Sometimes these Plutonic ebullitions would come to the surface, making new islands rise up upon the waters like tumors of lava.
In its bosom exist still double the quantity of animal species that abound in other seas, although less numerous.

The tunny fish, playful lambs of the blue pasture lands, were gamboling over its surface or passing in schools under the furrows of the waves.

Men were setting netted traps for them along the coasts of Spain and France, in Sardinia, the Straits of Messina and the waters of the Adriatic.

But this wholesale slaughter scarcely lessened the compact, fishy squadrons.

After wandering through the windings of the Grecian Archipelago, they passed the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, stirring the two narrow passageways with the violence of their invisible gallopade and making a turn at the bowl of the Black Sea, swimming back, decimated but impetuous, to the depths of the Mediterranean.
Red coral was forming immovable groves on the substrata of the Balearic Islands, and on the coasts of Naples and Africa.