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Ascending to the next group of rocks, we find the traces of life become more abundant, the number of species extended, and important additions made in certain vestiges of fuci, or sea-plants, and of fishes.
We enter a new world the under-world of water, and things that glide and swim; of sea-grasses and currents; of flowing waves that lap about the body with a cool chill; of palpitating color, that, at great depths, becomes a sort of darkness; of sea-beds of shell and sand, and bits of scattered wreckage; of ooze and tangled sea-plants, dusky shapes, and fan-like fins.
Some sea-plants, zoöphytes, infusory animalcules, and a few of the molluscous tribe, all low down in the order of being, but important from their immense numbers and joint action, commenced their work of absorbing the carbonic acid with which the air was overcharged, and building up vast piers and mounds of stone from their own remains.
These nulliporae, which are hard, very simply-organised sea-plants, play an analogous and important part in protecting the upper surfaces of coral-reefs, behind and within the breakers, where the true corals, during the outward growth of the mass, become killed by exposure to the sun and air.
Come and see for yourself how well we care for them, and how reposeful they look in their pearl and coral homes, with sea-plants growing around them, and gold and silver heaped at their feet. They crossed the world to get it, and their journeys have not been failures. Will you come, noble stranger? Come to be one of us whose lives are all love, and sunshine, and merriment?"
The surplus of this having gone, as M. Brogniart suggests, to form the vegetation, whose ruins became coal, and the air being thus brought to its present state, land animals immediately appeared. So also, sea-plants were at first the only specimens of vegetation, because there appears to have been no place where other plants could be produced or supported.
'Member once when we was sailing near the Bermudas by a reef where the Lively Fanny went down, and I heard a kind o' ding-dongin', and the waters there is clear as the sky, and I looked down and see the coral all a-growin', and the sea-plants a-wavin' as handsome as a pictur', and the mermaids they was a-singin'. It was beautiful; they sung kind o' mournful; and Jack Hubbard, he would have it they was a-singin' for the poor fellows that was a-lyin' there round under the seaweed."
When the boat was in safety we clambered upon the rocks, and among them Simon showed a little cave overhung with green streaming plants that indeed was a pleasant place, with all manner of coloured sea-plants clinging to the wall, that the light as it entered played upon.
Masses of varied coloured coral, sea-plants of every conceivable tint and of the brightest shells some with their living inhabitants, others deserted of the most lovely forms, while fish of curious shapes and beautiful colours glided noiselessly in and out amid the rocks and groves of this submarine fairy land.
Twenty years later, a pupil of Marsigli, the young Marseilles physician, Peyssonel, conceived the desire to study these singular sea-plants, and was sent by the French Government on a mission to the Mediterranean for that purpose.
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