THE INTELLECTUAL OBSERVER.

OCTOBER, 1863.

THE BLUE CYANEA.

BY PHILIP HENRY GOSSE, F.R.S.

(With a Coloured Plate.)

Of all the varied forms of strange life which the prolific sea carries in her bosom, few are more calculated to attract and rivet interested attention than the Medusa. Globose forms of translucent jelly, clear as crystal, or bearing alternate bands of frosted surface, like a lamp-globe of clear and ground glass commingled, colourless as the water which bears them, or dyed with the loveliest hues, moulded with the most elegant symmetry-they appear and vanish, now urging their solitary course with an unintelligible energy, now associated in immense groups, rising and falling helplessly on the lazy swell of the summer sea, now eluding the most diligent search. Whence they come, whither they go, why they congregate, why they separate, we know not. We land from the steamer in one of our western watering-places, and as we bustle about the pier, watching our luggage, we cannot help seeing that the surface of the little harbour is thronged with the elegant jelly-fishes. The oars of the busy boatmen push them about, or cut them through unheeded; they rotate with undignified agility in the swirl of the steamer's screw; they repose in motionless majesty between the piles of the wharf, where, as we look down perpendicularly upon them in the shadowed water, every line and every tint is discerned to advantage, and we wonder at their beauty. Or we take our stand on some rocky headland, and gazing into the transparent depth, see far below the surface a great sphere of painted glass, vigorously yet heavily making way by alternate pump-like expansions and contractions, and dragging in its oblique wake a tangled crowd of cords. Or, in the dazzling twinkling haze of an August noon, we take a pull in a boat a mile or two off shore, and, taking our station in the bow, break the glistening surface of the mirrory sea with re

VOL. IV.-NO. 111.

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