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There were wonderful great basins down there, all lined with pink and green corallines, and full of the loveliest weeds and anemones and other sea-flowers, and the rivulets that flowed from them to the sea were lined pink and green, too.
On trying to pass a channel through one of these reefs we were grounded, and all had to get out into the water, which in this shallow strait had been so heated by the sun as to be disagreeably warm, and drag our vessel a considerable distance among weeds and sponges, corals and prickly corallines.
But at Marseilles or Genoa or in the Levant they have names for many hundreds of species, of fish and shell-fish and cuttle-fish and worms and corallines, and all manner of swimming and creeping things; they know a vast deal about the habits of their lives, far more, sometimes, than do we 'scientific men'; they are naturalists by tradition and by trade.
"Ah, good," said Baldwin, with a nod of approval to the child, as if to say, "You have him there!" "True," returned the philosopher, "because the corallines can only work under water. The moment they reach the surface they die; but those that remain continue their labours on the sides of the reef or island, and thus widen it.
You have seen the room in the British Museum full of corals, madrepores, brain-stones, corallines, and sea-ferns? Oh yes. Then fancy all those alive. Not as they are now, white stone: but covered in jelly; and out of every pore a little polype, like a flower, peeping out. Fancy them of every gaudy colour you choose.
And besides these casual visitors there are numberless creatures which have lived and multiplied there, ever since I first visited the pool. Tender red, olive-colored, and green seaweeds, stony corallines, and acorn-barnacles lining the floor, sea-anemones clinging to the sides, sponges tiny and many-colored hiding under the ledges, and limpets and mussels wedged in the cracks.
The insects, which are called corallines, have the power of attracting this lime to them; drawing it away from the water, so to speak, and fixing it round their own bodies, which is called secreting the lime. Thus they form shells, or houses, to themselves, which they fix at the bottom of the sea.
He was, on the contrary, however, extremely ungallant. "All rubbish!" he exclaimed on her asking him if he did not think her pile of curiosities nice. "But, those corallines, young lady, are good. They were long supposed to belong to the animal world, like the zoophytes; instead of which they are plants the same as any other seaweed.
Like the Dalmatian Archipelago, it once formed part of the mainland, probably separated by the process that raised the maritime range. The rolling sandy plateau and the dwarf Wadys are strewed with trap and quartz, neither of which could have been generated by the new sandstones and the yellow corallines.
"Since my brothers died, Claude, the old gentleman has only me to look to. You seem to be a naturalist, sir." "A dabbler," said the major, with eye and hand still busy. "I ought not to begin our acquaintance by doubting your word: but these things are no dabbler's work;" and Tom pointed to some exquisite photographs of minute corallines, evidently taken under the microscope. "They are Mellot's."
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