palladium, titanium, osmium, strontium, yttrium,
and the rest, which have lately been of such
value to us in " Fraünhofer's lines." And
limestone in its simplicity of unsophisticated
chalk; then, by the help of iron, rising to dignity
and beauty as marble—marble, brown and red
and yellow and green and blue, black as night,
and white as solid snow, ashen grey, and black
with white shells and strange coralline forms
shining through, variegated with many colours,
and speckled and diverse like a block of
compressed sand; rising into still higher dignity and
beauty as alabaster, satin spar, rock-milk, the
double refracting Iceland spar, and others
cognate; which, however, are only carbonates of
lime, or lime in combination with carbon, raised
up to be ideals of grace and beauty for all time.
Successive bits of lignite, jet, brown coal,
and anthracite, showed the transition from buried
wood to fossil fuel, with the forms of the plants
and trees whence they have come, clearly figured
beside them. And then there was flint in its
primitive form of fire-flint buried in its rustic
jacket of chalk, all the remains of those
microscopic little beings known to science as the
diatomaceæ, as I said before. And in the flint
department I found chalcedony, and blood-red
cornelian, onyx banded black and white, and
sardonyx banded red and white, and jasper, and
agates, and the quartz series—Derbyshire spar,
and the lovely crystals of false amethyst and
chrysoprase, and rock crystal, and rose quartz,
and others of the same kind and generation,
culminating at last in the ideal of flint—the noble
opal and its varieties; for opal is only flint and
water—flint in its supreme and highest development,
with one-fifth or one-eighth of water at
its heart.

Then, there was alumina as earth, and
aluminum as metal; and the crystals proceeding—
sapphire and ruby and Oriental emerald and
topaz and amethyst; and nodules of turquoise,
which is only phosphate of alumina and lime,
coloured with the oxides of iron and copper;
and lapis lazuli, which is a combination of
soda, lime, and alumina, coloured with
sulphide of iron; and jade-stone and
soap-stone and their congeners—mere magnesia,
lime, and clay; and chrysolite, the gem or
crystal of magnesia; and talc and serpentine,
meerschaum and hornblende, the silicates of
magnesia, or flint and magnesia in union together.
And there was a case of mercury or
quicksilver, in its native state from the silver
mines, and as the red sulphide, called cinnabar,
whence our painters get their vermilion, as a
chloride or " horn mercury," and in great grey
crystals. And masses of sulphur from Sicily and
other volcanic regions, pale primrose-yellow; and
cobalt, both grey and impure from its native
alloy, and richly blue, with all its arsenic and
iron and nickel got out of it; and carbon as
graphite and other things, culminating in its
ideal, the diamond; and the crystal of glucina,
the emerald or beryl, with the earth and its
metal beside it; and zirconium topped by its
crystal, the blood-red hyacinth; and orpiment
or yellow sulphide of arsenic, brilliantly yellow
and glistening; and everywhere the uses and
transformations of all these materials shown and
written, and the life and being of the world told
in the plain language of nature and science
throughout.

From the geological-room, with all its passionless
beauty, I passed to the creatures, almost as
passionless, who make their homes in the deep
sea, and live and love—if they do love—in the
rayless fathoms at the roots of the earth. Shells
of all colours and all shapes and sizes, were
ranged in cases there. Pink and yellow and
green and purple, rainbow-coloured and opaque
white, but all with an indefinable likeness to the
soft tints seen in the sky and on the water by
the sea-side. And of all shapes: some spiral,
others flat; some convolute, others smooth; some
with thick clumsy edges like cabinet-work done
by a rude-handed village carpenter, and others
spreading out their doorways in fine filmy
curtains, so transparent and delicate one wonders
how they ever live through the storm-waves at
all. Some banded and tiger-like, others spotted
and leopard-like; some ribbed with strong flying
buttresses, others bound about with small
ornamental fillets notched and cut into airy nothingness;
some smooth and polished, others rugged
and rough, and others again spiny and pricking;
cockle-shells and limpets of simplest form, and
the many-chambered murex, the nautilus, and the
triton; shells heart-shaped, and razor-shaped, and
tulip-tinted; little innocent white cowries which
are to shells what daisies are to flowers, and the
larger kinds—the map and music and mole and
money and pig cowries, and the small-pox cowry;
the tear and the rough tear cowry, and
poached-eggs, and spindles, and weavers' shuttles,
and that large turned-lipped, tortoiseshell-
coloured cypræa, also a cowry, which used to be
so common on chimney-pieces a few years ago,
and where one can hear the sea roar grandly at
any time. Perhaps not so grandly as in that red
whelk, or " roaring buckie," which in Zetland is
used as a lamp, and where the cottage children
of Scotland listen to the waves imprisoned within
its cells. And all these in due and fit order;
not one known to man wanting; with a history
of their localities, and ranged as they come by
natural sequence.

Then there were coloured models and
preserved specimens of the soft unformed-looking
things inhabiting these beautiful homes; and,
large glass worlds of all such as could be induced
to live and thrive in captivity, and a reasonable
depth of water. The paper nautilus was there,
crawling at the bottom with its shell on its back,
and its strange staring eyes peering out from
among its curved and uplifted oars, or shooting
through the water, all its members gathered up
into an arrowy mast; and hideous cuttle-fish were
there, with their fiendish-looking arms extended:
and star-fish, unwholesome-looking; and stinging
but delusive jelly-fish; and sea-flowers putting
out their bright, petals, and sensitive to even
a shadow passing over them; and gaunt, busy
little shrimps, and fringed-lipped loach, and