“Not unfrequently one of these tiny vessels comes so close alongside that by means of the ship’s bucket, with the assistance of a smart fellow who has jumped into the ‘chains’ with a boat‐hook, it is captured and brought on deck for examination. A dozen voices are, however, lifted, warning you by no means to touch it, for well the experienced sailor knows its terrible powers of defence. It does not now appear so like a ship as when it was at a distance. It is an oblong bladder of tough membrane, varying considerably in shape, for no two agree in this respect; varying also in size, from less than an inch to the size of a man’s hat. Once, on a voyage to Mobile, when rounding the Florida reef, I was nearly a whole day passing through a fleet of these little Portuguese men‐of‐war, which studded the smooth sea as far as the eye could reach, and must have extended for many miles.” It is often to be seen on the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, brought thither by the Gulf Stream. [Illustration: PHYSALIA ANTARCTICA.] The Physalia is the natural enemy of the cuttle‐fish and the flying‐fish. One an inch in length will numb and kill a fish larger than a herring. “Each tentacle, by a movement as rapid as a flash of light, or sudden as an electric shock, seizes and benumbs them, winding round their bodies as a serpent winds itself round its victim.” Mr. Bennet, who accompanied the expedition under Admiral Fitzroy as naturalist, describes them as seizing their prey by means of the tentacles, which are alternately contracted to half an inch, and then shot out with amazing velocity to several feet, dragging the helpless and entangled prey to the sucker‐like mouth and stomach‐like cavities among the tentacles. Others have observed bold little fish unharmed among the feelers, a proof that even a Physalia can be good‐natured sometimes. An attendant satellite of the Physalia is the Velella, a smaller animal of the same family, especially abundant in tropical seas, but often seen elsewhere. It also possesses stinging powers. It is to the moderns we must look for anything like scientific study of these lower forms of Nature. The later poets, too, have caught the spirit of the age, and in some phases their utterances are artistically truer, and therefore truer to nature, than those of the merely _hard_ scientists. Crabbe has beautifully described this boon of our age, the study of Nature aided by the light of science. It is nowadays the privilege as well as it is to the profit of any intelligent person—