94 - INTERESTING EXPERIMENTS.

ceased by seeing the thing often repeated, till I at
length received a pleasure from the extraordinary
sight. What was most engaging, each fish showed
itself plainly to the eye by the light emitted from
its body ; and the same effect was produced by the
shells and other sea bodies which I had with me ;
even the pails themselves looked like a burning
surface. This was not all; every day the sight
was new, because I had new fishes and new shells
to observe; now it was a pilchard, now a molebat ;
at one time a purple fish, at another a periwinkle,
a polypus, a crab, or a star-fish, that showed its
luminous rays in the dark; in short, I perfectly
distinguished the shape of all these different fishes
by rays of light which darted from every part of
their bodies ; and as I could place them in a thou-
sand different positions, I had in my power to give
an infinite variety to this beautiful illumination.

“When the vag-vagues actually compelled me to
quit this glittering mansion, and to look for relhet
abroad, the angry ocean presented me with the
same phenomenon on a large scale. The foaming
billow.’ seemed to metamorphose themselves into
mountains of fire, and exhibited to my view a most
amazing spectacle, more capable of exciting admi-
ration than fear, even in the minds of persons
exposed to their fury.”

Many more equally vivacious passages might be