The alluring softness of this mimic world increases to sublimity when, instead of some rocky basin, dripping with mossy emeralds and coral berries, you look upon the deep crystalline sea.  Each mates to its kind.  This does not gather its imagery from gray, mossy rock or pendent leaf or flower, but draws into its enfolding arms the wide vault of the cerulean sky.  The richness of the majestic azure is deepened by that magnificent marriage.  The pale blue is darkened to violet.  Far through the ever-varying surface of the curious gelatinous liquid breaks the phosphorescence, sprinkled into innumerable lights and cross-lights.  As you look upon those endless pastures thought is quickened with the conception of their innumerable phases of vitality.  The floating weed, whose meshes measure the spaces of continents and archipelagoes, is everywhere instinct with animal and vegetable life.  The builder coral, glimmering in its softer parts with delicate hues and tints, throws up its stony barrier through a thousand miles of length and a third as much in breadth, fringing the continents with bays and sounds and atoll islands like fairy rings of the sea.  Animate flowers—­sea-nettles, sea anemones, plumularia, campanularia, hydropores, confervae, oscillatoria, bryozoa—­people the great waters.  Sea-urchins, star-fish, sea-eggs, combative gymnoti, polypes, struggle and thrive with ever-renewing change of color; gelatinous worms that shine like stars cling to every weed; glimmering animalcules, phosphorescent medusae, the very deep itself is vivid with sparkle and corruscation of electric fire.  So through every scale, from the zoophyte to the warm-blooded whale, the sea teems with life, out of which fewer links have been dropped than from sub-aerial life.  It is a matter for curious speculation that the missing species belong not to the lower subsidiary genera, as in terrene animals, but to the highest types of marine life.  In the quarries of Lyme Regis, among the accumulations of a sea of the Liassic period, lay the huge skeleton of the Ichthyosaurus, a warm-blooded marine existence, with huge saucer eyes of singular telescopic power, that gleamed radiant “with the eyelids of the morning,” “by whose neesings alight doth shine”—­the true leviathan of Job.  In the same extinct sea is found the skeleton of the Plesiosaurus, a marine lizard of equal size, and warm-blooded, whose swan-like neck and body graced the serene seas of the pre-adamite world.  Another was that of the Pterodactyl, the antique aragon, a winged fish.  The task of sustaining these existences was too great for old Ocean, and the monsters dropped from the upper end of the chain into the encrusting mud, the petrified symbols of failure.  So one day man may drop into the limbo of vanities, among the abandoned tools in the Creator’s workshop.