“When a vessel,” says Humboldt, “driven along by a fresh wind, divides the foaming waters, one never wearies of the lovely spectacle their agitation affords; for, whenever a wave makes the ship incline sidewise, bluish or reddish flames seem to shoot upward from the keel. Beautiful beyond description is the sight of a troop of dolphins gamboling in the phosphorescent sea. Every furrow they draw through the waters is marked by streaks of intense light. In the Gulf of Cariaco, between Cumana and the peninsula of Maniquarez, this scene has often delighted me for hours.” But even in the colder oceanic regions the brilliant phenomenon appears from time to time in its full glory. During a dark and stormy September night, on the way from the Sealion Island, Saint George, to Unalashka, Chamisso admired as beautiful a phosphorescence of the ocean as he had ever witnessed in the tropical seas. Sparks of light, remaining attached to the sails that had been wetted by the spray, continued to glow in another element. Near the south point of Kamtchatka, at a water temperature hardly above freezing point, Ermann saw the sea no less luminous than during a seven months’ sojourn in the tropical ocean. This distinguished traveler positively denies that warmth decidedly favors the luminosity of the sea. At Cape Colborn, one of the desolate promontories of the desolate Victoria Land, the phosphoric gleaming of the waves, when darkness closed in, was so intense that Simpson assures us he had seldom seen anything more brilliant. The boats seemed to cleave a flood of molten silver, and the spray, dashed from their bows before the fresh breeze, fell back in glittering showers into the deep. Mr. Charles Darwin paints in vivid colors the magnificent spectacle presented by the sea while sailing in the latitude of Cape Horn on a very dark night. There was a fresh breeze, and every part of the surface, which during the day is seen as foam, now glowed with a pale light. The vessel drove before her bows two billows of liquid phosphorus, and in her wake she was followed by a milky train. As far as the eye reached, the crest of every wave was bright, and the sky above the horizon, from the reflected glare of these livid flames, was not so utterly obscure as over the rest of the heavens. While _La Venus_ was at anchor before Simon’s Town, the breaking of the waves produced so strong a light that the room in which the naturalists of the expedition were seated was illumined as by sudden flashes of lightning. Although more than fifty paces from the beach when the phenomenon took place, they tried to read by this wondrous oceanic light, but the successive glimpses were of too short duration to gratify their wishes. Thus we see the same nocturnal splendor which shines forth in the tropical seas and gleams along our shores burst forth from the Arctic waters, and from the waves that bathe the southern promontories of the Old and the New Worlds.