own sensations are typical, to receive also a general toning up. Twice a
month at least a man should spend an afternoon on a coral reef for the
betterment of body and brain. On the face of it this is counsel of
perfection. Only to the happy few is such agreeable and blest physic
proffered gratis. Yet the whole world might be brighter and better if
coral reefs were more generously distributed. Breathing such subtle and
sturdy air, men would live longer; while the extravagant life of the
reef, appealing to him in fine colours and strange shapes, would avert
his thoughts from paltry and mean amusements and over-exciting pleasures.
The pomp of the world he would find personated by coral polyps; its
vanities by coy and painted fish; its artfulness represented by crabs
that think and plan; its scavenging performed by aureoled worms.

Although students of conchology are familiar with several species of
LIMA, I am eager to include it in these haphazard references, because my
first acquaintance with a living specimen afforded yet another experience
of the versatility of the designs of Nature. It is truly one of the
"strange fellows" which Nature in her time has framed. Living obscurely
in cavities, under stones, inoffensive and humble, the Lima enjoys the
distinction of being, the permanent exemplification of the misfit, its
body being several sizes too large as well as too robust for its fragile,
shelly covering. The valves are obtusely oblong, while the animal is
almost a flattened oval, the mantle being fringed with numerous bright
pink tentacles, almost electrical in their sensitiveness.

Though anything but rotund, so full in habit (comparatively speaking) is
the body of the lima that the valves cannot compress it. Except at the
hinges they are for ever divorced, an unfair proportion of the bulging
body being exposed naked to the inclemency and hostility of the world.
"All too full in the bud" for those frail unpuritanical stays, the animal