But the
discovery of the same, or a similar, species in abundance from the
Butt of the Lows down to Setubal on the Portuguese coast, where the
deep-water shark fishers call it "sea-whip," has given our savants
specimens enough to make up their minds - that they really know
little or nothing about it, and probably will never know.
And do not forget, lastly, to ask, whether at Liverpool or at the
British Museum, for the Holtenias and their congeners, - hollow
sponges built up of glassy spicules, and rooted in the mud by glass
hairs, in some cases between two and three feet long, as flexible
and graceful as tresses of snow-white silk.
Look at these, and a hundred kindred forms, and then see how nature
is not only "maxima in minimis" - greatest in her least, but often
"pulcherrima in abditis" - fairest in her most hidden works; and
how the Creative Spirit has lavished, as it were, unspeakable
artistic skill on lowly-organized creature, never till now beheld
by man, and buried, not only in foul mud, but in their own
unsightly heap of living jelly.
But so it was from the beginning; - and this planet was not made
for man alone. Countless ages before we appeared on earth the
depths of the old chalk-ocean teemed with forms as beautiful and
perfect as those, their lineal descendants, which the dredge now
brings up from the Atlantic sea-floor; and if there were - as my
reason tells me that there must have been - final moral causes for
their existence, the only ones which we have a right to imagine are
these - that all, down to the lowest Rhizopod, might delight
themselves, however dimly, in existing; and that the Lord might
delight Himself in them.
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