back the deep as it were.  Then the tide came, thrust forward in accumulated volume, until it made a real wall of waters that stood up in a huge crested, angry foam.  It was sufficiently like to cause the explorer to apprehend the possibility of finding Pharaoh by traveling the same watery road.  Another question that has puzzled scholars found a solution in the American’s observation.  Smith’s Bible Dictionary discusses learnedly the name of this curious gulf, written [Greek:  ae eruthra thalassa] in the Septuagint.  The Dictionary surmises that the name was derived from the red western mountains, red coral zoophytes, etc., and appears to give little weight to the real and natural reason which came under our American’s notice.  On one occasion the diver observed, while under sea, that the curious wavering shadows, which cross the lustrous golden floor like Frauenhofer’s lines on the spectrum, began to change and lose themselves.  A purple glory of intermingled colors darkened the violet curtains of the sea-chambers, reddening all glints and tinges with an angry fire.  Instead of that lustrous, golden firmament, the thallassphere darkened to crimson and opal.  The walls grew purple, the floor as red as blood:  the deep itself was purpled with the venous hue of deoxidized life-currents.

The view on the surface was even more magnificent.  The sea at first assumed the light tawny or yellowish red of sherry wine.  Anon this wine-color grew instinct with richer radiance:  as far as eye could see, and flashing in the crystalline splendor of the Arabian sun, was a glorious sea of rose.  The dusky red sandstone hills, with a border of white sand and green and flowered foliage, like an elaborately wrought cup of Bohemian glass enameled with brilliant flowers, held the sparkling liquid petals of that rosy sea.  The surface, on examination, proved to be covered with a thin brickdust layer of infusoriae slightly tinged with orange.  Placed in a white glass bottle, this changed to a deep violet, but the wide surface of the external sea was of that magnificent and brilliant rose-color.  It was a new and pleasing example of the lustrous, ever-varying beauty of the ocean world.  It was caused by diatomaceae, minute algae, which under the microscope revealed delicate threads gathered in tiny bundles, and containing rings, like blood-disks, of that curious coloring-matter in tiny tubes.

This miracle of beauty is not without its analogies in other seas.  The medusae of the Arctic seas, an allied existence, people the ultramarine blue of the cold, pure sea with vivid patches of living green thirty miles in diameter.  These minute organisms are doubly curious from their power of astonishing reproduction and the strange electric fire they display.  Minute as these microscopic creatures are, every motion and flash is the result of volition, and not a mere chemic or mechanic phosphorescence.  The Photocaris lights a flashing cirrus, on being irritated, in brilliant