kindling sparks, increasing in intensity until the whole organism is illuminated.  The living fire washes over its back, and pencils in greenish-yellow light its microscopic outline.  Nor do these little creatures lack a beauty of their own.  Their minute shields of pure translucent silex are elaborately wrought in microscopic symbols of mimic heraldry.  They are the chivalry of the deep, the tiny knights with lance and cuirass, and oval bossy shield carved in quaint conceits and ornamental fashion.  Nor must we despise them when we reflect upon their power of accretion.  The Gallionellae, invisible to the naked eye, can, of their heraldic shields and flinty armor, make two cubic feet of Bilin polishing slate in four days.  By straining sea-water, a web of greenish cloth of gold, illuminated by their play of self-generated electric light, has been collected.  Humboldt and Ehrenberg speak of their voracity, their power of discharging electricity at will, and their sporting about, exhibiting an intelligent enjoyment of the life God has given to them.  Man and his works perish, but the monuments of the infusoriae are the flinty ribs of the sea, the giant bones of huge continents, heaped into mountain-ranges over which the granite and porphyry have set their stony seal for ever.  Man thrives in his little zone:  the populous infusoriae crowd every nook of earth from the remote poles to the burning equatorial belt.

As the coral, in its soft, milky chalk, gives a name to tropical seas, so also it is a question to my simplicity if the Yellow Sea, Black Sea and White Sea do not owe their color and name, in part at least, to microscopic infusoriae.  One of these, the Yellow Sea, is very similar in many characteristics to our beautiful southern gulf, and there is connected with it an incident or two illustrative of submarine adventure which is the partial purpose of this desultory sketch.

About the time our American was investing in Pharaoh’s golden chariot-wheels an East Indiaman was trading its way from the English docks, eighteen weary weeks’ sail by seamen’s law, and more tedious by delays.  They exchanged for bullion on the Gold Coast; for bullion and bad Cape brandy at Good Hope to sell to the Mohammedans, who are forbidden to drink it.  At Bombay and Calcutta they exchanged bullion and brandy for opium to sell to the Chinese, who are forbidden to buy or use it.  Whether the coolie trade was included in its iniquities or not, I cannot say.  Very possibly that was the return cargo.  From Ceylon they proceed to Siam, and thence to Hong-Kong, where they drop anchor in the offing, and by a special custom the cargo is sold and paid for in sycee silver before disfreighting, and the bullion is in the safe of the huge smuggler, although the opium has not yet been removed.  The Chinese restrictive laws are very severe; but when we note that ninety thousand gallons of confiscated whisky were seized in godly Massachusetts in one year, we can infer the difficulties in the Maine law of the Celestials.  The custom is for a hong, a smuggler in a Chinese junk, to draw up beside the English contrabandist and transfer the cargo in the outer harbor.