Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 24, 2025
The oceanic beings know better how to recognize their presence, letting them filter through their bodies for the renovation and coloration of their organs. The copper accumulates in their blood; the gold and silver are discovered in the texture of the animal-plants; the phosphorus is absorbed by the sponges; the lead and the zinc by species of algae.
The animal-plants, motionless as stars, surround their ferocious mouths with a circle of flashing lights, and immediately their diminutive prey feel themselves as irresistibly drawn toward them as do the moths that fly toward the lamp, and the birds of the sea that beat against the lighthouse. None of the lights of the earth can compare with those of this abyssal world.
The nutritive matter was drawn from the animal-plant kingdom by the human being. We must think of those animal-plants as floating or swimming—or even lightly attached in an element surrounding them, as the lower animals of the present time live in water, or land animals in air.
The animal-plants sting like nettles; all the monsters without a shell flee from the poison of their tingling organs, and the fragments of their hair burn like pins of fire. In this manner the humble paguro, carrying upon his back his tower crowned with formidable batteries, inspires terror in the gigantic beasts of the deep.
Yet the element is neither water nor air in the present sense, but something midway between the two, a kind of thick vapour in which most heterogeneous substances move hither and thither, as though dissolved in currents flowing in all directions. The animal-plants appear only as condensed regular forms of this element, often differing little physically from their environment.
The crustaceans live within their shells or take advantage of ready-made refuges of limestone, expelling their former owners; the animal-plants exhale toxins; the planctonic beings, transparent and gelatinous, burn like a crystal exposed to fire; some organisms apparently weak and flabby, have in their tails the force of a carpenter's bit, perforating the rock sufficiently to create a cavern of refuge in its hard interior.... And the timid mollusks, trembling and succulent pulp, have fabricated for their protection the strong shields of their valves, two concave walls that on opening form their door, and on closing, their house.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking