They are also of all kinds and shapes. Many of umbrella-shape have, in place of a handle, bundles of fleshy tentacles hanging down below, and thin streamers reaching to a length of a hundred feet. Some are more like saucers or bowls. Others of longer and narrower make have been likened to large thimbles. Some are ribbon-like beings, moving in graceful serpentine folds. Others have the outlines of elegant tubes. Many, again, are like little inverted delicate shrubs, or fairy-seaweed fronds, hanging downward. Some carry sail upon the surface of the water. While all are of a more or less jelly-like substance, some are so frail and watery that they can only be lifted out of the sea in a pail. Any other mode causes them to drop to pieces. But the most wonderful and beautiful characteristic of the jelly-fish is that of its self-illuminating power. Here is a description of one kind, found in the Atlantic, near the coast of North America:-- “Objects of more exquisite beauty than some of these hydroid-medusæ do not perhaps exist. Each minute crystal chalice, with its beautifully curved outline, elongated delicate tentacles, gently coiling and uncoiling, and its slender proboscis which hangs like a lamp in the centre, lighting it with a soft phosphorescent glow, is the very type of delicate beauty, suggesting the wonders of fairyland.”[4] [4] J. S. KINGSLEY. And here is another description, no less striking; not this time of a floating medusa, but of a small coral-zoophyte, about ten inches long, common in the Mediterranean and in the Atlantic:-- “Nothing can exceed the beauty of the elegant opaline polyps of this zoophyte when fully expanded, and clustered like flowers on their orange-coloured stalk; a beauty, however, almost equalled by night when, on the slightest irritation, the whole colony glows from one extremity to the other with undulating waves of pale green phosphoric light. A large bucketful of these Alcyonaria was experimentally stirred up one evening, and the luminosity evolved produced a spectacle too brilliant for words to describe. The supporting stem appeared always to be the chief seat of these phosphorescent properties, and from thence the scintillations travelled onward to the bodies of the polyps themselves.”[5] [5] _Corals and Coral Islands_, by DANA. Travellers in all ages have described the marvellous illuminations seen at night on the ocean surface; illuminations long a mystery to those who gazed with admiration. At times the whole sea is one blaze of light; and the ship cleaves her way through liquid silver, or crimson glory, through milky whiteness or flames of blue and red.