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 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