Page:Colymbia (1873).djvu/71

Rh as to render the depths of the water obscure, the lamps are all lighted at the same moment by connecting the wires with the great electric apparatus on shore, and the whole subaqueous space is immediately illuminated as bright as day. The effect of the thousands of lamps hung in every direction is extremely beautiful. Every nook and cranny of the vast space glows with a marvellous brilliancy. The dazzling white of the coral branches looks like burnished silver, and the elegant forms and exquisite tints of the many sea-plants produce a series of the most charming pictures the imagination can conceive. The exquisite forms and graceful movements of the men and women, youths and maidens, darting or gliding rapidly or slowly hither and thither among the natural grottoes and artificial habitations of these watery depths, as their occupations or amusements require, form a scene more lovely than a poet's dream.

The galvanic action that produces this magic illumination is not, as with us, derived from voltaic cells but from the earth itself. While cells of the kind we use are subject to waste and deterioration, the electricity of the earth is practically inexhaustible and the supply never fails. The machinery for drawing off the electricity so bountifully furnished by the earth once set up, no care is required except to regulate its intensity, and this is effected by a self-acting regulating apparatus of the most ingenious construction.

Without some illuminating power of this sort the watery depths would have been uninhabitable during twelve hours out of the twenty-four. I was told that the illumination of the country had from a very early period occupied the attention of the scientific men. They had discovered the photogenic property of electricity 5em