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THE ORIGIN OF THE OLDEST FOSSILS, ETC.
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flying fish or a wandering sea bird or a floating tuft of sargassum, and we never think of the ocean as the home of vegetable life. It contains plant-like animals in abundance, but these are true animals and not plants, although they are so like them in form and color. At Nassau, in the Bahama Islands, the visitor is taken in a small boat, with windows of plate-glass set in the bottom, to visit the "sea-gardens" at the inner end of a channel through which the pure water from the open sea flows between two coral islands into the lagoon. Here the true reef-corals grow in quiet water, where they may be visited and examined.

When illuminated by the vertical sun of the tropics and by the light which is reflected back from the white bottom, the pure transparent water is as clear as air, and the smallest object forty or fifty feet down is distinctly visible through the glass bottom of the boat.

As this glides over the great mushroom-shaped coral domes which arch up from the depths, the dark grottoes between them and the caves under their overhanging tops are lighted up by the sun, far down among the anthozoa or flower animals and the zoöphytes or animal plants, which are seen through the waving thicket of brown and purple sea fans and sea feathers as they toss before the swell from the open ocean.

There are miles of these "sea gardens" in the lagoons of the Bahamas, and it has been my good fortune to spend many months studying their wonders, but no description can convery any conception of their beauty and luxuriance.

The general effect is very garden-like, and the beautiful fishes of black and golden yellow and iridescent cobalt blue hover like birds among the thickets of yellow and lilac gorgonias.

The parrot fishes seem to be cropping the plants like rabbits, but more careful examination shows that they are biting off the tips of the gorgonias and branching madrepores or hunting for the small crustacea which hide in the thicket and that all the apparent plants are really animals.

The delicate star-like flowers are the vermillion heads of

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