perhaps, from their nature, never able to seek--the upper waters and expose themselves to the gaze of man! What glittering riches, what heaps of gold, what stores of gems, there must be scattered in lavish profusion in the ocean's lowest bed! What spoils from all climates, what works of art from all lands, have been engulfed by the insatiable and reckless waves! Who shall go down to examine and reclaim this uncounted and idle wealth? Who bears the keys of the deep?