singular clearness of the medium removes that lovely violet drapery which surrounds like a pavilion the submarine palace, and allows a wider scope of vision.  But the scene here is not the play of sunbeams or the magic glory of the prismal waters.  Form adds its grace to the loveliness of color and the play of light and shadow.  The structures, the work of astraea, madrepores, andreas and meandrinas, bear a singular resemblance to fabrications of the architect.  One massive dome or archway, a hundred feet in diameter, rises to the surface.  Its front is carved in elaborate tracery and crusted with serpulae, looking like the fret-and flower-work that covers Saracenic architecture.  Looking through this into the violet ambuscade, the eye falls upon colonnades, light slender shafts a foot in diameter, that seem to support the paly-golden, lustrous roof.  It is curiously like a vast temple, spreading every way in vault and colonnade, on which religious enthusiasm or barbaric royalty has worked with a reckless waste of art and labor.  Nor is it the cold and shapely beauty of the stone:  it seems to be a temple built of many-colored glass.  To understand the magnificence of the wonderful structure, the reader must have in mind the laws affecting light in transmission through water—­the frangibility of the rays, the frequent alternations in dispersion, reflection, interference and accidental and complementary color.  He must recollect that every indentation, every twist of stony serpulae or fluting of the zoophyte catches the light and divides and splinters it into radiance, burning with a fringe of silver fire or flashing steel.  When the mind has conceived of that, there is to add the vivid beauty of the living coral, its hue of molten colored glass spreading a radiant mucus over the stony skeleton.

But he has not yet entered into an entire conception of its loveliness.  The arborescent and phaenogamous forms of the coral are to be noticed.  Here is a plant:  it has a pale, gray-blue stalk, and all over it are delicate green leaves, fronds or tentacles, as you please to call them.  There is a fan-shaped shrub whose starry fronds recall the Chaemerops serrulata of the adjacent shore.  The ament, so to speak, of the Parasmilia centralis, the catkin of the sea, recalls its terrene counterpart.  There are other flowers in fascicles and corymbs.  The rose is not lacking, but glows with the radiant beauty of its petaliferous sister; the columnar trunks of stony trees, covered with green, flossy mosses, are scattered about; and fresh fountains gush from the rocks, the white water as clearly distinguishable from the ultramarine as in the upper atmosphere.[1]