like a mermaid that sailors, deprived of female
society, have fallen deeply in love with it—-
still further attests its affinity to landswomen,
by having nails that will scratch, at the tips of
its fins.

The hippopotamus clearly retires to the bottom
of the Nile, in order to avoid being baconised
like a pig, drained of its natural juices like
a cow, slain for its teeth like an elephant, or made
to work for its living like an overgrown donkey.
For my own part, I had as lief be called " a
hippopotamus" as do the drudgery performed
by sundry land animals. The happy hippopotamus
bears no mark of metal collar round
his neck; and, with the thermometer at 90°
Fahr., who would not be he?

The otter, the beaver, and the water-rat, are
merely to be considered as amateurs with a
strong hankering after aquatics, and a full
acquiescence in abstinence from flesh. They are
really landsmen, though fond of bathing; they are
hereditary proprietors of residences on the banks
of streams. They are fresh-water sailors at
heart, even though a marine villa may be their
temporary home.

If land animals be a party of swimmers who
have finally left the waves for the shore, plants
are not unlikely to have adopted a similar
change of habitation. We can conceive the
earth entirely covered with an ocean teeming
with fish and tangled with seaweed. Such
plants would have their mass continually
submerged, never indulging in an air-bath. They
would be more permanently confined to water
than, probably, many of the fish themselves,
which in all ages have delighted to float, and to
bask in the sun and leap into the air. The
first-born plants would be, perforce, necessarily
and completely aquatic; thoroughly fish-plants.

But now that dry land has appeared and the
phenomena of the tides are visibly manifest—-
now that twice in every twenty-four hours a
portion of the ocean's bed lies bare and dry—-
we know that certain seaweeds can not only
be fish out of water for a time, but support
treatment of the roughest kind. Throughout
the world, the strip of shore, which
lies between high and low-water mark, is
tenanted by plants which, when not covered by
the sea, are baked in sunshine, burnt by frost,
torn by hurricanes, and deluged by sheets of
fresh water, enough to reduce them to cinder
or pap, and to wash the life-salt out of their
frame. A brave old plant, most certainly, is
the famous ivy green of the song; but a braver
is the bladder fucus, enduring what it does as
a fish out of water. It discovers land, takes
possession of it, and holds its own in spite of
all resistance.

Many plants, too, which you would believe
confined to the marsh, are nevertheless members
of an Alpine club. You left them on the
sea-level, and they welcome you on cloud-
capped heights. The pretty parnassia imbibes
mist with its leaves, as kindly as it sucks in wet
with its roots. Others, like the golden-flowered
moneywort (which makes such a pretty fringe
to a balcony), settle indifferently on the skirts
of a swamp, or on the crumbling brink of a
gravelly upland.

An able cultivator of palm-trees has let out
the secret that, when they fail in our hothouses,
it is mostly because of a stint of water. But
the very love of many land plants for water
and its neighbourhood, shows that plants,
though thirsty souls in general, may be still
made to put up with a certain amount of
thirstiness. As Venus is said (in poetry) to
linger near her native sea, so there are plants
which, although they live inland, never thrive
so well as within an easy distance from the
shore. The list is long; the numbers which
have maritimus, a, um, for their specific name,
constitute only a few. To us, insular observers,
the fact does not present itself so strikingly,
because the whole United Kingdom is
more or less maritime, compared with
continental areas.

The cork-tree, the fig-tree, the tree-mallow,
the cocoa-nut-tree, asparagus, sea-kale, cabbages,
many mesembryanthemums, and a host
of others, thoroughly enjoy being fanned by sea
breezes. The mangrove even enjoys a salt-water
foot-bath so much as to be answerable
for the stories about cockles and oysters
growing upon trees. " At Sierra Leonna,"
says The Wonders of Nature, "there is the
oyster-tree, which has no other fruit but oysters.
It has a very broad leaf, almost as thick as
leather. The boughs hang down a good way
into the water, and are overflowed by the tide.
On the mud and slush that stick to them, the
young oysters bred there fasten, and that in
such vast numbers that one can hardly see
anything almost, but long ropes of oysters."

The study of fish out of water has its interest,
though we may never hope to see
flocks of carp and tench straggling over our
lawns. Lakes and streams give birth to many
organisms which are not included in ichthyology
proper; and the question what aquatic
vegetables we can persuade to live and thrive
out of water, is important not merely in a
decorative, but in an utilitarian point of view. If
celery has been induced to desert its native
ditch and grow fat and fine in our kitchen-
gardens, there is no reason why other good
things should not follow its example. A recent
Gardener's Chronicle says: " A supply of
watercresses for autumn and winter may be
easily obtained by planting some strong young
tops, about four inches long, in a line at the
foot of a north wall. The cuttings should be
of pieces which have roots protruding from the
joints. Watercresses will grow freely in such
a situation. And where there are no artificial
beds, and natural ones are a considerable
distance off, these will be found useful."

There are water-flowers which take pattern
by the watercress, presenting themselves and
their foliage independent of floods. One of my
rambling grounds is a large tract of marshes
abounding in vegetable and animal life. There
are deep pools, shallow ditches, banks of mud