But, however high or low the degree in the scale, one distinguishing feature marks the vital creation in vegetable or animal—­an intelligence capable of adjusting itself to the elements about it, and electing its food.  The sunflower, even, does not follow the sun by a mechanical law, but, growing by a fair, bright sheet of water, looks as constantly at that shining surface for the beloved light as ever did the fabled Greek boy at his own image in the fountain.  The tendrils of the vine seek and choose their own support, and the thirsty spongioles of the root find the nourishing veins of water.  Growth, says a naturalist, is the conscious motion of vegetable life.  But this theory of kinship, imperfect in the plant, becomes plain and distinct in the animate creation.  However far removed, the wild dolphin at play and the painted bird in the air are cousins of man, with a responsive chord of sympathy connecting them.

It is this feeling that sends an exhilarating thrill through the submarine explorer when a school of porpoises frisk by with undulating grace, the marine type of a group of frolicking children.  It is the instinctive perception that it is a pure enjoyment to the fish, the healthy glow and laugh of submarine existence.  But for that sense of sympathetic nature the flying-fish, reeling porpoise and dolphin would be no more to him than the skipping shuttle in a weaver’s loom, the dull impetus of senseless machinery.  Self-generated motion is the outward and visible sign of vitality—­its wanton exercise the symbol and expression of enjoyment.  The poor philosopher who distinguished humanity as singular in the exhibition of humor had surely never heard a mocking-bird sing, watched a roguish crow or admired a school of fish.

This keen appreciation of a kindred life in the sea has thrown its charm over the poetry and religion of all races.  Ocean us leaves the o’erarching floods and rocky grottoes at the call of bound Prometheus; Cyrene, with her nymphs, sits in the cool Peneus, where comes Aristaeus mourning for his stolen bees; the Druid washed his hedge-hyssop in the sacred water, and priestesses lived on coral reefs visited by remote lovers in their sundown seas; Schiller’s diver goes into the purpling deep and sees the Sea-Horror reaching out its hundred arms; the beautiful Undine is the vivid poetry of the sea.  Every fountain has its guardian saint or nymph, and to this day not only the German peasant and benighted English boor thrill at the sight of some nymph-guarded well, but the New Mexican Indian offers his rude pottery in propitiation of the animate existence, the deity of the purling spring.

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“Der Taucher,” for all the rhythm and music that clothes his luckless plunge, was but a caitiff knight to some of our submarine adventurers.  A diver during the bay-fight in Mobile harbor had reason to apprehend a more desperate encounter.  A huge cuttle-fish, the marine monster of Pliny and Victor Hugo, had been seen in the water.  His tough, sinuous, spidery arms, five fathoms long, wavered visibly in the blue transparent gulf,