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It was beautiful solemn grand all in one, that narrow, gloomy, zigzag way between the perpendicular walls; and a naturalist would have spent hours examining the many-tinted sea anemones that opened their rays and awl-shaped tentacles below the water, or lay adhering and quiescent upon the rocks where the tide had fallen, looking some green, some olive, and many more like bosses of gelatinous coagulated blood.
This species grows fairly well in some parts of England and Ireland, and is a curious shrub with awl-shaped leaves, and, like the other members of the family, an abundant producer of flowers. It thrives best as a wall plant, and when favourably situated a height of 12 feet is sometimes attained. COLUTEA ARBORESCENS. Bladder Senna. France, 1548.
Among other specimens in these two branches, I noted some windowpane oysters with thin valves of unequal size, a type of ostracod unique to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, then orange-hued lucina with circular shells, awl-shaped auger shells, some of those Persian murex snails that supply the Nautilus with such wonderful dye, spiky periwinkles fifteen centimeters long that rose under the waves like hands ready to grab you, turban snails with shells made of horn and bristling all over with spines, lamp shells, edible duck clams that feed the Hindu marketplace, subtly luminous jellyfish of the species Pelagia panopyra, and finally some wonderful Oculina flabelliforma, magnificent sea fans that fashion one of the most luxuriant tree forms in this ocean.
Joints long and branch-like, with tufts of short, white hair on the apices of the tubercles, and one or two white, needle-like spines from ½ in. to 1 in. long. At the base of each tuft, from the apex to 1 ft. or more down the younger branches, there is a fleshy, green, awl-shaped leaf, from 2 in. to 5 in. long.
It was dry and flattened, and as unlike a living, growing plant as are generally the specimens from an herbarium. But it showed the awl-shaped leaves, and thread-like stalk with its tiny round seed-vessels, like those of our common shepherd's-purse, and Jimmy knew it at once.
This, for example, may be short and conical like a Canary's, awl-shaped like the bill of a Warbler, or very long and slender like that of a Snipe. By failing to observe these simple rules the learner may be in despair when he tries to find out the name of his strange bird by examining a bird book, or may cause some kindly friend an equal amount of annoyance.
Deprived of any indentation, incapable of chewing anything between their awl-shaped ends, these two tools serve at best to fix the grub slightly at some point of the fostering larva. Useless for carving, therefore, the mouth is a pure osculatory sucker, which drains the provisions by a process of exudation through the skin.
It is a sturdy, thickset little tree, usually about fifteen feet high when full grown, and about as broad as high, holding its knotty branches well out in every direction in stiff zigzags, but turning them gracefully upward at the ends in rounded bosses. Though making so dark a mass in the distance, the foliage is a pale grayish green, in stiff, awl-shaped fascicles.
But this seed never makes a single mistake. It produces millions of leaves, but every one is awl-shaped subulate. Woods have many odors sickening, aromatic, balsamic, medicinal. We go to the other side of the world to bring the odor of sandal or camphor to our nostrils. But amid so many odors our seed will make but one.
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