say the people of Stronza, "will escape all
maladies except black death." The Norwegians
call dulse sou-soell or sheep's weed,
because their sheep often stay eating it in their
fondness for it until they are drowned by the
returning tide. The Icelanders preserve dulse
by washing it well in fresh water, by drying
it in the sun until it gives out a sweet
powdery substance which covers the whole
plant, and by packing it into casks and keeping
it from the air. Preserved dulse is eaten
in this state with fish and butter, or is
boiled in milk and mixed with a little flour of
rye. The white powdery substance which
it gives out, is mannite—the principle of
manna.

The common plants which appear best
to identify the purple zone are the two
well-known gristly weeds sold as Irish moss,
which are eaten by the wise in the shape of
jellies and blancmanges. The colour of both
is purple. The Irish moss of the shops, or
carrageen of the Irish, is called by the savans
Chondrus crispus or the curly gristle. The
blade is variable in breadth,—gristly, branching
doubly, flat or curly, with wedgelike
segments, and tops that seem to be broken off.

A gristly plant popularly confounded with
the curly gristle, is called, by the learned,
Gigartina mamillosa. Ladies who have
studied these plants with culinary views,
prefer the Gigartina mamillosa to the Chondrus
crispus. The plants are both chondri
or cartilages, or gristles—these three words
mean but one thing—only the latter have
tubercles like grape-stones scattered over the
disk of the blade, and are therefore called the
gigartina or the grape-stones. The grape-
stone gristle, which is excellent to eat, is
distinguished by having the grape-like tubercles
supported on little stalks, or mamillosa.
The mamal gristle has a thick, fan-like,
channelled and irregularly branching frond, with
oblong and wedge-shaped segments. It is
often found rolled up like a ball. The
substance is tough, and when the fruit does not
ripen, the tubercles become leaflets. The
druggists sell both plants, confounded
together, at prices varying from a shilling to
four shillings the pound, I never regret my
money whatever price I pay for it. After
having been pretty well knocked about in
the world, and after having dined at many
of the different sorts of tables spread in it, I
declare I fancy I have never eaten better
food than the gristly seaweeds. However,
after every storm, hundreds of cart-loads of
it are carted away to manure the fields.

I am not alone in my partiality for Irish
moss. There was a time when it was a
fashionable dish; and it is still, everywhere in
France and Great Britain, more or less
prescribed as food for invalids. The poor of
Brighton use it instead of arrowroot. The
curly and marual gristles are bleached like
linen and cotton, and when dry will keep for
years. An amiable and interesting writer—
the late Dr. Landsborough—gives a recipe for
cooking it, which is found to be excellent
from experience. "When used, a tea-cup
full of it is boiled in water; this water, being
strained, is boiled with milk and sugar, and
seasoning, such as nutmeg, cinnamon, or
essence of lemon. It is then put into a shape
in which it consolidates like blancmange,
and when eaten with cream it is so good that
many a sweet-lipped little boy or girl would
almost wish to be on the invalid list to get a
share of it."

Many purple plants mark the purple zone,
I pass, however, from them, after mentioning
the most common and the most useful, to the
fixed animals which are its zoological
characteristics. Country cousins, on first visiting
low-water mark, require to be cautioned
against the mania of discoveries. They risk
the fate of the provincial editor, who, after a
first visit to the British capital, wrote in such
terms of the wonders he had seen, that he was
known ever after as "the discoverer of
London." A pamphlet has reached my hands while
writing, published by a M. Caillaud, who has
discovered the perforating sea-urchins!
Although these animals have been shown in
Paris ever since the days of Lamarck, and
his pamphlet says nothing which is not to be
found in common English books, he is irate
with the Academy of Sciences for doubting
his priority.

The rock-pools of the purple shore contain
living star-fishes. The thorn-skins or
echinodermata belong to deeper water and a more
brilliant shore, but the tide sometimes
abandons them on banks and in crevices
which they cannot leave fast enough to
escape the examination of the curious
observer. A five-fingered star-fish, walking
by means of the four rows of suckers which
line each of his fingers, is a personage not to
be seen, for the first time, without surprise,
He cocks up the finger he is not using, and
keeps a sharp look out behind with the red
eyes in it while advancing with the four
other fingers by a mode of locomotion which
is his own, and peculiar and original. I try,
in vain, to imitate it with my five fingers.
Every finger sprawls, and all the four fingers
sprawl; and the red eye of every finger
stares, and the red eyes of all the four
fingers stave; and, indeed, the locomotion of
each and all of them is made up of a step
and a stare, and a stare and a step, while the
cocked-up thumb stares—crab-like—fiercely
behind. The rows of suckers in every finger
are on the alert, and every sucker is as
sensitive and active as if solely responsible for
the safety of the whole, and there were not
five times four rows of them. Every finger
becomes at will as narrow as a little finger,
or as broad as a thumb. The spiny cross-fish
which I am describing, have a choice of roads
as surprising as their means of locomotion.
The edge of a ledge, the face of a rock, a
shelving bank, a rugged crevice, a channel all