Already, in the north of Africa, over the other side of the Cape, the vegetable kingdom, which reigns alone in the temperate zone, sees itself rivalled, surpassed. The great enchantment progresses, increases, as we near the Equator. On the land,--tree, shrub, flower, weed, are proud and gorgeous, flaming in every bright color, delicate in every soft shade, and beneath the waters' slime and the ruddy corals. Beside parterres, that display rainbow beauties of every color and every tint, commence the stone plants; the madrepores, whose branches (should we not rather say their hands and fingers?) flourish in a rose-tinted snow; like peach or apple blossoms. Seven hundred leagues on either side of the Equator, you sail through this faëry land of magical illusion and wondrous beauty. There are doubtful creatures, the Corallines, for instance, that are claimed by all the three kingdoms. They tend towards the animal, they tend towards the mineral, and, finally, are assigned to the vegetable. Perchance they form the real point at which Life obscurely and mysteriously rises from the slumber of the stone, without utterly quitting that rude starting-point, as if to remind us, so high placed and so haughty, of the right of even the humble mineral to rise into animation, and of the deep and eternal aspiration that lies buried, but busy, in the bosom of Nature. "The fields and forests of our dry land," says Darwin, "appear sterile and empty, if we compare them with those of the sea." And, in fact, all who traverse the marvellous transparent Indian seas are thrilled, stirred, startled, by the phantasmagoria that flashes up from their far clear depths. Especially surprising is the interchange between animal and vegetable life of their especial and characteristic appearances. The soft impressible gelatinous plants, with rounded organs, that are neither precisely leaves nor precisely stalks, the delicacy of their animal curves--those Hogarthian "lines of beauty," seem to ask us to believe that they are veritable animals, while the real animals, on the other hand, in form, in color, in all, seem to do their utmost to be mistaken for vegetables. Each kingdom skilfully imitates the other. These have the solidity, the quasi permanence, of the tree; the others alternately expand and fade like the evanescent flower. Thus the sea Anemone opens as a roseate and pearly flower, or as a granite star with deep blue eyes; but when her corollæ have given forth an Anemone daughter, you see the fair mother droop, fade, die.