deriving light and heat from the incandescent gulfs.  My state apartments were built of coral, in wondrous architecture, and trumpet-weed clothed their battlements.  Some cavernous recesses were lit with constellations of shining zoophytes, and there were floors of pearl, studded with diamonds.  I could stroll through marvellous arch-ways, gathering jewels at every step, or wander in my royal meadows, among the wrecks and spoils of hurricanes; or rising through the mellow depths, sit among the palms of the lagoon, watching the white sails of ships or studying the awfulness of the storm.

“For a time I secluded myself, theorizing upon the policy of my government.  My dominions were vast and venerable; they comprehended two thirds of the surface of the globe; no deluges had destroyed them, and they had been peopled ages before the coming of man.  Life here inhabited forms, vegetable and animal, to which the greatest terrestrials were puny.  But the darkness which of old rested on the face of the deep, now shadowed its depths.  There was no mind here.  These gigantic beings were shapes without souls.  How should I reason with creatures who could not feel, whose heads could not know till to-morrow that their members had been severed to-day—­some of whom, in a single moment, passed their whole existences, and fulfilled all the functions of eating, drinking, and generating—­who were not only incapable of thoughts, affections, and emotions, but who could not see, smell, hear, taste, or touch?  But such subjects are among the afflictions of all wise rulers, and I resolved to conclude upon nothing till I had visited every part of my dominions.

“During three years of travel I classified the fishes anew, all previous enumeration being paltry, and made the notes and queries which form the staple of my manuscript.  I found fresh-water creatures to which the sheat-fish would be a morsel, and hydras to which the fabled sea-serpent would be a worm.  I ascended the rivers with the salmon, and fathomed the motives of the climbing-perch.  I heard the narrative of a siluris tossed out of a volcano, and talked with a haddock which produced at a birth more young than there are men upon the globe.  I have noted the harlequin-angler, which lived three weeks in Amsterdam, hopping about on his fins like a toad; the sucking-fish which adhered to Marc Antony’s galley and held it fast; the horned-fish (fil en dos) which the savages discard from their nets in terror and prayer; and the sprats which rise with vapors into the clouds, and are rained back into the sea.  I have collected the traditions of many of these beings, and have translated some of their ballads.  There is music under the ocean; but most of the fishes sing with their fins, beating the water to rude measures.  Among the traditions of all the tribes is that of a time when the waters were peaceful and the fishes happy, when none were rapacious, when death was unknown, when no storms lashed the ripples into billows, and when beings of the upper air bathed at the surface, and the fishes rendered them homage.  But some foul deed of which the finny folk were guiltless brought confusion into the waters; the ocean covered all the globe, corpses sank into the depths and were devoured, nets were let down from above, strange fires were kindled beneath, and whirlpools, water-spouts, storms, and volcanoes began.