ents to be encountered on
both the east and west coasts, whose velocity is augmented by the
prevailing monsoon, and which cause some variations in the tide,
besides materially interfering with shore navigation.

No delights are wholly of a piece. All pleasures are qualified by some
inevitable conditions; temperate indulgence, even, has its price. As
he who enjoys with enthusiasm the delights of a tropical garden has
also to encounter the attacks of vicious mosquitoes, wiry land
leeches, stinging flies, biting scorpions, and poisonous cobras, so
the naturalist who dives among these submarine coral groves to secure
specimens, and to enjoy the marvelous sights below the surface of the
sea, meets with inevitable drawbacks. The millepora which float there
burn him like nettles; venomous fish sting his naked body, and
sea-urchins penetrate his flesh with their lance-like spines; while
the jagged points of the beautiful coral wound his hands like the
aggravating thorns on roses. These wounds inflicted beneath the water
sometimes entail serious consequences, creating painful sores which
last for weeks.

Off this southern coast of the island widespread moving fields of
brilliantly colored seaweed are seen at times, dense enough to form
quite an impediment to the progress of native boats which do not
successfully avoid them. So compact are these collections of vegetable
matter that they seem like a field of marshy land, rather than like a
floating substance. This weed gives shelter to many species of
mollusks and zoophytes, quite similar to a collection of seaweed often
encountered in the waters of the West Indies. Over this marine verdure
hover great flocks of ocean birds. Now and then one alights to secure
some tidbit of edible substance detected by its keen vision amid the
thick branches and leaves. This mass of rockweed, so called, seems to
come from the Indian continent at the north, but the natives have a
theory that it is the cast-off growth of submerged islands, loosened
from its native soil by the chafing of the restless sea after the
raging of a severe storm. So the Singhalese have their "Atlantis;"
fable, like history, repeats itself. Plato tells us of a vast island
or continent, so named, which suddenly sank into the sea with a vast
population, nine thousand years before his time.

The natives here, and at Singapore, Penang, Colombo, and along the
Asiatic coast generally, when not sleeping or eating, are incessantl