(_Invertebrate Animals._) "There is a kind of character in thy life That to th' observer doth thy history Fully unfold.----" (_Shakspeare._) Leaving the vegetable kingdom, those organisms which, though beautiful indeed and instructive, are yet inanimate, let us seek others which are endowed with a higher style of life, a life which is distinguished by a measure of consciousness of the exterior world, and a perception of relations to it. Let us look for animals. We retrace our steps to the verge of the rippling sea, where the belt of umbrageous Mangroves fringes its margin. Beneath the arching roots of these are now reposing in the warm sunlit shallows many creatures which number this as the first day of their existence. It is their natal, or rather (to make a word) their _creatal_ day. Here is a specimen of the Sea-pen (_Pennatula_), closely resembling a rather thick and fleshy feather, with its quill-end inserted in the tenacious marl which constitutes the floor of the sea along this shore, and with the greater part of its body, including all the pinnated portion, erect, and waving lightly in the gentle swell of the bay. Its central stem is beset on each side with about twenty-five horizontal purple pinnae, and each pinna bears from five to fifteen polypes with eight tentacles each. Let us wade out to yonder reef. See this great mass of Millepore, growing in thin irregular perpendicular plates, which join each other at various angles, so as to form a large open honeycomb-like structure, much resembling the second stomach of an ox. It is covered with what appears a thin stratum of fawn-coloured jelly, but this consists of innumerable disks, which protrude from myriads of orifices not larger than those produced by the punctures of a fine needle; as we may discern by touching the soft slimy surface, when the whole retires, and leaves apparent only the white stony surface dotted with numberless holes, within which the disks have disappeared, and whence they will again presently re-appear. Here too is a massive shrub of stone, a noble example of the Muricated Madrepore. It consists of a great multitude of short tranches, which are themselves branched and branched again, every part covered with little mammillary warts, and pierced with innumerable holes in which stand radiating plates of the common stone. Out of these plated orifices, especially those towards the tips of the branches, for the older ones are empty and dead, we see perpetually peeping forth, expanding for an instant, and then coyly withdrawing, lovely little green disks, surrounded with thread-like tentacles; and from the extreme end of each branch there protrudes one exactly similar to the rest in all respects, except that it is nearly twice as large. Here then are the living architects; these have secreted within their gelatinous membranes the calcareous atoms, whose aggregate forms the stony shrub before us.