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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: Twenty years ago there was but one specimen in Europe: now you may
buy one for a pound in any curiosity shop. I advise you to do so,
and to keep - as I have seen done - under a glass case, as a
delight to your eyes, one of the most exquisite, both for form and
texture, of natural objects.
Then look at the Hyalonemas, or glass-rope ocean floor by a twisted
wisp of strong flexible flint needles, somewhat on the principle of
a screw-pile. So strange and complicated is their structure, that
naturalists for a long while could literally make neither head nor
tail of them, as long as they had only Japanese specimens to study,
some of which the Japanese dealers had, of malice prepense, stuck
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