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Thus, a gryphaea is stated by M. Virlet to have been met with in a lead-mine near Semur, in France, and a madrepore in a compact vein of cinnabar in Hungary. Carne mentions true pebbles of quartz and slate in a tin lode of the Relistran Mine, at the depth of 600 feet below the surface.

Besides, the ship had a good stock of the madrepore Dendrophylia, known in Provence by the name sea fennel, and a poultice made from the dissolved flesh of its polyps will furnish an excellent cough medicine. For some days we saw a large number of aquatic birds with webbed feet, known as gulls or sea mews.

Fixed to a piece of madrepore, this seaweed vegetates at the bottom of the ocean, at the depth of 192 feet, notwithstanding which we found its leaves as green as those of our grasses. According to the experiments of Bouguer, light is weakened after a passage of 180 feet in the ratio of 1 to 1477.8.

The Cayo de Piedras is extremely precipitous on the side near the sea; and towards the middle there is a small basin of fresh water. We found a block of madrepore in the rock, measuring upwards of three cubic feet. Doubtless this limestone formation, which at a distance resembles Jura limestone, is a fragmentary rock.

That little animalcule there, which is living in that way, imagines no doubt that it is working all for itself, and yet it is united down the stem at whose extremity it stands, with the life of the whole madrepore or sponge to which it belongs. You have only to look at an ordinary tree to see the same thing going on.

I like to find a serious moral where I can." The Commandant counted the coins and dropped them into his pocket. Their weight seemed to make a man of him again. He bent and affected to examine the madrepore. Mr. Fossell bent also. He was on the point of asking in a low voice, that the clerk might not overhear for an explanation of Miss Gabriel's gossip.

And I was at the lowest point of created life; a madrepore rooted to the rock, fathoms below the tide-mark; and worst of all, my individuality was gone. I was not one thing, but many things a crowd of innumerable polypi; and I grew and grew, and the more I grew the more I divided, and multiplied thousand and ten thousandfold.

However, the stamp of its power is there also, and the Titanic sink of Paris realizes, among monuments, that strange ideal realized in humanity by some men like Macchiavelli, Bacon and Mirabeau, grandiose vileness. The sub-soil of Paris, if the eye could penetrate its surface, would present the aspect of a colossal madrepore.

And ere you have done wondering, you hear that all three are congeners of the ugly, shapeless, white "dead man's hand," which you may pick up after a storm on any shore. You have a beautiful madrepore or brain-stone on your mantel-piece, brought home from some Pacific coral-reef.

"Then I consider'd life in all its forms, Of vegetables first, next zoophytes, The tribe that dwells upon the confine strange 'Twixt plants and fish; some are there from their mouth Spit out their progeny, and some that breed, By suckers from their base or tubercles, Sea-hedgehog, madrepore, sea-ruff, or pad, Fungus, or sponge, or that gelatinous fish, That taken from its element at once Stinks, melts, and dies a fluid; so from these, Through many a tribe of less equivocal life, Dividual or insect, up I ranged, From sentient to percipient, small advance, Next to intelligent, to rational next, So to half spiritual human kind, And what is more, is more than man may know.