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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Glaucus, by Charles Kingsley
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: Glaucus
+       The Wonders of the Shore
+
+
+Author: Charles Kingsley
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 14, 2014  [eBook #695]
+[This file was first posted on October 22, 1996]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GLAUCUS***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1890 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+                          [Picture: Book cover]
+
+               [Picture: Plate 1: Actinia Mesembryanthemum]
+
+
+
+
+
+                                 GLAUCUS
+                                    OR
+                         THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE
+
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                    BY
+                             CHARLES KINGSLEY
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                      _WITH COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS_
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                  London
+                            MACMILLAN AND CO.
+                               AND NEW YORK
+                                   1890
+
+         _The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved_
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                     RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED,
+                            LONDON AND BUNGAY.
+
+_First Edition_ (Fcap. 8vo), May 1855.  _Second Edition_, August 1855.
+_Third Edition_, 1856.  _Fourth Edition_ (with Coloured Illustrations),
+1859.  _Fifth Edition_ (Crown 8vo), 1873.  _Reprinted_ 1878, 1879, 1881,
+1884, 1887, 1890.
+
+
+
+
+Dedication.
+
+
+MY DEAR MISS GRENFELL,
+
+I CANNOT forego the pleasure of dedicating this little book to you;
+excepting of course the opening exhortation (needless enough in your
+case) to those who have not yet discovered the value of Natural History.
+Accept it as a memorial of pleasant hours spent by us already, and as an
+earnest, I trust, of pleasant hours to be spent hereafter (perhaps, too,
+beyond this life in the nobler world to come), in examining together the
+works of our Father in heaven.
+
+Your grateful and faithful brother-in-law,
+
+                                                              C. KINGSLEY.
+
+BIDEFORD,
+      _April_ 24, 1855.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+   _The basis of this little book was an Article which appeared in the_
+                _North British Review for November_ 1854.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+    BEYOND the shadow of the ship,
+    I watch’d the water snakes:
+    They moved in tracks of shining white,
+    And when they rear’d, the elfish light
+    Fell off in hoary flakes.
+
+    * * * *
+
+    O happy living things! no tongue
+    Their beauty might declare:
+    A spring of love gush’d from my heart,
+    And I bless’d them unware.
+
+                                            COLERIDGE’S _Ancient Mariner_.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+                           WOOD ENGRAVINGS.
+FIG.                                                              PAGE
+1.         Nymphon Abyssorum, NORMAN                                81
+2.         Caprella spinosissima, NORMAN                            83
+3.         Pentacrinus asteria, LINNÆUS                             85
+                           COLOURED PLATES.
+PLATE
+1.         1. FLUSTRA LINEATA; (_a_) enlarged with polypes          73
+           protruding.  2. FLUSTRA FOLIACEA.  3. VALKERIA
+           CUSCUTA; (_a_) natural size; (_b_) two
+           tentacles; (_c_) tentacles bent inwards; (_d_)
+           enlarged, showing the gradual eversion of the
+           animal.  4. CRISIA DENTICULATA; (_a_) natural
+           size.  5. GEMELLARIA LORIOATA; (_a_) natural
+           size.  6. SERTULARIA ROSEA; (_a_) natural size.
+           7. CELLULARIA CILIATA; (_a_) natural size; (_b_)
+           one of the bird’s heads; (_c_) cell and bird’s
+           head, much enlarged.  8. CAMPANULARIA SYRINGA;
+           (_a_) natural size.  9. CAMPANULARIA VOLUBILIS,
+           enlarged.  10. SERIALARIA LENDIGERA.  11.
+           NOTAMIA BURSARIA; (_a_) natural size; (_b_) two
+           pairs of polype cells with the tobacco pipe
+           appendages
+2.         1. CARDIUM RUSTICUM, (TUBERCULATUM).  2. PAGURUS         65
+           BERNHARDI, in a Periwinkle Shell
+3.         1. NEMERTIES BORLASII.  2. SABELLA?  3.                 136
+           Sand-tube of TEREBELLA CONCHILEGA (_See Plate_
+           8)
+4.         1. SYNAPTA DIGITATA; (_a_) Ditto separating and         109
+           throwing out capsuliferous threads.  2.
+           THALASSIMA NEPTUNI
+5.         1. BALANOPHYLLEA REGIA, expanded; (_a_) Ditto,          117
+           contracted; (_b_) Ditto coral; (_c_) Ditto,
+           tentacle enlarged;  2. CARYOPHYLLEA SMITHII
+           partly expanded; (_a_) Ditto, section of bony
+           plates; (_b_) Ditto, tentacle.  3. SAGARTIA
+           ANGUICOMA closed; (_a_) Ditto, basal disc
+           showing radiating septa.  4. SYNAPTA DIGITATA
+           (_See Plate_ 4); (_a_, _b_) Ditto, fingered
+           tentacles enlarged; (_c_) Ditto, Spiculæ; (_d_)
+           Ditto, anchor lying on its transparent
+           anchor-plate.  5. S. VITTATA? perforated
+           anchor-plate; (_a_) Spicula
+6.         1. ACTINIA MESEMBRYANTHEMUM, partially expanded;        135
+           (_a_) Ditto, closed.  2. BUNODES CRASSICORNIS.
+           3. CARYOPHYLLEA SMITHII _Front_
+7.         1. ECHINUS MILIARIS, creeping over Modiola              168
+           barbata.  2. Ditto, creeping up the glass.  3.
+           Hiding under stones
+8.         1. LITTORINA LITTOREA (_See Plate_ 9); (_a_)            201
+           operculum; (_b_) pallet; (_c_) part of pallet,
+           magnified.  2. NASSA RETICULATA (_See Plate_
+           11); (_a_) egg capsules; (_b_, _c_) fry; (_d_)
+           shell of fry; (_e_) pallet, magnified.  3.
+           PATELLA VULGARIS; (_a_) palate, natural size;
+           (_b_, _c_) Ditto, enlarged.  4. ECHINUS MILIARIS
+           (_See Plate_ 7); (_a_) teeth and digesting mill;
+           (_b_) suckers, enlarged; (_c_) spine and socket;
+           (_d_) shell denuded; (_e_) Pedicellaria.  5.
+           NEMERTES BORLASII (_See Plate_ 3); (_a_) head,
+           enlarged; (_b_) head expanded swallowing a
+           Terebella
+9.         1. CUCUMARIA HYNDMANNI.  2. LITTORINA LITTOREA.         114
+           3. SIPHUNCULUS BERNHARDUS in shell of
+           TURRITELLA, with living BALANI
+10.        1. SERPULA CONTORTUPLICATA.  2. HINNITES PUSIO.         129
+           3. DORIS REPANDA.  4. EOLIS PELLUCIDA.  5.
+           PHOLADIDÆA PAPYRACEA.  6. PHOLAS PARVA.  7.
+           FISSURELLA GRÆCA
+11.        1. SYNGNATHUS LUMBRICIFORMIS.  2. SAXICAVA              163
+           RUGOSA; (_a_) Shell of SAXICAVA RUGOSA.  3.
+           NASSA RETICULATA
+12.        1. PEACHIA HASTATA.  2. URASTER RUBENS                   92
+
+
+
+
+GLAUCUS;
+OR,
+THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.
+
+
+YOU are going down, perhaps, by railway, to pass your usual six weeks at
+some watering-place along the coast, and as you roll along think more
+than once, and that not over-cheerfully, of what you shall do when you
+get there.  You are half-tired, half-ashamed, of making one more in the
+ignoble army of idlers, who saunter about the cliffs, and sands, and
+quays; to whom every wharf is but a “wharf of Lethe,” by which they rot
+“dull as the oozy weed.”  You foreknow your doom by sad experience.  A
+great deal of dressing, a lounge in the club-room, a stare out of the
+window with the telescope, an attempt to take a bad sketch, a walk up one
+parade and down another, interminable reading of the silliest of novels,
+over which you fall asleep on a bench in the sun, and probably have your
+umbrella stolen; a purposeless fine-weather sail in a yacht, accompanied
+by many ineffectual attempts to catch a mackerel, and the consumption of
+many cigars; while your boys deafen your ears, and endanger your personal
+safety, by blazing away at innocent gulls and willocks, who go off to die
+slowly; a sport which you feel to be wanton, and cowardly, and cruel, and
+yet cannot find in your heart to stop, because “the lads have nothing
+else to do, and at all events it keeps them out of the billiard-room;”
+and after all, and worst of all, at night a soulless _réchauffé_ of
+third-rate London frivolity: this is the life-in-death in which thousands
+spend the golden weeks of summer, and in which you confess with a sigh
+that you are going to spend them.
+
+Now I will not be so rude as to apply to you the old hymn-distich about
+one who
+
+    “—finds some mischief still
+    For idle hands to do:”
+
+but does it not seem to you, that there must surely be many a thing worth
+looking at earnestly, and thinking over earnestly, in a world like this,
+about the making of the least part whereof God has employed ages and
+ages, further back than wisdom can guess or imagination picture, and
+upholds that least part every moment by laws and forces so complex and so
+wonderful, that science, when it tries to fathom them, can only learn how
+little it can learn?  And does it not seem to you that six weeks’ rest,
+free from the cares of town business and the whirlwind of town pleasure,
+could not be better spent than in examining those wonders a little,
+instead of wandering up and down like the many, still wrapt up each in
+his little world of vanity and self-interest, unconscious of what and
+where they really are, as they gaze lazily around at earth and sea and
+sky, and have
+
+       “No speculation in those eyes
+    Which they do glare withal”?
+
+Why not, then, try to discover a few of the Wonders of the Shore? For
+wonders there are there around you at every step, stranger than ever
+opium-eater dreamed, and yet to be seen at no greater expense than a very
+little time and trouble.
+
+Perhaps you smile, in answer, at the notion of becoming a “Naturalist:”
+and yet you cannot deny that there must be a fascination in the study of
+Natural History, though what it is is as yet unknown to you.  Your
+daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing “Pteridomania,”
+and are collecting and buying ferns, with Ward’s cases wherein to keep
+them (for which you have to pay), and wrangling over unpronounceable
+names of species (which seem to be different in each new Fern-book that
+they buy), till the Pteridomania seems to you somewhat of a bore: and yet
+you cannot deny that they find an enjoyment in it, and are more active,
+more cheerful, more self-forgetful over it, than they would have been
+over novels and gossip, crochet and Berlin-wool.  At least you will
+confess that the abomination of “Fancy-work”—that standing cloak for
+dreamy idleness (not to mention the injury which it does to poor starving
+needlewomen)—has all but vanished from your drawing-room since the
+“Lady-ferns” and “Venus’s hair” appeared; and that you could not help
+yourself looking now and then at the said “Venus’s hair,” and agreeing
+that Nature’s real beauties were somewhat superior to the ghastly woollen
+caricatures which they had superseded.
+
+You cannot deny, I say, that there is a fascination in this same Natural
+History.  For do not you, the London merchant, recollect how but last
+summer your douce and portly head-clerk was seized by two keepers in the
+act of wandering in Epping Forest at dead of night, with a dark lantern,
+a jar of strange sweet compound, and innumerable pocketfuls of
+pill-boxes; and found it very difficult to make either his captors or you
+believe that he was neither going to burn wheat-ricks, nor poison
+pheasants, but was simply “sugaring the trees for moths,” as a blameless
+entomologist?  And when, in self-justification, he took you to his house
+in Islington, and showed you the glazed and corked drawers full of
+delicate insects, which had evidently cost him in the collecting the
+spare hours of many busy years, and many a pound, too, out of his small
+salary, were you not a little puzzled to make out what spell there could
+be in those “useless” moths, to draw out of his warm bed, twenty miles
+down the Eastern Counties Railway, and into the damp forest like a
+deer-stealer, a sober white-headed Tim Linkinwater like him, your very
+best man of business, given to the reading of Scotch political economy,
+and gifted with peculiarly clear notions on the currency question?
+
+It is puzzling, truly.  I shall be very glad if these pages help you
+somewhat toward solving the puzzle.
+
+We shall agree at least that the study of Natural History has become
+now-a-days an honourable one.  A Cromarty stonemason was till lately—God
+rest his noble soul!—the most important man in the City of Edinburgh, by
+dint of a work on fossil fishes; and the successful investigator of the
+minutest animals takes place unquestioned among men of genius, and, like
+the philosopher of old Greece, is considered, by virtue of his science,
+fit company for dukes and princes.  Nay, the study is now more than
+honourable; it is (what to many readers will be a far higher
+recommendation) even fashionable.  Every well-educated person is eager to
+know something at least of the wonderful organic forms which surround him
+in every sunbeam and every pebble; and books of Natural History are
+finding their way more and more into drawing-rooms and school-rooms, and
+exciting greater thirst for a knowledge which, even twenty years ago, was
+considered superfluous for all but the professional student.
+
+What a change from the temper of two generations since, when the
+naturalist was looked on as a harmless enthusiast, who went
+“bug-hunting,” simply because he had not spirit to follow a fox!  There
+are those alive who can recollect an amiable man being literally bullied
+out of the New Forest, because he dared to make a collection (at this
+moment, we believe, in some unknown abyss of that great Avernus, the
+British Museum) of fossil shells from those very Hordwell Cliffs, for
+exploring which there is now established a society of subscribers and
+correspondents.  They can remember, too, when, on the first appearance of
+Bewick’s “British Birds,” the excellent sportsman who brought it down to
+the Forest was asked, Why on earth he had bought a book about “cock
+sparrows”? and had to justify himself again and again, simply by lending
+the book to his brother sportsmen, to convince them that there were
+rather more than a dozen sorts of birds (as they then held) indigenous to
+Hampshire.  But the book, perhaps, which turned the tide in favour of
+Natural History, among the higher classes at least, in the south of
+England, was White’s “History of Selborne.”  A Hampshire gentleman and
+sportsman, whom everybody knew, had taken the trouble to write a book
+about the birds and the weeds in his own parish, and the every-day things
+which went on under his eyes, and everyone else’s.  And all gentlemen,
+from the Weald of Kent to the Vale of Blackmore, shrugged their shoulders
+mysteriously, and said, “Poor fellow!” till they opened the book itself,
+and discovered to their surprise that it read like any novel.  And then
+came a burst of confused, but honest admiration; from the young squire’s
+“Bless me! who would have thought that there were so many wonderful
+things to be seen in one’s own park!” to the old squire’s more morally
+valuable “Bless me! why, I have seen that and that a hundred times, and
+never thought till now how wonderful they were!”
+
+There were great excuses, though, of old, for the contempt in which the
+naturalist was held; great excuses for the pitying tone of banter with
+which the Spectator talks of “the ingenious” Don Saltero (as no doubt the
+Neapolitan gentleman talked of Ferrante Imperato the apothecary, and his
+museum); great excuses for Voltaire, when he classes the collection of
+butterflies among the other “bizarreries de l’esprit humain.”  For, in
+the last generation, the needs of the world were different.  It had no
+time for butterflies and fossils.  While Buonaparte was hovering on the
+Boulogne coast, the pursuits and the education which were needed were
+such as would raise up men to fight him; so the coarse, fierce,
+hard-handed training of our grandfathers came when it was wanted, and did
+the work which was required of it, else we had not been here now.  Let us
+be thankful that we have had leisure for science; and show now in war
+that our science has at least not unmanned us.
+
+Moreover, Natural History, if not fifty years ago, certainly a hundred
+years ago, was hardly worthy of men of practical common sense.  After,
+indeed, Linné, by his invention of generic and specific names, had made
+classification possible, and by his own enormous labours had shown how
+much could be done when once a method was established, the science has
+grown rapidly enough.  But before him little or nothing had been put into
+form definite enough to allure those who (as the many always will) prefer
+to profit by others’ discoveries, than to discover for themselves; and
+Natural History was attractive only to a few earnest seekers, who found
+too much trouble in disencumbering their own minds of the dreams of
+bygone generations (whether facts, like cockatrices, basilisks, and
+krakens, the breeding of bees out of a dead ox, and of geese from
+barnacles; or theories, like those of elements, the _vis plastrix_ in
+Nature, animal spirits, and the other musty heirlooms of Aristotleism and
+Neo-platonism), to try to make a science popular, which as yet was not
+even a science at all.  Honour to them, nevertheless.  Honour to Ray and
+his illustrious contemporaries in Holland and France.  Honour to Seba and
+Aldrovandus; to Pomet, with his “Historie of Drugges;” even to the
+ingenious Don Saltero, and his tavern-museum in Cheyne Walk.  Where all
+was chaos, every man was useful who could contribute a single spot of
+organized standing ground in the shape of a fact or a specimen.  But it
+is a question whether Natural History would have ever attained its
+present honours, had not Geology arisen, to connect every other branch of
+Natural History with problems as vast and awful as they are captivating
+to the imagination.  Nay, the very opposition with which Geology met was
+of as great benefit to the sister sciences as to itself.  For, when
+questions belonging to the most sacred hereditary beliefs of Christendom
+were supposed to be affected by the verification of a fossil shell, or
+the proving that the Maestricht “homo diluvii testis” was, after all, a
+monstrous eft, it became necessary to work upon Conchology, Botany, and
+Comparative Anatomy, with a care and a reverence, a caution and a severe
+induction, which had been never before applied to them; and thus
+gradually, in the last half-century, the whole choir of cosmical sciences
+have acquired a soundness, severity, and fulness, which render them, as
+mere intellectual exercises, as valuable to a manly mind as Mathematics
+and Metaphysics.
+
+But how very lately have they attained that firm and honourable standing
+ground!  It is a question whether, even twenty years ago, Geology, as it
+then stood, was worth troubling one’s head about, so little had been
+really proved.  And heavy and uphill was the work, even within the last
+fifteen years, of those who stedfastly set themselves to the task of
+proving and of asserting at all risks, that the Maker of the coal seam
+and the diluvial cave could not be a “Deus quidam deceptor,” and that the
+facts which the rock and the silt revealed were sacred, not to be warped
+or trifled with for the sake of any cowardly and hasty notion that they
+contradicted His other messages.  When a few more years are past,
+Buckland and Sedgwick, Murchison and Lyell, Delabêche and Phillips,
+Forbes and Jamieson, and the group of brave men who accompanied and
+followed them, will be looked back to as moral benefactors of their race;
+and almost as martyrs, also, when it is remembered how much
+misunderstanding, obloquy, and plausible folly they had to endure from
+well-meaning fanatics like Fairholme or Granville Penn, and the
+respectable mob at their heels who tried (as is the fashion in such
+cases) to make a hollow compromise between fact and the Bible, by
+twisting facts just enough to make them fit the fancied meaning of the
+Bible, and the Bible just enough to make it fit the fancied meaning of
+the facts.  But there were a few who would have no compromise; who
+laboured on with a noble recklessness, determined to speak the thing
+which they had seen, and neither more nor less, sure that God could take
+better care than they of His own everlasting truth.  And now they have
+conquered: the facts which were twenty years ago denounced as contrary to
+Revelation, are at last accepted not merely as consonant with, but as
+corroborative thereof; and sound practical geologists—like Hugh Miller,
+in his “Footprints of the Creator,” and Professor Sedgwick, in the
+invaluable notes to his “Discourse on the Studies of Cambridge”—have
+wielded in defence of Christianity the very science which was faithlessly
+and cowardly expected to subvert it.
+
+But if you seek, reader, rather for pleasure than for wisdom, you can
+find it in such studies, pure and undefiled.
+
+Happy, truly, is the naturalist.  He has no time for melancholy dreams.
+The earth becomes to him transparent; everywhere he sees significancies,
+harmonies, laws, chains of cause and effect endlessly interlinked, which
+draw him out of the narrow sphere of self-interest and self-pleasing,
+into a pure and wholesome region of solemn joy and wonder.  He goes up
+some Snowdon valley; to him it is a solemn spot (though unnoticed by his
+companions), where the stag’s-horn clubmoss ceases to straggle across the
+turf, and the tufted alpine clubmoss takes its place: for he is now in a
+new world; a region whose climate is eternally influenced by some fresh
+law (after which he vainly guesses with a sigh at his own ignorance),
+which renders life impossible to one species, possible to another.  And
+it is a still more solemn thought to him, that it was not always so; that
+æons and ages back, that rock which he passed a thousand feet below was
+fringed, not as now with fern and blue bugle, and white bramble-flowers,
+but perhaps with the alp-rose and the “gemsen-kraut” of Mont Blanc, at
+least with Alpine Saxifrages which have now retreated a thousand feet up
+the mountain side, and with the blue Snow-Gentian, and the Canadian
+Sedum, which have all but vanished out of the British Isles.  And what is
+it which tells him that strange story?  Yon smooth and rounded surface of
+rock, polished, remark, across the strata and against the grain; and
+furrowed here and there, as if by iron talons, with long parallel
+scratches.  It was the crawling of a glacier which polished that
+rock-face; the stones fallen from Snowdon peak into the half-liquid lake
+of ice above, which ploughed those furrows.  Æons and æons ago, before
+the time when Adam first
+
+    “Embraced his Eve in happy hour,
+    And every bird in Eden burst
+    In carol, every bud in flower,”
+
+those marks were there; the records of the “Age of ice;” slight, truly;
+to be effaced by the next farmer who needs to build a wall; but
+unmistakeable, boundless in significance, like Crusoe’s one savage
+footprint on the sea-shore; and the naturalist acknowledges the
+finger-mark of God, and wonders, and worships.
+
+Happy, especially, is the sportsman who is also a naturalist: for as he
+roves in pursuit of his game, over hills or up the beds of streams where
+no one but a sportsman ever thinks of going, he will be certain to see
+things noteworthy, which the mere naturalist would never find, simply
+because he could never guess that they were there to be found.  I do not
+speak merely of the rare birds which may be shot, the curious facts as to
+the habits of fish which may be observed, great as these pleasures are.
+I speak of the scenery, the weather, the geological formation of the
+country, its vegetation, and the living habits of its denizens.  A
+sportsman, out in all weathers, and often dependent for success on his
+knowledge of “what the sky is going to do,” has opportunities for
+becoming a meteorologist which no one beside but a sailor possesses; and
+one has often longed for a scientific gamekeeper or huntsman, who, by
+discovering a law for the mysterious and seemingly capricious phenomena
+of “scent,” might perhaps throw light on a hundred dark passages of
+hygrometry.  The fisherman, too,—what an inexhaustible treasury of wonder
+lies at his feet, in the subaqueous world of the commonest mountain burn!
+All the laws which mould a world are there busy, if he but knew it,
+fattening his trout for him, and making them rise to the fly, by strange
+electric influences, at one hour rather than at another.  Many a good
+geognostic lesson, too, both as to the nature of a country’s rocks, and
+as to the laws by which strata are deposited, may an observing man learn
+as he wades up the bed of a trout-stream; not to mention the strange
+forms and habits of the tribes of water-insects.  Moreover, no good
+fisherman but knows, to his sorrow, that there are plenty of minutes, ay,
+hours, in each day’s fishing in which he would be right glad of any
+employment better than trying to
+
+    “Call spirits from the vasty deep,”
+
+who will not
+
+    “Come when you do call for them.”
+
+What to do, then?  You are sitting, perhaps, in your coracle, upon some
+mountain tarn, waiting for a wind, and waiting in vain.
+
+    “Keine luft an keine seite,
+    Todes-stille fürchterlich;”
+
+as Göthe has it—
+
+    “Und der schiffer sieht bekümmert
+    Glatte fläche rings umher.”
+
+You paddle to the shore on the side whence the wind ought to come, if it
+had any spirit in it; tie the coracle to a stone, light your cigar, lie
+down on your back upon the grass, grumble, and finally fall asleep.  In
+the meanwhile, probably, the breeze has come on, and there has been
+half-an-hour’s lively fishing curl; and you wake just in time to see the
+last ripple of it sneaking off at the other side of the lake, leaving all
+as dead-calm as before.
+
+Now how much better, instead of falling asleep, to have walked quietly
+round the lake side, and asked of your own brains and of Nature the
+question, “How did this lake come here?  What does it mean?”
+
+It is a hole in the earth.  True, but how was the hole made?  There must
+have been huge forces at work to form such a chasm.  Probably the
+mountain was actually opened from within by an earthquake; and when the
+strata fell together again, the portion at either end of the chasm, being
+perhaps crushed together with greater force, remained higher than the
+centre, and so the water lodged between them.  Perhaps it was formed
+thus.  You will at least agree that its formation must have been a grand
+sight enough, and one during which a spectator would have had some
+difficulty in keeping his footing.
+
+And when you learn that this convulsion probably took plus at the bottom
+of an ocean hundreds of thousands of years ago, you have at least a few
+thoughts over which to ruminate, which will make you at once too busy to
+grumble, and ashamed to grumble.
+
+Yet, after all, I hardly think the lake was formed in this way, and
+suspect that it may have been dry for ages after it emerged from the
+primeval waves, and Snowdonia was a palm-fringed island in a tropic sea.
+Let us look the place over more fully.
+
+You see the lake is nearly circular; on the side where we stand the
+pebbly beach is not six feet above the water, and slopes away steeply
+into the valley behind us, while before us it shelves gradually into the
+lake; forty yards out, as you know, there is not ten feet water; and then
+a steep bank, the edge whereof we and the big trout know well, sinks
+suddenly to unknown depths.  On the opposite side, that flat-topped wall
+of rock towers up shoreless into the sky, seven hundred feet
+perpendicular; the deepest water of all we know is at its very foot.
+Right and left, two shoulders of down slope into the lake.  Now turn
+round and look down the gorge.  Remark that this pebble bank on which we
+stand reaches some fifty yards downward: you see the loose stones peeping
+out everywhere.  We may fairly suppose that we stand on a dam of loose
+stones, a hundred feet deep.
+
+But why loose stones?—and if so, what matter? and what wonder? There are
+rocks cropping out everywhere down the hill-side.
+
+Because if you will take up one of these stones and crack it across, you
+will see that it is not of the same stuff as those said rocks.  Step into
+the next field and see.  That rock is the common Snowdon slate, which we
+see everywhere.  The two shoulders of down, right and left, are slate,
+too; you can see that at a glance.  But the stones of the pebble bank are
+a close-grained, yellow-spotted rock.  They are Syenite; and (you may
+believe me or not, as you will) they were once upon a time in the
+condition of a hasty pudding heated to some 800 degrees of Fahrenheit,
+and in that condition shoved their way up somewhere or other through
+these slates.  But where? whence on earth did these Syenite pebbles come?
+Let us walk round to the cliff on the opposite side and see.  It is worth
+while; for even if my guess be wrong, there is good spinning with a brass
+minnow round the angles of the rocks.
+
+Now see.  Between the cliff-foot and the sloping down is a crack, ending
+in a gully; the nearer side is of slate, and the further side, the cliff
+itself, is—why, the whole cliff is composed of the very same stone as the
+pebble ridge.
+
+Now, my good friend, how did these pebbles get three hundred yards across
+the lake?  Hundreds of tons, some of them three feet long: who carried
+them across?  The old Cymry were not likely to amuse themselves by making
+such a breakwater up here in No-man’s-land, two thousand feet above the
+sea: but somebody or something must have carried them; for stones do not
+fly, nor swim either.
+
+Shot out of a volcano?  As you seem determined to have a prodigy, it may
+as well be a sufficiently huge one.
+
+Well—these stones lie altogether; and a volcano would have hardly made so
+compact a shot, not being in the habit of using Eley’s wire cartridges.
+Our next hope of a solution lies in John Jones, who carried up the
+coracle.  Hail him, and ask him what is on the top of that cliff . . .
+So, “Plainshe and pogshe, and another Llyn.”  Very good.  Now, does it
+not strike you that this whole cliff has a remarkably smooth and
+plastered look, like a hare’s run up an earthbank?  And do you not see
+that it is polished thus only over the lake? that as soon as the cliff
+abuts on the downs right and left, it forms pinnacles, caves, broken
+angular boulders?  Syenite usually does so in our damp climate, from the
+“weathering” effect of frost and rain: why has it not done so over the
+lake?  On that part something (giants perhaps) has been scrambling up or
+down on a very large scale, and so rubbed off every corner which was
+inclined to come away, till the solid core of the rock was bared.  And
+may not those mysterious giants have had a hand in carrying the stones
+across the lake? . . . Really, I am not altogether jesting.  Think a
+while what agent could possibly have produced either one or both of these
+effects?
+
+There is but one; and that, if you have been an Alpine traveller—much
+more if you have been a Chamois hunter—you have seen many a time (whether
+you knew it or not) at the very same work.
+
+Ice?  Yes; ice; Hrymir the frost-giant, and no one else.  And if you will
+look at the facts, you will see how ice may have done it.  Our friend
+John Jones’s report of plains and bogs and a lake above makes it quite
+possible that in the “Ice age” (Glacial Epoch, as the big-word-mongers
+call it) there was above that cliff a great neve, or snowfield, such as
+you have seen often in the Alps at the head of each glacier.  Over the
+face of this cliff a glacier has crawled down from that neve, polishing
+the face of the rock in its descent: but the snow, having no large and
+deep outlet, has not slid down in a sufficient stream to reach the vale
+below, and form a glacier of the first order; and has therefore stopped
+short on the other side of the lake, as a glacier of the second order,
+which ends in an ice-cliff hanging high up on the mountain side, and kept
+from further progress by daily melting.  If you have ever gone up the Mer
+de Glace to the Tacul, you saw a magnificent specimen of this sort on
+your right hand, just opposite the Tacul, in the Glacier de Trelaporte,
+which comes down from the Aiguille de Charmoz.
+
+This explains our pebble-ridge.  The stones which the glacier rubbed off
+the cliff beneath it it carried forward, slowly but surely, till they saw
+the light again in the face of the ice-cliff, and dropped out of it under
+the melting of the summer sun, to form a huge dam across the ravine;
+till, the “Ice age” past, a more genial climate succeeded, and neve and
+glacier melted away: but the “moraine” of stones did not, and remains to
+this day, as the dam which keeps up the waters of the lake.
+
+There is my explanation.  If you can find a better, do: but remember
+always that it must include an answer to—“How did the stones get across
+the lake?”
+
+Now, reader, we have had no abstruse science here, no long words, not
+even a microscope or a book: and yet we, as two plain sportsmen, have
+gone back, or been led back by fact and common sense, into the most awful
+and sublime depths, into an epos of the destruction and re-creation of a
+former world.
+
+This is but a single instance; I might give hundreds.  This one,
+nevertheless, may have some effect in awakening you to the boundless
+world of wonders which is all around you, and make you ask yourself
+seriously, “What branch of Natural History shall I begin to investigate,
+if it be but for a few weeks, this summer?”
+
+To which I answer, Try “the Wonders of the Shore.”  There are along every
+sea-beach more strange things to be seen, and those to be seen easily,
+than in any other field of observation which you will find in these
+islands.  And on the shore only will you have the enjoyment of finding
+new species, of adding your mite to the treasures of science.
+
+For not only the English ferns, but the natural history of all our land
+species, are now well-nigh exhausted.  Our home botanists and
+ornithologists are spending their time now, perforce, in verifying a few
+obscure species, and bemoaning themselves, like Alexander, that there are
+no more worlds left to conquer.  For the geologist, indeed, and the
+entomologist, especially in the remoter districts, much remains to be
+done, but only at a heavy outlay of time, labour, and study; and the
+dilettante (and it is for dilettanti, like myself, that I principally
+write) must be content to tread in the tracks of greater men who have
+preceded him, and accept at second or third hand their foregone
+conclusions.
+
+But this is most unsatisfactory; for in giving up discovery, one gives up
+one of the highest enjoyments of Natural History.  There is a mysterious
+delight in the discovery of a new species, akin to that of seeing for the
+first time, in their native haunts, plants or animals of which one has
+till then only read.  Some, surely, who read these pages have experienced
+that latter delight; and, though they might find it hard to define whence
+the pleasure arose, know well that it was a solid pleasure, the memory of
+which they would not give up for hard cash.  Some, surely, can recollect,
+at their first sight of the Alpine Soldanella, the Rhododendron, or the
+black Orchis, growing upon the edge of the eternal snow, a thrill of
+emotion not unmixed with awe; a sense that they were, as it were, brought
+face to face with the creatures of another world; that Nature was
+independent of them, not merely they of her; that trees were not merely
+made to build their houses, or herbs to feed their cattle, as they looked
+on those wild gardens amid the wreaths of the untrodden snow, which had
+lifted their gay flowers to the sun year after year since the foundation
+of the world, taking no heed of man, and all the coil which he keeps in
+the valleys far below.
+
+And even, to take a simpler instance, there are those who will excuse, or
+even approve of, a writer for saying that, among the memories of a
+month’s eventful tour, those which stand out as beacon-points, those
+round which all the others group themselves, are the first wolf-track by
+the road-side in the Kyllwald; the first sight of the blue and green
+Roller-birds, walking behind the plough like rooks in the tobacco-fields
+of Wittlich; the first ball of Olivine scraped out of the volcanic
+slag-heaps of the Dreisser-Weiher; the first pair of the Lesser Bustard
+flushed upon the downs of the Mosel-kopf; the first sight of the cloud of
+white Ephemeræ, fluttering in the dusk like a summer snowstorm between us
+and the black cliffs of the Rheinstein, while the broad Rhine beneath
+flashed blood-red in the blaze of the lightning and the fires of the
+Mausenthurm—a lurid Acheron above which seemed to hover ten thousand
+unburied ghosts; and last, but not least, on the lip of the vast
+Mosel-kopf crater—just above the point where the weight of the fiery lake
+has burst the side of the great slag-cup, and rushed forth between two
+cliffs of clink-stone across the downs, in a clanging stream of fire,
+damming up rivulets, and blasting its path through forests, far away
+toward the valley of the Moselle—the sight of an object for which was
+forgotten for the moment that battle-field of the Titans at our feet, and
+the glorious panorama, Hundsruck and Taunus, Siebengebirge and Ardennes,
+and all the crater peaks around; and which was—smile not, reader—our
+first yellow foxglove.
+
+But what is even this to the delight of finding a new species?—of
+rescuing (as it seems to you) one more thought of the Divine mind from
+Hela, and the realms of the unknown, unclassified, uncomprehended?  As it
+seems to you: though in reality it only seems so, in a world wherein not
+a sparrow falls to the ground unnoticed by our Father who is in heaven.
+
+The truth is, the pleasure of finding new species is too great; it is
+morally dangerous; for it brings with it the temptation to look on the
+thing found as your own possession, all but your own creation; to pride
+yourself on it, as if God had not known it for ages since; even to
+squabble jealously for the right of having it named after you, and of
+being recorded in the Transactions of I-know-not-what Society as its
+first discoverer:—as if all the angels in heaven had not been admiring
+it, long before you were born or thought of.
+
+But to be forewarned is to be forearmed; and I seriously counsel you to
+try if you cannot find something new this summer along the coast to which
+you are going.  There is no reason why you should not be so successful as
+a friend of mine who, with a very slight smattering of science, and very
+desultory research, obtained in one winter from the Torbay shores three
+entirely new species, beside several rare animals which had escaped all
+naturalists since the lynx-eye of Colonel Montagu discerned them forty
+years ago.
+
+And do not despise the creatures because they are minute.  No doubt we
+should most of us prefer discovering monstrous apes in the tropical
+forests of Borneo, or stumbling upon herds of gigantic Ammon sheep amid
+the rhododendron thickets of the Himalaya: but it cannot be; and “he is a
+fool,” says old Hesiod, “who knows not how much better half is than the
+whole.”  Let us be content with what is within our reach.  And doubt not
+that in these tiny creatures are mysteries more than we shall ever
+fathom.
+
+The zoophytes and microscopic animalcules which people every shore and
+every drop of water, have been now raised to a rank in the human mind
+more important, perhaps, than even those gigantic monsters whose models
+fill the lake at the Crystal Palace.  The research which has been
+bestowed, for the last century, upon these once unnoticed atomies has
+well repaid itself; for from no branch of physical science has more been
+learnt of the _scientia scientiarum_, the priceless art of learning; no
+branch of science has more utterly confounded a wisdom of the wise,
+shattered to pieces systems and theories, and the idolatry of arbitrary
+names, and taught man to be silent while his Maker speaks, than this
+apparent pedantry of zoophytology, in which our old distinctions of
+“animal,” “vegetable,” and “mineral” are trembling in the balance,
+seemingly ready to vanish like their fellows—“the four elements” of fire,
+earth, air, and water.  No branch of science has helped so much to sweep
+away that sensuous idolatry of mere size, which tempts man to admire and
+respect objects in proportion to the number of feet or inches which they
+occupy in space.  No branch of science, moreover, has been more humbling
+to the boasted rapidity and omnipotence of the human reason, or has more
+taught those who have eyes to see, and hearts to understand, how weak and
+wayward, staggering and slow, are the steps of our fallen race (rapid and
+triumphant enough in that broad road of theories which leads to
+intellectual destruction) whensoever they tread the narrow path of true
+science, which leads (if I may be allowed to transfer our Lord’s great
+parable from moral to intellectual matters) to Life; to the living and
+permanent knowledge of living things and of the laws of their existence.
+Humbling, truly, to one who looks back to the summer of 1754, when good
+Mr. Ellis, the wise and benevolent West Indian merchant, read before the
+Royal Society his paper proving the animal nature of corals, and followed
+it up the year after by that “Essay toward a Natural History of the
+Corallines, and other like Marine Productions of the British Coasts,”
+which forms the groundwork of all our knowledge on the subject to this
+day.  The chapter in Dr. G. Johnston’s “British Zoophytes,” p. 407, or
+the excellent little _résumé_ thereof in Dr. Landsborough’s book on the
+same subject, is really a saddening one, as one sees how loth were, not
+merely dreamers like, Marsigli or Bonnet, but sound-headed men like
+Pallas and Linné, to give up the old sense-bound fancy, that these corals
+were vegetables, and their polypes some sort of living flowers.  Yet,
+after all, there are excuses for them.  Without our improved microscopes,
+and while the sciences of comparative anatomy and chemistry were yet
+infantile, it was difficult to believe what was the truth; and for this
+simple reason: that, as usual, the truth, when discovered, turned out far
+more startling and prodigious than the dreams which men had hastily
+substituted for it; more strange than Ovid’s old story that the coral was
+soft under the sea, and hardened by exposure to air; than Marsigli’s
+notion, that the coral-polypes were its flowers; than Dr. Parsons’
+contemptuous denial, that these complicated forms could be “the
+operations of little, poor, helpless, jelly-like animals, and not the
+work of more sure vegetation;” than Baker the microscopist’s detailed
+theory of their being produced by the crystallization of the mineral
+salts in the sea-water, just as he had seen “the particles of mercury and
+copper in aquafortis assume tree-like forms, or curious delineations of
+mosses and minute shrubs on slates and stones, owing to the shooting of
+salts intermixed with mineral particles:”—one smiles at it now: yet these
+men were no less sensible than we; and if we know better, it is only
+because other men, and those few and far between, have laboured amid
+disbelief, ridicule, and error; needing again and again to retrace their
+steps, and to unlearn more than they learnt, seeming to go backwards when
+they were really progressing most: and now we have entered into their
+labours, and find them, as I have just said, more wondrous than all the
+poetic dreams of a Bonnet or a Darwin.  For who, after all, to take a few
+broad instances (not to enlarge on the great root-wonder of a number of
+distinct individuals connected by a common life, and forming a seeming
+plant invariable in each species), would have dreamed of the
+“bizarreries” which these very zoophytes present in their classification?
+
+You go down to any shore after a gale of wind, and pick up a few delicate
+little sea-ferns.  You have two in your hand, which probably look to you,
+even under a good pocket magnifier, identical or nearly so. {37}  But you
+are told to your surprise, that however like the dead horny polypidoms
+which you hold may be, the two species of animal which have formed them
+are at least as far apart in the scale of creation as a quadruped is from
+a fish.  You see in some Musselburgh dredger’s boat the phosphorescent
+sea-pen (unknown in England), a living feather, of the look and
+consistency of a cock’s comb; or the still stranger sea-rush (_Virgularia
+mirabilis_), a spine a foot long, with hundreds of rosy flowerets
+arranged in half-rings round it from end to end; and you are told that
+these are the congeners of the great stony Venus’s fan which hangs in
+seamen’s cottages, brought home from the West Indies.  And ere you have
+done wondering, you hear that all three are congeners of the ugly,
+shapeless, white “dead man’s hand,” which you may pick up after a storm
+on any shore.  You have a beautiful madrepore or brain-stone on your
+mantel-piece, brought home from some Pacific coral-reef.  You are to
+believe that its first cousins are the soft, slimy sea-anemones which you
+see expanding their living flowers in every rock-pool—bags of sea-water,
+without a trace of bone or stone.  You must believe it; for in science,
+as in higher matters, he who will walk surely, must “walk by faith and
+not by sight.”
+
+These are but a few of the wonders which the classification of marine
+animals affords; and only drawn from one class of them, though almost as
+common among every other family of that submarine world whereof Spenser
+sang—
+
+    “Oh, what an endless work have I in hand,
+       To count the sea’s abundant progeny!
+    Whose fruitful seed far passeth those in land,
+       And also those which won in th’ azure sky,
+       For much more earth to tell the stars on high,
+    Albe they endless seem in estimation,
+       Than to recount the sea’s posterity;
+    So fertile be the flouds in generation,
+    So huge their numbers, and so numberless their nation.”
+
+But these few examples will be sufficient to account both for the slow
+pace at which the knowledge of sea-animals has progressed, and for the
+allurement which men of the highest attainments have found, and still
+find, in it.  And when to this we add the marvels which meet us at every
+step in the anatomy and the reproduction of these creatures, and in the
+chemical and mechanical functions which they fulfil in the great economy
+of our planet, we cannot wonder at finding that books which treat of them
+carry with them a certain charm of romance, and feed the play of fancy,
+and that love of the marvellous which is inherent in man, at the same
+time that they lead the reader to more solemn and lofty trains of
+thought, which can find their full satisfaction only in self-forgetful
+worship, and that hymn of praise which goes up ever from land and sea, as
+well as from saints and martyrs and the heavenly host, “O all ye works of
+the Lord, and ye, too, spirits and souls of the righteous, praise Him,
+and magnify Him for ever!”
+
+I have said, that there were excuses for the old contempt of the study of
+Natural History.  I have said, too, it may be hoped, enough to show that
+contempt to be now ill-founded.  But still, there are those who regard it
+as a mere amusement, and that as a somewhat effeminate one; and think
+that it can at best help to while away a leisure hour harmlessly, and
+perhaps usefully, as a substitute for coarser sports, or for the reading
+of novels.  Those, however, who have followed it out, especially on the
+sea-shore, know better.  They can tell from experience, that over and
+above its accessory charms of pure sea-breezes, and wild rambles by cliff
+and loch, the study itself has had a weighty moral effect upon their
+hearts and spirits.  There are those who can well understand how the good
+and wise John Ellis, amid all his philanthropic labours for the good of
+the West Indies, while he was spending his intellect and fortune in
+introducing into our tropic settlements the bread-fruit, the mangosteen,
+and every plant and seed which he hoped might be useful for medicine,
+agriculture, and commerce, could yet feel himself justified in devoting
+large portions of his ever well-spent time to the fighting the battle of
+the corallines against Parsons and the rest, and even in measuring pens
+with Linné, the prince of naturalists.
+
+There are those who can sympathise with the gallant old Scotch officer
+mentioned by some writer on sea-weeds, who, desperately wounded in the
+breach at Badajos, and a sharer in all the toils and triumphs of the
+Peninsular war, could in his old age show a rare sea-weed with as much
+triumph as his well-earned medals, and talk over a tiny spore-capsule
+with as much zest as the records of sieges and battles.  Why not?  That
+temper which made him a good soldier may very well have made him a good
+naturalist also.  The late illustrious geologist, Sir Roderick Murchison,
+was also an old Peninsular officer.  I doubt not that with him, too, the
+experiences of war may have helped to fit him for the studies of peace.
+Certainly, the best naturalist, as far as logical acumen, as well as
+earnest research, is concerned, whom England has ever seen, was the
+Devonshire squire, Colonel George Montagu, of whom the late E. Forbes
+well says, that “had he been educated a physiologist” (and not, as he
+was, a soldier and a sportsman), “and made the study of Nature his aim
+and not his amusement, his would have been one of the greatest names in
+the whole range of British science.”  I question, nevertheless, whether
+he would not have lost more than he would have gained by a different
+training.  It might have made him a more learned systematizer; but would
+it have quickened in him that “seeing” eye of the true soldier and
+sportsman, which makes Montagu’s descriptions indelible word-pictures,
+instinct with life and truth?  “There is no question,” says E. Forbes,
+after bewailing the vagueness of most naturalists, “about the identity of
+any animal Montagu described. . . . He was a forward-looking philosopher;
+he spoke of every creature as if one exceeding like it, yet different
+from it, would be washed up by the waves next tide.  Consequently his
+descriptions are permanent.”  Scientific men will recognize in this the
+highest praise which can be bestowed, because it attributes to him the
+highest faculty—The Art of Seeing; but the study and the book would not
+have given that.  It is God’s gift wheresoever educated: but its true
+school-room is the camp and the ocean, the prairie and the forest;
+active, self-helping life, which can grapple with Nature herself: not
+merely with printed-books about her.  Let no one think that this same
+Natural History is a pursuit fitted only for effeminate or pedantic men.
+I should say, rather, that the qualifications required for a perfect
+naturalist are as many and as lofty as were required, by old chivalrous
+writers, for the perfect knight-errant of the Middle Ages: for (to sketch
+an ideal, of which I am happy to say our race now affords many a fair
+realization) our perfect naturalist should be strong in body; able to
+haul a dredge, climb a rock, turn a boulder, walk all day, uncertain
+where he shall eat or rest; ready to face sun and rain, wind and frost,
+and to eat or drink thankfully anything, however coarse or meagre; he
+should know how to swim for his life, to pull an oar, sail a boat, and
+ride the first horse which comes to hand; and, finally, he should be a
+thoroughly good shot, and a skilful fisherman; and, if he go far abroad,
+be able on occasion to fight for his life.
+
+For his moral character, he must, like a knight of old, be first of all
+gentle and courteous, ready and able to ingratiate himself with the poor,
+the ignorant, and the savage; not only because foreign travel will be
+often otherwise impossible, but because he knows how much invaluable
+local information can be only obtained from fishermen, miners, hunters,
+and tillers of the soil.  Next, he should be brave and enterprising, and
+withal patient and undaunted; not merely in travel, but in investigation;
+knowing (as Lord Bacon might have put it) that the kingdom of Nature,
+like the kingdom of heaven, must be taken by violence, and that only to
+those who knock long and earnestly does the great mother open the doors
+of her sanctuary.  He must be of a reverent turn of mind also; not rashly
+discrediting any reports, however vague and fragmentary; giving man
+credit always for some germ of truth, and giving Nature credit for an
+inexhaustible fertility and variety, which will keep him his life long
+always reverent, yet never superstitious; wondering at the commonest, but
+not surprised by the most strange; free from the idols of size and
+sensuous loveliness; able to see grandeur in the minutest objects,
+beauty, in the most ungainly; estimating each thing not carnally, as the
+vulgar do, by its size or its pleasantness to the senses, but
+spiritually, by the amount of Divine thought revealed to Man therein;
+holding every phenomenon worth the noting down; believing that every
+pebble holds a treasure, every bud a revelation; making it a point of
+conscience to pass over nothing through laziness or hastiness, lest the
+vision once offered and despised should be withdrawn; and looking at
+every object as if he were never to behold it again.
+
+Moreover, he must keep himself free from all those perturbations of mind
+which not only weaken energy, but darken and confuse the inductive
+faculty; from haste and laziness, from melancholy, testiness, pride, and
+all the passions which make men see only what they wish to see.  Of
+solemn and scrupulous reverence for truth; of the habit of mind which
+regards each fact and discovery, not as our own possession, but as the
+possession of its Creator, independent of us, our tastes, our needs, or
+our vain-glory, I hardly need to speak; for it is the very essence of a
+nature’s faculty—the very tenure of his existence: and without
+truthfulness science would be as impossible now as chivalry would have
+been of old.
+
+And last, but not least, the perfect naturalist should have in him the
+very essence of true chivalry, namely, self-devotion; the desire to
+advance, not himself and his own fame or wealth, but knowledge and
+mankind.  He should have this great virtue; and in spite of many
+shortcomings (for what man is there who liveth and sinneth not?),
+naturalists as a class have it to a degree which makes them stand out
+most honourably in the midst of a self-seeking and mammonite generation,
+inclined to value everything by its money price, its private utility.
+The spirit which gives freely, because it knows that it has received
+freely; which communicates knowledge without hope of reward, without
+jealousy and rivalry, to fellow-students and to the world; which is
+content to delve and toil comparatively unknown, that from its obscure
+and seemingly worthless results others may derive pleasure, and even
+build up great fortunes, and change the very face of cities and lands, by
+the practical use of some stray talisman which the poor student has
+invented in his laboratory;—this is the spirit which is abroad among our
+scientific men, to a greater degree than it ever has been among any body
+of men for many a century past; and might well be copied by those who
+profess deeper purposes and a more exalted calling, than the discovery of
+a new zoophyte, or the classification of a moorland crag.
+
+And it is these qualities, however imperfectly they may be realized in
+any individual instance, which make our scientific men, as a class, the
+wholesomest and pleasantest of companions abroad, and at home the most
+blameless, simple, and cheerful, in all domestic relations; men for the
+most part of manful heads, and yet of childlike hearts, who have turned
+to quiet study, in these late piping times of peace, an intellectual
+health and courage which might have made them, in more fierce and
+troublous times, capable of doing good service with very different
+instruments than the scalpel and the microscope.
+
+I have been sketching an ideal: but one which I seriously recommend to
+the consideration of all parents; for, though it be impossible and absurd
+to wish that every young man should grow up a naturalist by profession,
+yet this age offers no more wholesome training, both moral and
+intellectual, than that which is given by instilling into the young an
+early taste for outdoor physical science.  The education of our children
+is now more than ever a puzzling problem, if by education we mean the
+development of the whole humanity, not merely of some arbitrarily chosen
+part of it.  How to feed the imagination with wholesome food, and teach
+it to despise French novels, and that sugared slough of sentimental
+poetry, in comparison with which the old fairy-tales and ballads were
+manful and rational; how to counteract the tendency to shallowed and
+conceited sciolism, engendered by hearing popular lectures on all manner
+of subjects, which can only be really learnt by stern methodic study; how
+to give habits of enterprise, patience, accurate observation, which the
+counting-house or the library will never bestow; above all, how to
+develop the physical powers, without engendering brutality and
+coarseness—are questions becoming daily more and more puzzling, while
+they need daily more and more to be solved, in an age of enterprise,
+travel, and emigration, like the present.  For the truth must be told,
+that the great majority of men who are now distinguished by commercial
+success, have had a training the directly opposite to that which they are
+giving to their sons.  They are for the most part men who have migrated
+from the country to the town, and had in their youth all the advantages
+of a sturdy and manful hill-side or sea-side training; men whose bodies
+were developed, and their lungs fed on pure breezes, long before they
+brought to work in the city the bodily and mental strength which they had
+gained by loch and moor.  But it is not so with their sons.  Their
+business habits are learnt in the counting-house; a good school,
+doubtless, as far as it goes: but one which will expand none but the
+lowest intellectual faculties; which will make them accurate accountants,
+shrewd computers and competitors, but never the originators of daring
+schemes, men able and willing to go forth to replenish the earth and
+subdue it.  And in the hours of relaxation, how much of their time is
+thrown away, for want of anything better, on frivolity, not to say on
+secret profligacy, parents know too well; and often shut their eyes in
+very despair to evils which they know not how to cure.  A frightful
+majority of our middle-class young men are growing up effeminate, empty
+of all knowledge but what tends directly to the making of a fortune; or
+rather, to speak correctly, to the keeping up the fortunes which their
+fathers have made for them; while of the minority, who are indeed
+thinkers and readers, how many women as well as men have we seen wearying
+their souls with study undirected, often misdirected; craving to learn,
+yet not knowing how or what to learn; cultivating, with unwholesome
+energy, the head at the expense of the body and the heart; catching up
+with the most capricious self-will one mania after another, and tossing
+it away again for some new phantom; gorging the memory with facts which
+no one has taught them to arrange, and the reason with problems which
+they have no method for solving; till they fret themselves in a chronic
+fever of the brain, which too often urge them on to plunge, as it were,
+to cool the inward fire, into the ever-restless seas of doubt or of
+superstition.  It is a sad picture.  There are many who may read these
+pages whose hearts will tell them that it is a true one.  What is wanted
+in these cases is a methodic and scientific habit of mind; and a class of
+objects on which to exercise that habit, which will fever neither the
+speculative intellect nor the moral sense; and those physical science
+will give, as nothing else can give it.
+
+Moreover, to revert to another point which we touched just now, man has a
+body as well as a mind; and with the vast majority there will be no _mens
+sana_ unless there be a _corpus sanum_ for it to inhabit.  And what
+outdoor training to give our youths is, as we have already said, more
+than ever puzzling.  This difficulty is felt, perhaps, less in Scotland
+than in England.  The Scotch climate compels hardiness; the Scotch bodily
+strength makes it easy; and Scotland, with her mountain-tours in summer,
+and her frozen lochs in winter, her labyrinth of sea-shore, and, above
+all, that priceless boon which Providence has bestowed on her, in the
+contiguity of her great cities to the loveliest scenery, and the hills
+where every breeze is health, affords facilities for healthy physical
+life unknown to the Englishman, who has no Arthur’s Seat towering above
+his London, no Western Islands sporting the ocean firths beside his
+Manchester.  Field sports, with the invaluable training which they give,
+if not
+
+    “The reason firm,”
+
+yet still
+
+          “The temperate will,
+    Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill,”
+
+have become impossible for the greater number: and athletic exercises are
+now, in England at least, becoming more and more artificialized and
+expensive; and are confined more and more—with the honourable exception
+of the football games in Battersea Park—to our Public Schools and the two
+elder Universities.  All honour, meanwhile, to the Volunteer movement,
+and its moral as well as its physical effects.  But it is only a
+comparatively few of the very sturdiest who are likely to become
+effective Volunteers, and so really gain the benefits of learning to be
+soldiers.  And yet the young man who has had no substitute for such
+occupations will cut but a sorry figure in Australia, Canada, or India;
+and if he stays at home, will spend many a pound in doctors’ bills, which
+could have been better employed elsewhere.  “Taking a walk”—as one would
+take a pill or a draught—seems likely soon to become the only form of
+outdoor existence possible for too many inhabitants of the British Isles.
+But a walk without an object, unless in the most lovely and novel of
+scenery, is a poor exercise; and as a recreation, utterly nil.  I never
+knew two young lads go out for a “constitutional,” who did not, if they
+were commonplace youths, gossip the whole way about things better left
+unspoken; or, if they were clever ones, fall on arguing and brainsbeating
+on politics or metaphysics from the moment they left the door, and return
+with their wits even more heated and tired than they were when they set
+out.  I cannot help fancying that Milton made a mistake in a certain
+celebrated passage; and that it was not “sitting on a hill apart,” but
+tramping four miles out and four miles in along a turnpike-road, that his
+hapless spirits discoursed
+
+    “Of fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,
+    And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.”
+
+Seriously, if we wish rural walks to do our children any good, we must
+give them a love for rural sights, an object in every walk; we must teach
+them—and we can teach them—to find wonder in every insect, sublimity in
+every hedgerow, the records of past worlds in every pebble, and boundless
+fertility upon the barren shore; and so, by teaching them to make full
+use of that limited sphere in which they now are, make them faithful in a
+few things, that they may be fit hereafter to be rulers over much.
+
+I may seem to exaggerate the advantages of such studies; but the question
+after all is one of experience: and I have had experience enough and to
+spare that what I say is true.  I have seen the young man of fierce
+passions, and uncontrollable daring, expend healthily that energy which
+threatened daily to plunge him into recklessness, if not into sin, upon
+hunting out and collecting, through rock and bog, snow and tempest, every
+bird and egg of the neighbouring forest.  I have seen the cultivated man,
+craving for travel and for success in life, pent up in the drudgery of
+London work, and yet keeping his spirit calm, and perhaps his morals all
+the more righteous, by spending over his microscope evenings which would
+too probably have gradually been wasted at the theatre.  I have seen the
+young London beauty, amid all the excitement and temptation of luxury and
+flattery, with her heart pure and her mind occupied in a boudoir full of
+shells and fossils, flowers and sea-weeds; keeping herself unspotted from
+the world, by considering the lilies of the field, how they grow.  And
+therefore it is that I hail with thankfulness every fresh book of Natural
+History, as a fresh boon to the young, a fresh help to those who have to
+educate them.
+
+The greatest difficulty in the way of beginners is (as in most things)
+how “to learn the art of learning.”  They go out, search, find less than
+they expected, and give the subject up in disappointment.  It is good to
+begin, therefore, if possible, by playing the part of “jackal” to some
+practised naturalist, who will show the tyro where to look, what to look
+for, and, moreover, what it is that he has found; often no easy matter to
+discover.  Forty years ago, during an autumn’s work of
+dead-leaf-searching in the Devon woods for poor old Dr. Turton, while he
+was writing his book on British land-shells, the present writer learnt
+more of the art of observing than he would have learnt in three years’
+desultory hunting on his own account; and he has often regretted that no
+naturalist has established shore-lectures at some watering-place, like
+those up hill and down dale field-lectures which, in pleasant bygone
+Cambridge days, Professor Sedgwick used to give to young geologists, and
+Professor Henslow to young botanists.
+
+In the meanwhile, to show you something of what may be seen by those who
+care to see, let me take you, in imagination, to a shore where I was once
+at home, and for whose richness I can vouch, and choose our season and
+our day to start forth, on some glorious September or October morning, to
+see what last night’s equinoctial gale has swept from the populous
+shallows of Torbay, and cast up, high and dry, on Paignton sands.
+
+Torbay is a place which should be as much endeared to the naturalist as
+to the patriot and to the artist.  We cannot gaze on its blue ring of
+water, and the great limestone bluffs which bound it to the north and
+south, without a glow passing through our hearts, as we remember the
+terrible and glorious pageant which passed by in the glorious July days
+of 1588, when the Spanish Armada ventured slowly past Berry Head, with
+Elizabeth’s gallant pack of Devon captains (for the London fleet had not
+yet joined) following fast in its wake, and dashing into the midst of the
+vast line, undismayed by size and numbers, while their kin and friends
+stood watching and praying on the cliffs, spectators of Britain’s
+Salamis.  The white line of houses, too, on the other side of the bay, is
+Brixham, famed as the landing-place of William of Orange; the stone on
+the pier-head, which marks his first footsteps on British ground, is
+sacred in the eyes of all true English Whigs; and close by stands the
+castle of the settler of Newfoundland, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Raleigh’s
+half-brother, most learned of all Elizabeth’s admirals in life, most
+pious and heroic in death.  And as for scenery, though it can boast of
+neither mountain peak nor dark fiord, and would seem tame enough in the
+eyes of a western Scot or Irishman, yet Torbay surely has a soft beauty
+of its own.  The rounded hills slope gently to the sea, spotted with
+squares of emerald grass, and rich red fallow fields, and parks full of
+stately timber trees.  Long lines of tall elms run down to the very
+water’s edge, their boughs unwarped by any blast; here and there apple
+orchards are bending under their loads of fruit, and narrow strips of
+water-meadow line the glens, where the red cattle are already lounging in
+richest pastures, within ten yards of the rocky pebble beach.  The shore
+is silent now, the tide far out: but six hours hence it will be hurling
+columns of rosy foam high into the sunlight, and sprinkling passengers,
+and cattle, and trim gardens which hardly know what frost and snow may
+be, but see the flowers of autumn meet the flowers of spring, and the old
+year linger smilingly to twine a garland for the new.
+
+No wonder that such a spot as Torquay, with its delicious Italian
+climate, and endless variety of rich woodland, flowery lawn, fantastic
+rock-cavern, and broad bright tide-sand, sheltered from every wind of
+heaven except the soft south-east, should have become a favourite haunt,
+not only for invalids, but for naturalists.  Indeed, it may well claim
+the honour of being the original home of marine zoology and botany in
+England, as the Firth of Forth, under the auspices of Sir J. G. Dalyell,
+has been for Scotland.  For here worked Montagu, Turton, and Mrs.
+Griffith, to whose extraordinary powers of research English marine botany
+almost owes its existence, and who survived to an age long beyond the
+natural term of man, to see, in her cheerful and honoured old age, that
+knowledge become popular and general which she pursued for many a year
+unassisted and alone.  Here, too, the scientific succession is still
+maintained by Mr. Pengelly and Mr. Gosse, the latter of whom by his
+delightful and, happily, well-known books has done more for the study of
+marine zoology than any other living man.  Torbay, moreover, from the
+variety of its rocks, aspects, and sea-floors, where limestones alternate
+with traps, and traps with slates, while at the valley-mouth the soft
+sandstones and hard conglomerates of the new red series slope down into
+the tepid and shallow waves, affords an abundance and variety of animal
+and vegetable life, unequalled, perhaps, in any other part of Great
+Britain.  It cannot boast, certainly, of those strange deep-sea forms
+which Messrs. Alder, Goodsir, and Laskey dredge among the lochs of the
+western Highlands, and the sub-marine mountain glens of the Zetland sea;
+but it has its own varieties, its own ever-fresh novelties: and in spite
+of all the research which has been lavished on its shores, a naturalist
+cannot, I suspect, work there for a winter without discovering forms new
+to science, or meeting with curiosities which have escaped all observers,
+since the lynx eye of Montagu espied them full fifty years ago.
+
+Follow us, then, reader, in imagination, out of the gay watering-place,
+with its London shops and London equipages, along the broad road beneath
+the sunny limestone cliff, tufted with golden furze; past the huge oaks
+and green slopes of Tor Abbey; and past the fantastic rocks of Livermead,
+scooped by the waves into a labyrinth of double and triple caves, like
+Hindoo temples, upborne on pillars banded with yellow and white and red,
+a week’s study, in form and colour and chiaro-oscuro, for any artist; and
+a mile or so further along a pleasant road, with land-locked glimpses of
+the bay, to the broad sheet of sand which lies between the village of
+Paignton and the sea—sands trodden a hundred times by Montagu and Turton,
+perhaps, by Dillwyn and Gaertner, and many another pioneer of science.
+And once there, before we look at anything else, come down straight to
+the sea marge; for yonder lies, just left by the retiring tide, a mass of
+life such as you will seldom see again.  It is somewhat ugly, perhaps, at
+first sight; for ankle-deep are spread, for some ten yards long by five
+broad, huge dirty bivalve shells, as large as the hand, each with its
+loathly grey and black siphons hanging out, a confused mass of slimy
+death.  Let us walk on to some cleaner heap, and leave these, the great
+Lutraria Elliptica, which have been lying buried by thousands in the
+sandy mud, each with the point of its long siphon above the surface,
+sucking in and driving out again the salt water on which it feeds, till
+last night’s ground-swell shifted the sea-bottom, and drove them up
+hither to perish helpless, but not useless, on the beach.
+
+See, close by is another shell bed, quite as large, but comely enough to
+please any eye.  What a variety of forms and colours are there, amid the
+purple and olive wreaths of wrack, and bladder-weed, and tangle
+(ore-weed, as they call it in the south), and the delicate green ribbons
+of the Zostera (the only English flowering plant which grows beneath the
+sea).  What are they all?  What are the long white razors?  What are the
+delicate green-grey scimitars? What are the tapering brown spires?  What
+the tufts of delicate yellow plants like squirrels’ tails, and lobsters’
+horns, and tamarisks, and fir-trees, and all other finely cut animal and
+vegetable forms?  What are the groups of grey bladders, with something
+like a little bud at the tip?  What are the hundreds of little
+pink-striped pears?  What those tiny babies’ heads, covered with grey
+prickles instead of hair?  The great red star-fish, which Ulster children
+call “the bad man’s hands;” and the great whelks, which the youth of
+Musselburgh know as roaring buckies, these we have seen before; but what,
+oh what, are the red capsicums?—
+
+Yes, what are the red capsicums? and why are they poking, snapping,
+starting, crawling, tumbling wildly over each other, rattling about the
+huge mahogany cockles, as big as a child’s two fists, out of which they
+are protruded?  Mark them well, for you will perhaps never see them
+again.  They are a Mediterranean species, or rather three species, left
+behind upon these extreme south-western coasts, probably at the vanishing
+of that warmer ancient epoch, which clothed the Lizard Point with the
+Cornish heath, and the Killarney mountains with Spanish saxifrages, and
+other relics of a flora whose home is now the Iberian peninsula and the
+sunny cliffs of the Riviera.  Rare on every other shore, even in the
+west, it abounds in Torbay at certain, or rather uncertain, times, to so
+prodigious an amount, that the dredge, after five minutes’ scrape, will
+sometimes come up choked full of this great cockle only.  You will see
+hundreds of them in every cove for miles this day; a seeming waste of
+life, which would be awful, in our eyes, were not the Divine Ruler, as
+His custom is, making this destruction the means of fresh creation, by
+burying them in the sands, as soon as washed on shore, to fertilize the
+strata of some future world.  It is but a shell-fish truly; but the great
+Cuvier thought it remarkable enough to devote to its anatomy elaborate
+descriptions and drawings, which have done more perhaps than any others
+to illustrate the curious economy of the whole class of bivalve, or
+double-shelled, mollusca.  (Plate II. Fig. 3.)
+
+   [Picture: Plate 2: 1. Cardium Rusticum, (tuberculatum).  2. Pagurus
+                    Bernhardi, in a Periwinkle Shell]
+
+That red capsicum is the foot of the animal contained in the cockleshell.
+By its aid it crawls, leaps, and burrows in the sand, where it lies
+drinking in the salt water through one of its siphons, and discharging it
+again through the other.  Put the shell into a rock pool, or a basin of
+water, and you will see the siphons clearly.  The valves gape apart some
+three-quarters of an inch.  The semi-pellucid orange “mantle” fills the
+intermediate space.  Through that mantle, at the end from which the foot
+curves, the siphons protrude; two thick short tubes joined side by side,
+their lips fringed with pearly cirri, or fringes; and very beautiful they
+are.  The larger is always open, taking in the water, which is at once
+the animal’s food and air, and which, flowing over the delicate inner
+surface of the mantle, at once oxygenates its blood, and fills its
+stomach with minute particles of decayed organized matter.  The smaller
+is shut.  Wait a minute, and it will open suddenly and discharge a jet of
+clear water, which has been robbed, I suppose, of its oxygen and its
+organic matter.  But, I suppose, your eyes will be rather attracted by
+that same scarlet and orange foot, which is being drawn in and thrust out
+to a length of nearly four inches, striking with its point against any
+opposing object, and sending the whole shell backwards with a jerk.  The
+point, you see, is sharp and tongue-like; only flattened, not
+horizontally, like a tongue, but perpendicularly, so as to form, as it
+was intended, a perfect sand-plough, by which the animal can move at
+will, either above or below the surface of the sand. {67}
+
+But for colour and shape, to what shall we compare it?  To polished
+cornelian, says Mr. Gosse.  I say, to one of the great red capsicums
+which hang drying in every Covent-garden seedsman’s window.  Yet is
+either simile better than the guess of a certain lady, who, entering a
+room wherein a couple of Cardium tuberculatum were waltzing about a
+plate, exclaimed, “Oh dear!  I always heard that my pretty red coral came
+out of a fish, and here it is all alive!”
+
+“C. tuberculatum,” says Mr. Gosse (who described it from specimens which
+I sent him in 1854), “is far the finest species.  The valves are more
+globose and of a warmer colour; those that I have seen are even more
+spinous.”  Such may have been the case in those I sent: but it has
+occurred to me now and then to dredge specimens of C. aculeatum, which
+had escaped that rolling on the sand fatal in old age to its delicate
+spines, and which equalled in colour, size, and perfectness the noble one
+figured in poor dear old Dr. Turton’s “British Bivalves.”  Besides,
+aculeatum is a far thinner and more delicate shell.  And a third species,
+C. echinatum, with curves more graceful and continuous, is to be found
+now and then with the two former.  In it, each point, instead of
+degenerating into a knot, as in tuberculatum, or developing from delicate
+flat briar-prickles into long straight thorns, as in aculeatum, is
+close-set to its fellow, and curved at the point transversely to the
+shell, the whole being thus horrid with hundreds of strong tenterhooks,
+making his castle impregnable to the raveners of the deep.  For we can
+hardly doubt that these prickles are meant as weapons of defence, without
+which so savoury a morsel as the mollusc within (cooked and eaten largely
+on some parts of our south coast) would be a staple article of food for
+sea-beasts of prey.  And it is noteworthy, first, that the defensive
+thorns which are permanent on the two thinner species, aculeatum and
+echinatum, disappear altogether on the thicker one, tuberculatum, as old
+age gives him a solid and heavy globose shell; and next, that he too,
+while young and tender, and liable therefore to be bored through by
+whelks and such murderous univalves, does actually possess the same
+briar-prickles, which his thinner cousins keep throughout life.
+Nevertheless, prickles, in all three species, are, as far as we can see,
+useless in Torbay, where no wolf-fish (Anarrhichas lupus) or other owner
+of shell-crushing jaws wanders, terrible to lobster and to cockle.
+Originally intended, as we suppose, to face the strong-toothed monsters
+of the Mediterranean, these foreigners have wandered northward to shores
+where their armour is not now needed; and yet centuries of idleness and
+security have not been able to persuade them to lay it by.  This—if my
+explanation is the right one—is but one more case among hundreds in which
+peculiarities, useful doubtless to their original possessors, remain,
+though now useless, in their descendants.  Just so does the tame ram
+inherit the now superfluous horns of his primeval wild ancestors, though
+he fights now—if he fights at all—not with his horns, but with his
+forehead.
+
+Enough of Cardium tuberculatum.  Now for the other animals of the heap;
+and first, for those long white razors.  They, as well as the grey
+scimitars, are Solens, Razor-fish (Solen siliqua and S. ensis), burrowers
+in the sand by that foot which protrudes from one end, nimble in escaping
+from the Torquay boys, whom you will see boring for them with a long iron
+screw, on the sands at low tide.  They are very good to eat, these
+razor-fish; at least, for those who so think them; and abound in millions
+upon all our sandy shores. {70}
+
+Now for the tapering brown spires.  They are Turritellæ, snail-like
+animals (though the form of the shell is different), who crawl and browse
+by thousands on the beds of Zostera, or grass wrack, which you see thrown
+about on the beach, and which grows naturally in two or three fathoms
+water.  Stay: here is one which is “more than itself.”  On its back is
+mounted a cluster of barnacles (Balanus Porcatus), of the same family as
+those which stud the tide-rocks in millions, scratching the legs of
+hapless bathers.  Of them, I will speak presently; for I may have a still
+more curious member of the family to show you.  But meanwhile, look at
+the mouth of the shell; a long grey worm protrudes from it, which is not
+the rightful inhabitant.  He is dead long since, and his place has been
+occupied by one Sipunculus Bernhardi; a wight of low degree, who connects
+“radiate” with annulate forms—in plain English, sea-cucumbers (of which
+we shall see some soon) with sea-worms.  But however low in the scale of
+comparative anatomy, he has wit enough to take care of himself; mean ugly
+little worm as he seems.  For finding the mouth of the Turritella too big
+for him, he has plastered it up with sand and mud (Heaven alone knows
+how), just as a wry-neck plasters up a hole in an apple-tree when she
+intends to build therein, and has left only a round hole, out of which he
+can poke his proboscis.  A curious thing is this proboscis, when seen
+through the magnifier.  You perceive a ring of tentacles round the mouth,
+for picking up I know not what; and you will perceive, too, if you watch
+it, that when he draws it in, he turns mouth, tentacles and all, inwards,
+and so down into his stomach, just as if you were to turn the finger of a
+glove inward from the tip till it passed into the hand; and so performs,
+every time he eats, the clown’s as yet ideal feat, of jumping down his
+own throat. {72}
+
+                 [Picture: Plate 1: Flustra Lineata etc.]
+
+So much have we seen on one little shell.  But there is more to see close
+to it.  Those yellow plants which I likened to squirrels’ tails and
+lobsters’ horns, and what not, are zoophytes of different kinds.  Here is
+Sertularia argentea (true squirrel’s tail); here, S. filicula, as
+delicate as tangled threads of glass; here, abietina; here, rosacea.  The
+lobsters’ horns are Antennaria antennina; and mingled with them are
+Plumulariæ, always to be distinguished from Sertulariæ by polypes growing
+on one side of the branch, and not on both.  Here is falcata, with its
+roots twisted round a sea-weed.  Here is cristata, on the same weed; and
+here is a piece of the beautiful myriophyllum, which has been battered in
+its long journey out of the deep water about the ore rock.  For all these
+you must consult Johnson’s “Zoophytes,” and for a dozen smaller species,
+which you would probably find tangled among them, or parasitic on the
+sea-weed.  Here are Flustræ, or sea-mats.  This, which smells very like
+Verbena, is Flustra coriacea (Pl. I. Fig. 2).  That scurf on the frond of
+ore-weed is F. lineata (Pl. Fig. 1).  The glass bells twined about this
+Sertularia are Campanularia syringa (Pl. I. Fig. 9); and here is a tiny
+plant of Cellularia ciliata (Pl. I. Fig. 8).  Look at it through the
+field-glass; for it is truly wonderful.  Each polype cell is edged with
+whip-like spines, and on the back of some of them is—what is it, but a
+live vulture’s head, snapping and snapping—what for?
+
+Nay, reader, I am here to show you what can be seen: but as for telling
+you what can be known, much more what cannot, I decline; and refer you to
+Johnson’s “Zoophytes,” wherein you will find that several species of
+polypes carry these same birds’ heads: but whether they be parts of the
+polype, and of what use they are, no man living knoweth.
+
+Next, what are the striped pears?  They are sea-anemones, and of a
+species only lately well known, Sagartia viduata, the snake-locked
+anemone (Pl. V. Fig. 3 {74}).  They have been washed off the loose stones
+to which they usually adhere by the pitiless roll of the ground-swell;
+however, they are not so far gone, but that if you take one of them home,
+and put it in a jar of water, it will expand into a delicate compound
+flower, which can neither be described nor painted, of long pellucid
+tentacles, hanging like a thin bluish cloud over a disk of mottled brown
+and grey.
+
+Here, adhering to this large whelk, is another, but far larger and
+coarser.  It is Sagartia parasitica, one of our largest British species;
+and most singular in this, that it is almost always (in Torbay, at
+least,) found adhering to a whelk: but never to a live one; and for this
+reason.  The live whelk (as you may see for yourself when the tide is
+out) burrows in the sand in chase of hapless bivalve shells, whom he
+bores through with his sharp tongue (always, cunning fellow, close to the
+hinge, where the fish is), and then sucks out their life.  Now, if the
+anemone stuck to him, it would be carried under the sand daily, to its
+own disgust.  It prefers, therefore, the dead whelk, inhabited by a
+soldier crab, Pagurus Bernhardi (Pl. II.  Fig. 2), of which you may find
+a dozen anywhere as the tide goes out; and travels about at the crab’s
+expense, sharing with him the offal which is his food.  Note, moreover,
+that the soldier crab is the most hasty and blundering of marine animals,
+as active as a monkey, and as subject to panics as a horse; wherefore the
+poor anemone on his back must have a hard life of it; being knocked about
+against rocks and shells, without warning, from morn to night and night
+to morn.  Against which danger, kind Nature, ever _maxima in minimis_,
+has provided by fitting him with a stout leather coat, which she has
+given, I believe, to no other of his family.
+
+Next, for the babies’ heads, covered with prickles, instead of hair.
+They are sea-urchins, Amphidotus cordatus, which burrow by thousands in
+the sand.  These are of that Spatangoid form, which you will often find
+fossil in the chalk, and which shepherd boys call snakes’ heads.  We
+shall soon find another sort, an Echinus, and have time to talk over
+these most strange (in my eyes) of all living animals.
+
+There are a hundred more things to be talked of here: but we must defer
+the examination of them till our return; for it wants an hour yet of the
+dead low spring-tide; and ere we go home, we will spend a few minutes at
+least on the rocks at Livermead, where awaits us a strong-backed
+quarryman, with a strong-backed crowbar, as is to be hoped (for he
+snapped one right across there yesterday, falling miserably on his back
+into a pool thereby), and we will verify Mr. Gosse’s observation, that—
+
+“When once we have begun to look with curiosity on the strange things
+that ordinary people pass over without notice, our wonder is continually
+excited by the variety of phase, and often by the uncouthness of form,
+under which some of the meaner creatures are presented to us.  And this
+is very specially the case with the inhabitants of the sea.  We can
+scarcely poke or pry for an hour among the rocks, at low-water mark, or
+walk, with an observant downcast eye, along the beach after a gale,
+without finding some oddly-fashioned, suspicious-looking being, unlike
+any form of life that we have seen before.  The dark concealed interior
+of the sea becomes thus invested with a fresh mystery; its vast recesses
+appear to be stored with all imaginable forms; and we are tempted to
+think there must be multitudes of living creatures whose very figure and
+structure have never yet been suspected.
+
+    “‘O sea! old sea! who yet knows half
+    Of thy wonders or thy pride!’”
+
+                                         GOSSE’S _Aquarium_, pp. 226, 227.
+
+These words have more than fulfilled themselves since they were written.
+Those Deep-Sea dredgings, of which a detailed account will be found in
+Dr. Wyville Thomson’s new and most beautiful book, “The Depths of the
+Sea,” have disclosed, of late years, wonders of the deep even more
+strange and more multitudinous than the wonders of the shore.  The time
+is past when we thought ourselves bound to believe, with Professor Edward
+Forbes, that only some hundred fathoms down, the inhabitants of the
+sea-bottom “become more and more modified, and fewer and fewer,
+indicating our approach towards an abyss where life is either
+extinguished, or exhibits but a few sparks to mark it’s lingering
+presence.”
+
+Neither now need we indulge in another theory which had a certain
+grandeur in it, and was not so absurd as it looks at first sight,—namely,
+that, as Dr. Wyville Thomson puts it, picturesquely enough, “in going
+down the sea water became, under the pressure, gradually heavier and
+heavier, and that all the loose things floated at different levels,
+according to their specific weight,—skeletons of men, anchors and shot
+and cannon, and last of all the broad gold pieces lost in the wreck of
+many a galleon off the Spanish Main; the whole forming a kind of ‘false
+bottom’ to the ocean, beneath which there lay all the depth of clear
+still water, which was heavier than molten gold.”
+
+The facts are; first that water, being all but incompressible, is hardly
+any heavier, and just as liquid, at the greatest depth, than at the
+surface; and that therefore animals can move as freely in it in deep as
+in shallow water; and next, that as the fluids inside the body of a sea
+animal must be at the same pressure as that of the water outside it, the
+two pressures must balance each other; and the body, instead of being
+crushed in, may be unconscious that it is living under a weight of two or
+three miles of water.  But so it is; as we gather our curiosities at
+low-tide mark, or haul the dredge a mile or two out at sea, we may allow
+our fancy to range freely out to the westward, and down over the
+subaqueous cliffs of the hundred-fathom line, which mark the old shore of
+the British Isles, or rather of a time when Britain and Ireland were part
+of the continent, through water a mile, and two, and three miles deep,
+into total darkness, and icy cold, and a pressure which, in the open air,
+would crush any known living creature to a jelly; and be certain that we
+shall find the ocean-floor teeming everywhere with multitudinous life,
+some of it strangely like, some strangely unlike, the creatures which we
+see along the shore.
+
+Some strangely like.  You may find, for instance, among the sea-weed,
+here and there, a little black sea-spider, a Nymphon, who has this
+peculiarity, that possessing no body at all to speak of, he carries his
+needful stomach in long branches, packed inside his legs.  The specimens
+which you will find will probably be half an inch across the legs.  An
+almost exactly similar Nymphon has been dredged from the depths of the
+Arctic and Antarctic oceans, nearly two feet across.
+
+                   [Picture: Nymphon Abyssorum, Norman]
+
+You may find also a quaint little shrimp, _Caprella_, clinging by its
+hind claws to sea-weed, and waving its gaunt grotesque body to and fro,
+while it makes mesmeric passes with its large fore claws,—one of the most
+ridiculous of Nature’s many ridiculous forms.  Those which you will find
+will be some quarter of an inch in length; but in the cold area of the
+North Atlantic, their cousins, it is now found, are nearly three inches
+long, and perch in like manner, not on sea-weeds, for there are none so
+deep, but on branching sponges.
+
+These are but two instances out of many of forms which were supposed to
+be peculiar to shallow shores repeating themselves at vast depths: thus
+forcing on us strange questions about changes in the distribution and
+depth of the ancient seas; and forcing us, also, to reconsider the old
+rules by which rocks were distinguished as deep-sea or shallow-sea
+deposits according to the fossils found in them.
+
+                 [Picture: Caprella spinosissima, Norman]
+
+As for the new forms, and even more important than them, the ancient
+forms, supposed to have been long extinct, and only known as fossils,
+till they were lately rediscovered alive in the nether darkness,—for them
+you must consult Dr. Wyville Thomson’s book, and the notices of the
+“Challenger’s” dredgings which appear from time to time in the columns of
+“Nature;” for want of space forbids my speaking of them here.
+
+But if you have no time to read “The Depths of the Sea,” go at least to
+the British Museum, or if you be a northern man, to the admirable public
+museum at Liverpool; ask to be shown the deep-sea forms; and there feast
+your curiosity and your sense of beauty for an hour.  Look at the
+Crinoids, or stalked star-fishes, the “Lilies of living stone,” which
+swarmed in the ancient seas, in vast variety, and in such numbers that
+whole beds of limestone are composed of their disjointed fragments; but
+which have vanished out of our modern seas, we know not why, till, a few
+years since, almost the only known living species was the exquisite and
+rare Pentacrinus asteria, from deep water off the Windward Isles of the
+West Indies.
+
+                 [Picture: Pentacrinus asteria, Linnæus]
+
+Of this you will see a specimen or two both at Liverpool and in the
+British Museum; and near them, probably, specimens of the new-old
+Crinoids, discovered of late years by Professor Sars, Mr. Gwyn Jeffreys,
+Dr. Carpenter, Dr. Wyville Thomson, and the other deep-sea disciples of
+the mythic Glaucus, the fisherman, who, enamoured of the wonders of the
+sea, plunged into the blue abyss once and for all, and became himself
+“the blue old man of the sea.”
+
+Next look at the corals, and Gorgonias, and all the sea-fern tribe of
+branching polypidoms, and last, but not least, at the glass sponges;
+first at the Euplectella, or Venus’s flower-basket, which lives embedded
+in the mud of the seas of the Philippines, supported by a glass frill
+“standing up round it like an Elizabethan ruff.”  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 upside down
+into Pholas-borings in stones.  Which was top and which bottom; which the
+thing itself, and which special parasites growing on it; whether it was a
+sponge, or a zoophyte, or something else; at one time even whether it was
+natural, or artificial and a make-up,—could not be settled, even till a
+year or two since.  But the discovery of the same, or a similar, species
+in abundance from the Butt of the Lows down to Setubal on the Portuguese
+coast, where the deep-water shark fishers call it “sea-whip,” has given
+our savants specimens enough to make up their minds—that they really know
+little or nothing about it, and probably will never know.
+
+And do not forget, lastly, to ask, whether at Liverpool or at the British
+Museum, for the Holtenias and their congeners,—hollow sponges built up of
+glassy spicules, and rooted in the mud by glass hairs, in some cases
+between two and three feet long, as flexible and graceful as tresses of
+snow-white silk.
+
+Look at these, and a hundred kindred forms, and then see how nature is
+not only “maxima in minimis”—greatest in her least, but often
+“pulcherrima in abditis”—fairest in her most hidden works; and how the
+Creative Spirit has lavished, as it were, unspeakable artistic skill on
+lowly-organized creature, never till now beheld by man, and buried, not
+only in foul mud, but in their own unsightly heap of living jelly.
+
+But so it was from the beginning;—and this planet was not made for man
+alone.  Countless ages before we appeared on earth the depths of the old
+chalk-ocean teemed with forms as beautiful and perfect as those, their
+lineal descendants, which the dredge now brings up from the Atlantic
+sea-floor; and if there were—as my reason tells me that there must have
+been—final moral causes for their existence, the only ones which we have
+a right to imagine are these—that all, down to the lowest Rhizopod, might
+delight themselves, however dimly, in existing; and that the Lord might
+delight Himself in them.
+
+Thus, much—alas! how little—about the wonders of the deep.  We, who are
+no deep-sea dredgers, must return humbly to the wonders of the shore.
+And first, as after descending the gap in the sea-wall we walk along the
+ribbed floor of hard yellow sand, let me ask you to give a sharp look-out
+for a round grey disc, about as big as a penny-piece, peeping out on the
+surface.  No; that is not it, that little lump: open it, and you will
+find within one of the common little Venus gallina.—The closet collectors
+have given it some new name now, and no thanks to them: they are always
+changing the names, instead of studying the live animals where Nature has
+put them, in which case they would have no time for word-inventing.  Nay,
+I verify suspect that the names grow, like other things; at least, they
+get longer and longer and more jaw-breaking every year.  The little
+bivalve, however, finding itself left by the tide, has wisely shut up its
+siphons, and, by means of its foot and its edges, buried itself in a
+comfortable bath of cool wet sand, till the sea shall come back, and make
+it safe to crawl and lounge about on the surface, smoking the sea-water
+instead of tobacco.  Neither is that depression what we seek.  Touch it,
+and out poke a pair of astonished and inquiring horns: it is a long-armed
+crab, who saw us coming, and wisely shovelled himself into the sand by
+means of his nether-end.  Corystes Cassivelaunus is his name, which he is
+said to have acquired from the marks on his back, which are somewhat like
+a human face.  “Those long antennæ,” says my friend, Mr. Lloyd {90}—I
+have not verified the fact, but believe it, as he knows a great deal
+about crabs, and I know next to nothing—“form a tube through which a
+current of water passes into the crab’s gills, free from the surrounding
+sand.”  Moreover, it is only the male who has those strangely long
+fore-arms and claws; the female contenting herself with limbs of a more
+moderate length.  Neither is that, though it might be, the hole down
+which what we seek has vanished: but that burrow contains one of the long
+white razors which you saw cast on shore at Paignton.  The boys close by
+are boring for them with iron rods armed with a screw, and taking them in
+to sell in Torquay market, as excellent food.  But there is one, at
+last—a grey disc pouting up through the sand.  Touch it, and it is gone
+down, quick as light.  We must dig it out, and carefully, for it is a
+delicate monster.  At last, after ten minutes’ careful work, we have
+brought up, from a foot depth or more—what?  A thick, dirty, slimy worm,
+without head or tail, form or colour.  A slug has more artistic beauty
+about him.  Be it so.  At home in the aquarium (where, alas! he will live
+but for a day or two, under the new irritation of light) he will make a
+very different figure.  That is one of the rarest of British sea-animals,
+Peachia hastata (Pl. XII. Fig. 1), which differs from most other British
+Actiniæ in this, that instead of having like them a walking disc, it has
+a free open lower end, with which (I know not how) it buries itself
+upright in the sand, with its mouth just above the surface.  The figure
+on the left of the plate represents a curious cluster of papillæ which
+project from one side of the mouth, and are the opening of the oviduct.
+But his value consists, not merely in his beauty (though that, really, is
+not small), but in his belonging to what the long word-makers call an
+“interosculant” group,—a party of genera and species which connect
+families scientifically far apart, filling up a fresh link in the great
+chain, or rather the great network, of zoological classification.  For
+here we have a simple, and, as it were, crude form; of which, if we dared
+to indulge in reveries, we might say that the Creative Mind realized it
+before either Actiniæ or Holothurians, and then went on to perfect the
+idea contained in it in two different directions; dividing it into two
+different families, and making on its model, by adding new organs, and
+taking away old ones, in one direction the whole family of Actiniæ
+(sea-anemones), and in a quite opposite one the Holothuriæ, those strange
+sea-cucumbers, with their mouth-fringe of feathery gills, of which you
+shall see some anon.  Thus there has been, in the Creative Mind, as it
+gave life to new species, a development of the idea on which older
+species were created, in order—we may fancy—that every mesh of the great
+net might gradually be supplied, and there should be no gaps in the
+perfect variety of Nature’s forms.  This development is one which we must
+believe to be at least possible, if we allow that a Mind presides over
+the universe, and not a mere brute necessity, a Law (absurd misnomer)
+without a Lawgiver; and to it (strangely enough coinciding here and there
+with the Platonic doctrine of Eternal Ideas existing in the Divine Mind)
+all fresh inductive discovery seems to point more and more.
+
+            [Picture: 1. Peachia Hastata.  2. Uraster Rubens]
+
+Let me speak freely a few words on this important matter.  Geology has
+disproved the old popular belief that the universe was brought into being
+as it now exists by a single fiat.  We know that the work has been
+gradual; that the earth
+
+    “In tracts of fluent heat began,
+    The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
+    The home of seeming random forms,
+    Till, at the last, arose the man.”
+
+And we know, also, that these forms, “seeming random” as they are, have
+appeared according to a law which, as far as we can judge, has been on
+the whole one of progress,—lower animals (though we cannot yet say, the
+lowest) appearing first, and man, the highest mammal, “the roof and crown
+of things,” one of the latest in the series.  We have no more right, let
+it be observed, to say that man, the highest, appeared last, than that
+the lowest appeared first.  It was probably so, in both cases; but there
+is as yet no positive proof of either; and as we know that species of
+animals lower than those which already existed appeared again and again
+during the various eras, so it is quite possible that they may be
+appearing now, and may appear hereafter: and that for every extinct Dodo
+or Moa, a new species may be created, to keep up the equilibrium of the
+whole.  This is but a surmise: but it may be wise, perhaps, just now, to
+confess boldly, even to insist on, its possibility, lest any should
+fancy, from our unwillingness to allow it, that there would be ought in
+it, if proved, contrary to sound religion.
+
+I am, I must honestly confess, more and more unable to perceive anything
+which an orthodox Christian may not hold, in those physical theories of
+“evolution,” which are gaining more and more the assent of our best
+zoologists and botanists.  All that they ask us to believe is, that
+“species” and “families,” and indeed the whole of organic nature, have
+gone through, and may still be going through, some such development from
+a lowest germ, as we know that every living individual, from the lowest
+zoophyte to man himself, does actually go through.  They apply to the
+whole of the living world, past, present, and future, the law which is
+undeniably at work on each individual of it.  They may be wrong, or they
+may be right: but what is there in such a conception contrary to any
+doctrine—at least of the Church of England?  To say that this cannot be
+true; that species cannot vary, because God, at the beginning, created
+each thing “according to its kind,” is really to beg the question; which
+is—Does the idea of “kind” include variability or not? and if so, how
+much variability?  Now, “kind,” or “species,” as we call it, is defined
+nowhere in the Bible.  What right have we to read our own definition into
+the word?—and that against the certain fact, that some “kinds” do vary,
+and that widely,—mankind, for instance, and the animals and plants which
+he domesticates.  Surely that latter fact should be significant, to those
+who believe, as I do, that man was created in the likeness of God.  For
+if man has the power, not only of making plants and animals vary, but of
+developing them into forms of higher beauty and usefulness than their
+wild ancestors possessed, why should not the God in whose image he is
+made possess the same power?  If the old theological rule be true—“There
+is nothing in man which was not first in God” (sin, of course,
+excluded)—then why should not this imperfect creative faculty in man be
+the very guarantee that God possesses it in perfection?
+
+Such at least is the conclusion of one who, studying certain families of
+plants, which indulge in the most fantastic varieties of shape and size,
+and yet through all their vagaries retain—as do the Palms, the Orchids,
+the Euphorbiaceæ—one organ, or form of organs, peculiar and highly
+specialized, yet constant throughout the whole of each family, has been
+driven to the belief that each of these three families, at least, has
+“sported off” from one common ancestor—one archetypal Palm, one
+archetypal Orchid, one archetypal Euphorbia, simple, it may be, in
+itself, but endowed with infinite possibilities of new and complex
+beauty, to be developed, not in it, but in its descendants.  He has asked
+himself, sitting alone amid the boundless wealth of tropic forests,
+whether even then and there the great God might not be creating round
+him, slowly but surely, new forms of beauty?  If he chose to do it, could
+He not do it?  That man found himself none the worse Christian for the
+thought.  He has said—and must be allowed to say again, for he sees no
+reason to alter his words—in speaking of the wonderful variety of forms
+in the Euphorbiaceæ, from the weedy English Euphorbias, the Dog’s
+Mercuries, and the Box, to the prickly-stemmed Scarlet Euphorbia of
+Madagascar, the succulent Cactus-like Euphorbias of the Canaries and
+elsewhere; the Gale-like Phyllanthus; the many-formed Crotons; the
+Hemp-like Maniocs, Physic-nuts, Castor-oils, the scarlet Poinsettia, the
+little pink and yellow Dalechampia, the poisonous Manchineel, and the
+gigantic Hura, or sandbox tree, of the West Indies,—all so different in
+shape and size, yet all alike in their most peculiar and complex
+fructification, and in their acrid milky juice,—“What if all these forms
+are the descendants of one original form?  Would that be one whit the
+more wonderful than the theory that they were, each and all, with the
+minute, and often imaginary, shades of difference between certain cognate
+species among them, created separately and at once?  But if it be
+so—which I cannot allow—what would the theologian have to say, save that
+God’s works are even more wonderful than he always believed them to be?
+As for the theory being impossible—that is to be decided by men of
+science, on strict experimental grounds.  As for us theologians, who are
+we, that we should limit, à priori, the power of God?  ‘Is anything too
+hard for the Lord?’ asked the prophet of old; and we have a right to ask
+it as long as the world shall last.  If it be said that ‘natural
+selection,’ or, as Mr. Herbert Spencer better defines it, the ‘survival
+of the fittest,’ is too simple a cause to produce such fantastic
+variety—that, again, is a question to be settled exclusively by men of
+science, on their own grounds.  We, meanwhile, always knew that God works
+by very simple, or seemingly simple, means; that the universe, as far as
+we could discern it, was one organization of the most simple means.  It
+was wonderful—or should have been—in our eyes, that a shower of rain
+should make the grass grow, and that the grass should become flesh, and
+the flesh food for the thinking brain of man.  It was—or ought to have
+been—more wonderful yet to us that a child should resemble its parents,
+or even a butterfly resemble, if not always, still usually, its parents
+likewise.  Ought God to appear less or more august in our eyes if we
+discover that the means are even simpler than we supposed?  We held Him
+to be Almighty and All-wise.  Are we to reverence Him less or more if we
+find Him to be so much mightier, so much wiser, than we dreamed, that He
+can not only make all things, but—the very perfection of creative
+power—_make all things make themselves_?  We believed that His care was
+over all His works; that His providence worked perpetually over the
+universe.  We were taught—some of us at least—by Holy Scripture, that
+without Him not a sparrow fell to the ground, and that the very hairs of
+our head were all numbered; that the whole history of the universe was
+made up, in fact, of an infinite network of special providences.  If,
+then, that should be true which a great naturalist writes, ‘It may be
+metaphorically said that natural selection is daily and hourly
+scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest;
+rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good;
+silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity
+offers, at the improvement of each organic being, in relation to its
+organic and inorganic conditions of life,’—if this, I say, were proved to
+be true, ought God’s care and God’s providence to seem less or more
+magnificent in our eyes?  Of old it was said by Him without whom nothing
+is made—‘My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.’  Shall we quarrel with
+physical science, if she gives us evidence that those words are true?”
+
+And—understand it well—the grand passage I have just quoted need not be
+accused of substituting “natural selection for God.”  In any case natural
+selection would be only the means or law by which God works, as He does
+by other natural laws.  We do not substitute gravitation for God, when we
+say that the planets are sustained in their orbits by the law of
+gravitation.  The theory about natural selection may be untrue, or
+imperfect, as may the modern theories of the “evolution and progress” of
+organic forms: let the man of science decide that.  But if true, the
+theories seem to me perfectly to agree with, and may be perfectly
+explained by, the simple old belief which the Bible sets before us, of a
+LIVING GOD: not a mere past will, such as the Koran sets forth, creating
+once and for all, and then leaving the universe, to use Goethe’s simile,
+“to spin round his finger;” nor again, an “all-pervading spirit,” words
+which are mere contradictory jargon, concealing, from those who utter
+them, blank Materialism: but One who works in all things which have
+obeyed Him to will and to do of His good pleasure, keeping His abysmal
+and self-perfect purpose, yet altering the methods by which that purpose
+is attained, from æon to æon, ay, from moment to moment, for ever
+various, yet for ever the same.  This great and yet most blessed paradox
+of the Changeless God, who yet can say “It repenteth me,” and “Behold, I
+work a new thing on the earth,” is revealed no less by nature than by
+Scripture; the changeableness, not of caprice or imperfection, but of an
+Infinite Maker and “Poietes,” drawing ever fresh forms out of the
+inexhaustible treasury of His primæval Mind; and yet never throwing away
+a conception to which He has once given actual birth in time and space,
+(but to compare reverently small things and great) lovingly repeating it,
+re-applying it; producing the same effects by endlessly different
+methods; or so delicately modifying the method that, as by the turn of a
+hair, it shall produce endlessly diverse effects; looking back, as it
+were, ever and anon over the great work of all the ages, to retouch it,
+and fill up each chasm in the scheme, which for some good purpose had
+been left open in earlier worlds; or leaving some open (the forms, for
+instance, necessary to connect the bimana and the quadrumana) to be
+filled up perhaps hereafter when the world needs them; the handiwork, in
+short, of a living and loving Mind, perfect in His own eternity, but
+stooping to work in time and space, and there rejoicing Himself in the
+work of His own hands, and in His eternal Sabbaths ceasing in rest
+ineffable, that He may look on that which He hath made, and behold it is
+very good.
+
+I speak, of course, under correction; for this conclusion is emphatically
+matter of induction, and must be verified or modified by ever-fresh
+facts: but I meet with many a Christian passage in scientific books,
+which seems to me to go, not too far, but rather not far enough, in
+asserting the God of the Bible, as Saint Paul says, “not to have left
+Himself without witness,” in nature itself, that He is the God of grace.
+Why speak of the God of nature and the God of grace as two antithetical
+terms? The Bible never, in a single instance, makes the distinction; and
+surely, if God be (as He is) the Eternal and Unchangeable One, and if (as
+we all confess) the universe bears the impress of His signet, we have no
+right, in the present infantile state of science, to put arbitrary limits
+of our own to the revelation which He may have thought good to make of
+Himself in nature.  Nay, rather, let us believe that, if our eyes were
+opened, we should fulfil the requirement of Genius, to “see the universal
+in the particular,” by seeing God’s whole likeness, His whole glory,
+reflected as in a mirror even in the meanest flower; and that nothing but
+the dulness of our own souls prevents them from seeing day and night in
+all things, however small or trivial to human eclecticism, the Lord Jesus
+Christ Himself fulfilling His own saying, “My Father worketh hitherto,
+and I work.”
+
+To me it seems (to sum up, in a few words, what I have tried to say) that
+such development and progress as have as yet been actually discovered in
+nature, bear every trace of having been produced by successive acts of
+thought and will in some personal mind; which, however boundlessly rich
+and powerful, is still the Archetype of the human mind; and therefore
+(for to this I confess I have been all along tending) probably capable,
+without violence to its properties, of becoming, like the human mind,
+incarnate.
+
+But to descend from these perhaps too daring speculations, there is
+another, and more human, source of interest about the animal who is
+writhing feebly in the glass jar of salt water; for he is one of the many
+curiosities which have been added to our fauna by that humble hero Mr.
+Charles Peach, the self-taught naturalist, of whom, as we walk on toward
+the rocks, something should be said, or rather read; for Mr. Chambers, in
+an often-quoted passage from his Edinburgh Journal, which I must have the
+pleasure of quoting once again, has told the story better than we can
+tell it:—
+
+“But who is that little intelligent-looking man in a faded naval uniform,
+who is so invariably to be seen in a particular central seat in this
+section?  That, gentle reader, is perhaps one of the most interesting men
+who attend the British Association.  He is only a private in the mounted
+guard (preventive service) at an obscure part of the Cornwall coast, with
+four shillings a day, and a wife and nine children, most of whose
+education he has himself to conduct.  He never tastes the luxuries which
+are so common in the middle ranks of life, and even amongst a large
+portion of the working classes.  He has to mend with his own hands every
+sort of thing that can break or wear in his house.  Yet Mr. Peach is a
+votary of Natural History; not a student of the science in books, for he
+cannot afford books; but an investigator by sea and shore, a collector of
+Zoophytes and Echinodermata—strange creatures, many of which are as yet
+hardly known to man.  These he collects, preserves, and describes; and
+every year does he come up to the British Association with a few
+novelties of this kind, accompanied by illustrative papers and drawings:
+thus, under circumstances the very opposite of those of such men as Lord
+Enniskillen, adding, in like manner, to the general stock of knowledge.
+On the present occasion he is unusually elated, for he has made the
+discovery of a Holothuria with twenty tentacula, a species of the
+Echinodermata which Professor Forbes, in his book on Star-Fishes, has
+said was never yet observed in the British seas.  It may be of small
+moment to you, who, mayhap, know nothing of Holothurias: but it is a
+considerable thing to the Fauna of Britain, and a vast matter to a poor
+private of the Cornwall mounted guard.  And accordingly he will go home
+in a few days, full of the glory of his exhibition, and strong anew by
+the kind notice taken of him by the masters of the science, to similar
+inquiries, difficult as it may be to prosecute them, under such a
+complication of duties, professional and domestic.  Honest Peach! humble
+as is thy home, and simple thy bearing, thou art an honour even to this
+assemblage of nobles and doctors: nay, more, when we consider everything,
+thou art an honour to human nature itself; for where is the heroism like
+that of virtuous, intelligent, independent poverty?  And such heroism is
+thine!”—_Chambers’ Edin. Journ._, Nov. 23, 1844.
+
+Mr. Peach has been since rewarded in part for his long labours in the
+cause of science, by having been removed to a more lucrative post on the
+north coast of Scotland; the earnest, it is to be hoped, of still further
+promotion.
+
+I mentioned just now Synapta; or, as Montagu called it, Chirodota: a much
+better name, and, I think, very uselessly changed; for Chirodota
+expresses the peculiarity of the beast, which consists in—start not,
+reader—twelve hands, like human hands, while Synapta expresses merely its
+power of clinging to the fingers, which it possesses in common with many
+other animals.  It is, at least, a beast worth talking about; as for
+finding one, I fear that we have no chance of such good fortune.
+
+                [Picture: Plate 4: Synapta Digitata etc.]
+
+Colonel Montagu found them here some forty years ago; and after him, Mr.
+Alder, in 1845.  I found hundreds of them, but only once, in 1854 after a
+heavy south-eastern gale, washed up among the great Lutrariæ in a cove
+near Goodrington; but all my dredging outside failed to procure a
+specimen—Mr. Alder, however, and Mr. Cocks (who find everything, and will
+at last certainly catch Midgard, the great sea-serpent, as Thor did, by
+baiting for him with a bull’s head), have dredged them in great numbers;
+the former, at Helford in Cornwall, the latter on the west coast of
+Scotland.  It seems, however, to be a southern monster, probably a
+remnant, like the great cockle, of the Mediterranean fauna; for Mr.
+MacAndrew finds them plentifully in Vigo Bay, and J. Müller in the
+Adriatic, off Trieste.
+
+But what is it like?  Conceive a very fat short earth-worm; not ringed,
+though, like the earth-worm, but smooth and glossy, dappled with darker
+spots, especially on one side, which may be the upper one.  Put round its
+mouth twelve little arms, on each a hand with four ragged fingers, and on
+the back of the hand a stump of a thumb, and you have Synapta Digitata
+(Plates IV. and V., from my drawings of the live animal).  These hands it
+puts down to its mouth, generally in alternate pairs, but how it obtains
+its food by them is yet a mystery, for its intestines are filled, like an
+earth-worm’s, with the mud in which it lives, and from which it probably
+extracts (as does the earth-worm) all organic matters.
+
+You will find it stick to your fingers by the whole skin, causing, if
+your hand be delicate, a tingling sensation; and if you examine the skin
+under the microscope, you will find the cause.  The whole skin is studded
+with minute glass anchors, some hanging freely from the surface, but most
+imbedded in the skin.  Each of these anchors is jointed at its root into
+one end of a curious cribriform plate,—in plain English, one pierced like
+a sieve, which lies under the skin, and reminds one of the similar plates
+in the skin of the White Cucumaria, which I will show you presently; and
+both of these we must regard as the first rudiments of an Echinoderm’s
+outside skeleton, such as in the Sea-urchins covers the whole body of the
+animal.  (See on Echinus Millaris, p. 89.)  {111}  Somewhat similar
+anchor-plates, from a Red Sea species, Synapta Vittata, may be seen in
+any collection of microscopic objects.
+
+The animal, when caught, has a strange habit of self-destruction,
+contracting its skin at two or three different points, and writhing till
+it snaps itself into “junks,” as the sailors would say, and then dies.
+My specimens, on breaking up, threw out from the wounded part long
+“ovarian filaments” (whatsoever those may be), similar to those thrown
+out by many of the Sagartian anemones, especially S. parasitica.  Beyond
+this, I can tell you nothing about Synapta, and only ask you to consider
+its hands, as an instance of that fantastic play of Nature which repeats,
+in families widely different, organs of similar form, though perhaps of
+by no means similar use; nay, sometimes (as in those beautiful clear-wing
+hawk-moths which you, as they hover round the rhododendrons, mistake for
+bumble-bees) repeats the outward form of a whole animal, for no
+conceivable reason save her—shall we not say honestly His?—own good
+pleasure.
+
+But here we are at the old bank of boulders, the ruins of an antique pier
+which the monks of Tor Abbey built for their convenience, while Torquay
+was but a knot of fishing huts within a lonely limestone cove.  To get to
+it, though, we have passed many a hidden treasure; for every ledge of
+these flat New-red-sandstone rocks, if torn up with the crowbar,
+discloses in its cracks and crannies nests of strange forms which shun
+the light of day; beautiful Actiniæ fill the tiny caverns with living
+flowers; great Pholades (Plate X. figs. 3, 4) bore by hundreds in the
+softer strata; and wherever a thin layer of muddy sand intervenes between
+two slabs, long Annelid worms of quaintest forms and colours have their
+horizontal burrows, among those of that curious and rare radiate animal,
+the Spoonworm, {113} an eyeless bag about an inch long, half bluish grey,
+half pink, with a strange scalloped and wrinkled proboscis of saffron
+colour, which serves, in some mysterious way, soft as it is, to collect
+food, and clear its dark passage through the rock.
+
+See, at the extreme low-water mark, where the broad olive fronds of the
+Laminariæ, like fan-palms, droop and wave gracefully in the retiring
+ripples, a great boulder which will serve our purpose.  Its upper side is
+a whole forest of sea-weeds, large and small; and that forest, if you
+examined it closely, as full of inhabitants as those of the Amazon or the
+Gambia.  To “beat” that dense cover would be an endless task: but on the
+under side, where no sea-weeds grow, we shall find full in view enough to
+occupy us till the tide returns.  For the slab, see, is such a one as
+sea-beasts love to haunt.  Its weed-covered surface shows that the surge
+has not shifted it for years past.  It lies on other boulders clear of
+sand and mud, so that there is no fear of dead sea-weed having lodged and
+decayed under it, destructive to animal life.  We can see dark crannies
+and caves beneath; yet too narrow to allow the surge to wash in, and keep
+the surface clean.  It will be a fine menagerie of Nereus, if we can but
+turn it.
+
+Now the crowbar is well under it; heave, and with a will; and so, after
+five minutes’ tugging, propping, slipping, and splashing, the boulder
+gradually tips over, and we rush greedily upon the spoil.
+
+A muddy dripping surface it is, truly, full of cracks and hollows,
+uninviting enough at first sight: let us look it round leisurely, to see
+if there are not materials enough there for an hour’s lecture.
+
+               [Picture: Plate 9: Cucumaria Hyndmanni etc.]
+
+The first object which strikes the eye is probably a group of milk-white
+slugs, from two to six inches long, cuddling snugly together (Plate IX.
+fig. 1).  You try to pull them off, and find that they give you some
+trouble, such a firm hold have the delicate white sucking arms, which
+fringe each of their five edges.  You see at the head nothing but a
+yellow dimple; for eating and breathing are suspended till the return of
+tide; but once settled in a jar of salt-water, each will protrude a large
+chocolate-coloured head, tipped with a ring of ten feathery gills,
+looking very much like a head of “curled kale,” but of the loveliest
+white and primrose; in the centre whereof lies perdu a mouth with sturdy
+teeth—if indeed they, as well as the whole inside of the beast, have not
+been lately got rid of, and what you see be not a mere bag, without
+intestine or other organ: but only for the time being.  For hear it,
+worn-out epicures, and old Indians who bemoan your livers, this little
+Holothuria knows a secret which, if he could tell it, you would be glad
+to buy of him for thousands sterling.  To him blue pill and muriatic acid
+are superfluous, and travels to German Brunnen a waste of time.  Happy
+Holothuria! who possesses really the secret of everlasting youth, which
+ancient fable bestowed on the serpent and the eagle.  For when his teeth
+ache, or his digestive organs trouble him, all he has to do is just to
+cast up forthwith his entire inside, and, faisant maigre for a month or
+so, grow a fresh set, and then eat away as merrily as ever.  His name, if
+you wish to consult so triumphant a hygeist, is Cucumaria Pentactes: but
+he has many a stout cousin round the Scotch coast, who knows the
+antibilious panacea as well as he, and submits, among the northern
+fishermen, to the rather rude and undeserved name of sea-puddings; one of
+which grows in Shetland to the enormous length of three feet, rivalling
+there his huge congeners, who display their exquisite plumes on every
+tropic coral reef. {116}
+
+               [Picture: Plate 5: Balanophyllea Regia etc.]
+
+Next, what are those bright little buds, like salmon-coloured Banksia
+roses half expanded, sitting closely on the stone?  Touch them; the soft
+part is retracted, and the orange flower of flesh is transformed into a
+pale pink flower of stone.  That is the Madrepore, Caryophyllia Smithii
+(Plate V. fig. 2); one of our south coast rarities: and see, on the lip
+of the last one, which we have carefully scooped off with the chisel, two
+little pink towers of stone, delicately striated; drop them into this
+small bottle of sea-water, and from the top of each tower issues every
+half-second—what shall we call it?—a hand or a net of finest hairs,
+clutching at something invisible to our grosser sense.  That is the
+Pyrgoma, parasitic only (as far as we know) on the lip of this same rare
+Madrepore; a little “cirrhipod,” the cousin of those tiny barnacles which
+roughen every rock (a larger sort whereof I showed you on the
+Turritella), and of those larger ones also who burrow in the thick hide
+of the whale, and, borne about upon his mighty sides, throw out their
+tiny casting nets, as this Pyrgoma does, to catch every passing
+animalcule, and sweep them into the jaws concealed within its shell.  And
+this creature, rooted to one spot through life and death, was in its
+infancy a free swimming animal, hovering from place to place upon
+delicate ciliæ, till, having sown its wild oats, it settled down in life,
+built itself a good stone house, and became a landowner, or rather a
+glebæ adscriptus, for ever and a day.  Mysterious destiny!—yet not so
+mysterious as that of the free medusoid young of every polype and coral,
+which ends as a rooted tree of horn or stone, and seems to the eye of
+sensuous fancy to have literally degenerated into a vegetable.  Of them
+you must read for yourself in Mr. Gosse’s book; in the meanwhile he shall
+tell you something of the beautiful Madrepores themselves.  His
+description, {118} by far the best yet published, should be read in full;
+we must content ourselves with extracts.
+
+“Doubtless you are familiar with the stony skeleton of our Madrepore, as
+it appears in museums.  It consists of a number of thin calcareous plates
+standing up edgewise, and arranged in a radiating manner round a low
+centre.  A little below the margin their individuality is lost in the
+deposition of rough calcareous matter. . . . The general form is more or
+less cylindrical, commonly wider at top than just above the bottom. . . .
+This is but the skeleton; and though it is a very pretty object, those
+who are acquainted with it alone, can form but a very poor idea of the
+beauty of the living animal. . . . Let it, after being torn from the
+rock, recover its equanimity; then you will see a pellucid gelatinous
+flesh emerging from between the plates, and little exquisitely formed and
+coloured tentacula, with white clubbed tips fringing the sides of the
+cup-shaped cavity in the centre, across which stretches the oval disc
+marked with a star of some rich and brilliant colour, surrounding the
+central mouth, a slit with white crenated lips, like the orifice of one
+of those elegant cowry shells which we put upon our mantelpieces.  The
+mouth is always more or less prominent, and can be protruded and expanded
+to an astonishing extent.  The space surrounding the lips is commonly
+fawn colour, or rich chestnut-brown; the star or vandyked circle rich
+red, pale vermilion, and sometimes the most brilliant emerald green, as
+brilliant as the gorget of a humming-bird.”
+
+And what does this exquisitely delicate creature do with its pretty
+mouth?  Alas for fact!  It sips no honey-dew, or fruits from paradise.—“I
+put a minute spider, as large as a pin’s head, into the water, pushing it
+down to the coral.  The instant it touched the tip of a tentacle, it
+adhered, and was drawn in with the surrounding tentacles between the
+plates.  With a lens I saw the small mouth slowly open, and move over to
+that side, the lips gaping unsymmetrically; while with a movement as
+imperceptible as that of the hour hand of a watch, the tiny prey was
+carried along between the plates to the corner of the mouth.  The mouth,
+however, moved most, and at length reached the edges of the plates,
+gradually closed upon the insect, and then returned to its usual place in
+the centre.”
+
+Mr. Gosse next tried the fairy of the walking mouth with a house-fly, who
+escaped only by hard fighting; and at last the gentle creature, after
+swallowing and disgorging various large pieces of shell-fish, found
+viands to its taste in “the lean of cooked meat and portions of
+earthworms,” filling up the intervals by a perpetual dessert of
+microscopic animalcules, whirled into that lovely avernus, its mouth, by
+the currents of the delicate ciliæ which clothe every tentacle.  The fact
+is, that the Madrepore, like those glorious sea-anemones whose living
+flowers stud every pool, is by profession a scavenger and a feeder on
+carrion; and being as useful as he is beautiful, really comes under the
+rule which he seems at first to break, that handsome is who handsome
+does.
+
+Another species of Madrepore {121} was discovered on our Devon coast by
+Mr. Gosse, more gaudy, though not so delicate in hue as our Caryophyllia.
+Mr. Gosse’s locality, for this and numberless other curiosities, is
+Ilfracombe, on the north coast of Devon.  My specimens came from Lundy
+Island, in the mouth of the Bristol Channel, or more properly from that
+curious “Rat Island” to the south of it, where still lingers the black
+long-tailed English rat, exterminated everywhere else by his sturdier
+brown cousin of the Hanoverian dynasty.
+
+Look, now, at these tiny saucers of the thinnest ivory, the largest not
+bigger than a silver threepence, which contain in their centres a
+milk-white crust of stone, pierced, as you see under the magnifier, into
+a thousand cells, each with its living architect within.  Here are two
+kinds: in one the tubular cells radiate from the centre, giving it the
+appearance of a tiny compound flower, daisy or groundsel; in the other
+they are crossed with waving grooves, giving the whole a peculiar fretted
+look, even more beautiful than that of the former species.  They are
+Tubulipora patina and Tubulipora hispida;—and stay—break off that tiny
+rough red wart, and look at its cells also under the magnifier: it is
+Cellepora pumicosa; and now, with the Madrepore, you hold in your hand
+the principal, at least the commonest, British types of those famed coral
+insects, which in the tropics are the architects of continents, and the
+conquerors of the ocean surge.  All the world, since the publication of
+Darwin’s delightful “Voyage of the Beagle,”‘ and of Williams’ “Missionary
+Enterprises,” knows, or ought to know, enough about them: for those who
+do not, there are a few pages in the beginning of Dr. Landsborough’s
+“British Zoophytes,” well worth perusal.
+
+There are a few other true cellepore corals round the coast.  The largest
+of all, Cervicornis, may be dredged a few miles outside on the Exmouth
+bank, with a few more Tubulipores: but all tiny things, the lingering
+and, as it were, expiring remnants of that great coral-world which,
+through the abysmal depths of past ages, formed here in Britain our
+limestone hills, storing up for generations yet unborn the materials of
+agriculture and architecture.  Inexpressibly interesting, even solemn, to
+those who will think, is the sight of those puny parasites which, as it
+were, connect the ages and the æons: yet not so solemn and full of
+meaning as that tiny relic of an older world, the little pear-shaped
+Turbinolia (cousin of the Madrepores and Sea-anemones), found fossil in
+the Suffolk Crag, and yet still lingering here and there alive in the
+deep water of Scilly and the west coast of Ireland, possessor of a
+pedigree which dates, perhaps, from ages before the day in which it was
+said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”  To think that
+the whole human race, its joys and its sorrows, its virtues and its sins,
+its aspirations and its failures, has been rushing out of eternity and
+into eternity again, as Arjoon in the Bhagavad Gita beheld the race of
+men issuing from Kreeshna’s flaming mouth, and swallowed up in it again,
+“as the crowds of insects swarm into the flame, as the homeless streams
+leap down into the ocean bed,” in an everlasting heart-pulse whose blood
+is living souls—and all that while, and ages before that mystery began,
+that humble coral, unnoticed on the dark sea-floor, has been “continuing
+as it was at the beginning,” and fulfilling “the law which cannot be
+broken,” while races and dynasties and generations have been
+
+    “Playing such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
+    As make the angels weep.”
+
+Yes; it is this vision of the awful permanence and perfection of the
+natural world, beside the wild flux and confusion, the mad struggles, the
+despairing cries of the world of spirits which man has defiled by sin,
+which would at moments crush the naturalist’s heart, and make his brain
+swim with terror, were it not that he can see by faith, through all the
+abysses and the ages, not merely
+
+                      “Hands,
+    From out the darkness, shaping man;”
+
+but above them a living loving countenance, human and yet Divine; and can
+hear a voice which said at first, “Let us make man in our image;” and
+hath said since then, and says for ever and for ever, “Lo, I am with you
+alway, even to the end of the world.”
+
+But now, friend, who listenest, perhaps instructed, and at least
+amused—if, as Professor Harvey well says, the simpler animals represent,
+as in a glass, the scattered organs of the higher races, which of your
+organs is represented by that “sca’d man’s head,” which the Devon
+children more gracefully, yet with less adherence to plain likeness, call
+“mermaid’s head,” {126a} which we picked up just now on Paignton Sands?
+Or which, again, by its more beautiful little congener, {126b} five or
+six of which are adhering tightly to the slab before us, a ball covered
+with delicate spines of lilac and green, and stuck over (cunning
+fellows!) with stripes of dead sea-weed to serve as improvised parasols?
+One cannot say that in him we have the first type of the human skull: for
+the resemblance, quaint as it is, is only sensuous and accidental, (in
+the logical use of that term,) and not homological, _i.e._ a lower
+manifestation of the same idea.  Yet how is one tempted to say, that this
+was Nature’s first and lowest attempt at that use of hollow globes of
+mineral for protecting soft fleshy parts, which she afterwards developed
+to such perfection in the skulls of vertebrate animals!  But even that
+conceit, pretty as it sounds, will not hold good; for though Radiates
+similar to these were among the earliest tenants of the abyss, yet as
+early as their time, perhaps even before them, had been conceived and
+actualized, in the sharks, and in Mr. Hugh Miller’s pets the old red
+sandstone fishes, that very true vertebrate skull and brain, of which
+this is a mere mockery. {127}  Here the whole animal, with his
+extraordinary feeding mill, (for neither teeth nor jaws is a fit word for
+it,) is enclosed within an ever-growing limestone castle, to the
+architecture of which the Eddystone and the Crystal Palace are bungling
+heaps; without arms or legs, eyes or ears, and yet capable, in spite of
+his perpetual imprisonment, of walking, feeding, and breeding, doubt it
+not, merrily enough.  But this result has been attained at the expense of
+a complication of structure, which has baffled all human analysis and
+research into final causes.  As much concerning this most miraculous of
+families as is needful to be known, and ten times more than you are
+likely to understand, may be read in Harvey’s “Sea-Side Book,” pp.
+142–148,—pages from which you will probably arise with a sense of the
+infinity and complexity of Nature, even in what we are pleased to call
+her “lower” forms, and the simplest and, as it were, easiest forms of
+life.  Conceive a Crystal Palace, (for mere difference in size, as both
+the naturalist and the metaphysician know, has nothing to do with the
+wonder,) whereof each separate joist, girder, and pane grows continually
+without altering the shape of the whole; and you have conceived only one
+of the miracles embodied in that little sea-egg, which the Creator has,
+as it were, to justify to man His own immutability, furnished with a
+shell capable of enduring fossil for countless ages, that we may confess
+Him to have been as great when first His Spirit brooded on the deep, as
+He is now and will be through all worlds to come.
+
+But we must make haste; for the tide is rising fast, and our stone will
+be restored to its eleven hours’ bath, long before we have talked over
+half the wonders which it holds.  Look though, ere you retreat, at one or
+two more.
+
+What is that little brown thing whom you have just taken off the rock to
+which it adhered so stoutly by his sucking-foot?  A limpet? Not at all:
+he is of quite a different family and structure; but, on the whole, a
+limpet-like shell would suit him well enough, so he had one given him:
+nevertheless, owing to certain anatomical peculiarities, he needed one
+aperture more than a limpet; so one, if you will examine, has been given
+him at the top of his shell. {129}  This is one instance among a thousand
+of the way in which a scientific knowledge of objects must not obey, but
+run counter to, the impressions of sense; and of a custom in nature which
+makes this caution so necessary, namely, the repetition of the same form,
+slightly modified, in totally different animals, sometimes as if to avoid
+waste, (for why should not the same conception be used in two different
+cases, if it will suit in both?) and sometimes (more marvellous by far)
+when an organ, fully developed and useful in one species, appears in a
+cognate species but feeble, useless, and, as it were, abortive; and
+gradually, in species still farther removed, dies out altogether; placed
+there, it would seem, at first sight, merely to keep up the family
+likeness.  I am half jesting; that cannot be the only reason, perhaps not
+the reason at all; but the fact is one of the most curious, and notorious
+also, in comparative anatomy.
+
+            [Picture: Plate 10: Serpula Contortuplicata etc.]
+
+Look, again, at those sea-slugs.  One, some three inches long, of a
+bright lemon-yellow, clouded with purple; another of a dingy grey; {130a}
+another exquisite little creature of a pearly French White, {130b} furred
+all over the back with what seem arms, but are really gills, of ringed
+white and grey and black.  Put that yellow one into water, and from his
+head, above the eyes, arise two serrated horns, while from the after-part
+of his back springs a circular Prince-of-Wales’s-feather of gills,—they
+are almost exactly like those which we saw just now in the white
+Cucumaria.  Yes; here is another instance of the same custom of
+repetition.  The Cucumaria is a low radiate animal—the sea-slug a far
+higher mollusc; and every organ within him is formed on a different type;
+as indeed are those seemingly identical gills, if you come to examine
+them under the microscope, having to oxygenate fluids of a very different
+and more complicated kind; and, moreover, the Cucumaria’s gills were put
+round his mouth, the Doris’s feathers round the other extremity; that
+grey Eolis’s, again, are simple clubs, scattered over his whole back, and
+in each of his nudibranch congeners these same gills take some new and
+fantastic form; in Melibæa those clubs are covered with warts; in
+Scyllæa, with tufted bouquets; in the beautiful Antiopa they are
+transparent bags; and in many other English species they take every
+conceivable form of leaf, tree, flower, and branch, bedecked with every
+colour of the rainbow, as you may see them depicted in Messrs. Alder and
+Hancock’s unrivalled Monograph on the Nudibranch Mollusca.
+
+And now, worshipper of final causes and the mere useful in nature, answer
+but one question,—Why this prodigal variety?  All these Nudibranchs live
+in much the same way: why would not the same mould have done for them
+all?  And why, again, (for we must push the argument a little further,)
+why have not all the butterflies, at least all who feed on the same
+plant, the same markings?  Of all unfathomable triumphs of design, (we
+can only express ourselves thus, for honest induction, as Paley so well
+teaches, allows us to ascribe such results only to the design of some
+personal will and mind,) what surpasses that by which the scales on a
+butterfly’s wing are arranged to produce a certain pattern of artistic
+beauty beyond all painter’s skill?  What a waste of power, on any
+utilitarian theory of nature!  And once more, why are those strange
+microscopic atomies, the Diatomaceæ and Infusoria, which fill every
+stagnant pool; which fringe every branch of sea-weed; which form banks
+hundreds of miles long on the Arctic sea-floor, and the strata of whole
+moorlands; which pervade in millions the mass of every iceberg, and float
+aloft in countless swarms amid the clouds of the volcanic dust;—why are
+their tiny shells of flint as fantastically various in their quaint
+mathematical symmetry, as they are countless beyond the wildest dreams of
+the Poet?  Mystery inexplicable on the conceited notion which, making man
+forsooth the centre of the universe, dares to believe that this variety
+of forms has existed for countless ages in abysmal sea-depths and
+untrodden forests, only that some few individuals of the Western races
+might, in these latter days, at last discover and admire a corner here
+and there of the boundless realms of beauty.  Inexplicable, truly, if man
+be the centre and the object of their existence; explicable enough to him
+who believes that God has created all things for Himself, and rejoices in
+His own handiwork, and that the material universe is, as the wise man
+says, “A platform whereon His Eternal Spirit sports and makes melody.”
+Of all the blessings which the study of nature brings to the patient
+observer, let none, perhaps, be classed higher than this: that the
+further he enters into those fairy gardens of life and birth, which
+Spenser saw and described in his great poem, the more he learns the awful
+and yet most comfortable truth, that they do not belong to him, but to
+One greater, wiser, lovelier than he; and as he stands, silent with awe,
+amid the pomp of Nature’s ever-busy rest, hears, as of old, “The Word of
+the Lord God walking among the trees of the garden in the cool of the
+day.”
+
+One sight more, and we have done.  I had something to say, had time
+permitted, on the ludicrous element which appears here and there in
+nature.  There are animals, like monkeys and crabs, which seem made to be
+laughed at; by those at least who possess that most indefinable of
+faculties, the sense of the ridiculous.  As long as man possesses muscles
+especially formed to enable him to laugh, we have no right to suppose
+(with some) that laughter is an accident of our fallen nature; or to find
+(with others) the primary cause of the ridiculous in the perception of
+unfitness or disharmony.  And yet we shrink (whether rightly or wrongly,
+we can hardly tell) from attributing a sense of the ludicrous to the
+Creator of these forms.  It may be a weakness on my part; at least I will
+hope it is a reverent one: but till we can find something corresponding
+to what we conceive of the Divine Mind in any class of phenomena, it is
+perhaps better not to talk about them at all, but observe a stoic
+“epoche,” waiting for more light, and yet confessing that our own
+laughter is uncontrollable, and therefore we hope not unworthy of us, at
+many a strange creature and strange doing which we meet, from the highest
+ape to the lowest polype.
+
+But, in the meanwhile, there are animals in which results so strange,
+fantastic, even seemingly horrible, are produced, that fallen man may be
+pardoned, if he shrinks from them in disgust.  That, at least, must be a
+consequence of our own wrong state; for everything is beautiful and
+perfect in its place.  It may be answered, “Yes, in its place; but its
+place is not yours.  You had no business to look at it, and must pay the
+penalty for intermeddling.”  I doubt that answer; for surely, if man have
+liberty to do anything, he has liberty to search out freely his heavenly
+Father’s works; and yet every one seems to have his antipathic animal;
+and I know one bred from his childhood to zoology by land and sea, and
+bold in asserting, and honest in feeling, that all without exception is
+beautiful, who yet cannot, after handling and petting and admiring all
+day long every uncouth and venomous beast, avoid a paroxysm of horror at
+the sight of the common house-spider.  At all events, whether we were
+intruding or not, in turning this stone, we must pay a fine for having
+done so; for there lies an animal as foul and monstrous to the eye as
+“hydra, gorgon, or chimæra dire,” and yet so wondrously fitted to its
+work, that we must needs endure for our own instruction to handle and to
+look at it.  Its name, if you wish for it, is Nemertes; probably N.
+Borlasii; {136} a worm of very “low” organization, though well fitted
+enough for its own work.  You see it?  That black, shiny, knotted lump
+among the gravel, small enough to be taken up in a dessert spoon.  Look
+now, as it is raised and its coils drawn out.  Three feet—six—nine, at
+least: with a capability of seemingly endless expansion; a slimy tape of
+living caoutchouc, some eighth of an inch in diameter, a dark
+chocolate-black, with paler longitudinal lines.  Is it alive?  It hangs,
+helpless and motionless, a mere velvet string across the hand.  Ask the
+neighbouring Annelids and the fry of the rock fishes, or put it into a
+vase at home, and see.  It lies motionless, trailing itself among the
+gravel; you cannot tell where it begins or ends; it may be a dead strip
+of sea-weed, Himanthalia lorea, perhaps, or Chorda filum; or even a
+tarred string.  So thinks the little fish who plays over and over it,
+till he touches at last what is too surely a head.  In an instant a
+bell-shaped sucker mouth has fastened to his side.  In another instant,
+from one lip, a concave double proboscis, just like a tapir’s (another
+instance of the repetition of forms), has clasped him like a finger; and
+now begins the struggle: but in vain.  He is being “played” with such a
+fishing-line as the skill of a Wilson or a Stoddart never could invent; a
+living line, with elasticity beyond that of the most delicate fly-rod,
+which follows every lunge, shortening and lengthening, slipping and
+twining round every piece of gravel and stem of sea-weed, with a tiring
+drag such as no Highland wrist or step could ever bring to bear on salmon
+or on trout.  The victim is tired now; and slowly, and yet dexterously,
+his blind assailant is feeling and shifting along his side, till he
+reaches one end of him; and then the black lips expand, and slowly and
+surely the curved finger begins packing him end-foremost down into the
+gullet, where he sinks, inch by inch, till the swelling which marks his
+place is lost among the coils, and he is probably macerated to a pulp
+long before he has reached the opposite extremity of his cave of doom.
+Once safe down, the black murderer slowly contracts again into a knotted
+heap, and lies, like a boa with a stag inside him, motionless and blest.
+{138}
+
+               [Picture: Nemerties Borlasii etc.: Plate 3]
+
+There; we must come away now, for the tide is over our ankles; but touch,
+before you go, one of those little red mouths which peep out of the
+stone.  A tiny jet of water shoots up almost into your face.  The bivalve
+{139a} who has burrowed into the limestone knot (the softest part of the
+stone to his jaws, though the hardest to your chisel) is scandalized at
+having the soft mouths of his siphons so rudely touched, and taking your
+finger for some bothering Annelid, who wants to nibble him, is defending
+himself; shooting you, as naturalists do humming-birds, with water.  Let
+him rest in peace; it will cost you ten minutes’ hard work, and much
+dirt, to extract him; but if you are fond of shells, secure one or two of
+those beautiful pink and straw-coloured scallops (Hinnites pusio, Plate
+X. fig. 1), who have gradually incorporated the layers of their lower
+valve with the roughnesses of the stone, destroying thereby the beautiful
+form which belongs to their race, but not their delicate colour.  There
+are a few more bivalves too, adhering to the stone, and those rare ones,
+and two or three delicate Mangeliæ and Nassæ {139b} are trailing their
+graceful spires up and down in search of food.  That little bright red
+and yellow pea, too, touch it—the brilliant coloured cloak is withdrawn,
+and, instead, you have a beautiful ribbed pink cowry, {140a} our only
+European representative of that grand tropical family.  Cast one
+wondering glance, too, at the forest of zoophytes and corals, Lepraliæ
+and Flustræ, and those quaint blue stars, set in brown jelly, which are
+no zoophytes, but respectable molluscs, each with his well-formed mouth
+and intestines, {140b} but combined in a peculiar form of Communism, of
+which all one can say is, that one hopes they like it; and that, at all
+events, they agree better than the heroes and heroines of Mr. Hawthorne’s
+“Blithedale Romance.”
+
+Now away, and as a specimen of the fertility of the water-world, look at
+this rough list of species, {140c} the greater part of which are on this
+very stone, and all of which you might obtain in an hour, would the rude
+tide wait for zoologists: and remember that the number of individuals of
+each species of polype must be counted by tens of thousands; and also,
+that, by searching the forest of sea-weeds which covers the upper
+surface, we should probably obtain some twenty minute species more.
+
+A goodly catalogue this, surely, of the inhabitants of three or four
+large stones; and yet how small a specimen of the multitudinous nations
+of the sea!
+
+From the bare rocks above high-water mark, down to abysses deeper than
+ever plummet sounded, is life, everywhere life; fauna after fauna, and
+flora after flora, arranged in zones, according to the amount of light
+and warmth which each species requires, and to the amount of pressure
+which they are able to endure.  The crevices of the highest rocks, only
+sprinkled with salt spray in spring-tides and high gales, have their
+peculiar little univalves, their crisp lichen-like sea-weed, in myriads;
+lower down, the region of the Fuci (bladder-weeds) has its own tribes of
+periwinkles and limpets; below again, about the neap-tide mark, the
+region of the corallines and Algæ furnishes food for yet other species
+who graze on its watery meadows; and beneath all, only uncovered at low
+spring-tide, the zone of the Laminariæ (the great tangles and ore-weeds)
+is most full of all of every imaginable form of life.  So that as we
+descend the rocks, we may compare ourselves (likening small things to
+great) to those who, descending the Andes, pass in a single day from the
+vegetation of the Arctic zone to that of the Tropics.  And here and
+there, even at half-tide level, deep rock-basins, shaded from the sun and
+always full of water, keep up in a higher zone the vegetation of a lower
+one, and afford in nature an analogy to those deep “barrancos” which
+split the high table-land of Mexico, down whose awful cliffs, swept by
+cool sea-breezes, the traveller looks from among the plants and animals
+of the temperate zone, and sees far below, dim through their everlasting
+vapour-bath of rank hot steam, the mighty forms and gorgeous colours of a
+tropic forest.
+
+“I do not wonder,” says Mr. Gosse, in his charming “Naturalist’s Rambles
+on the Devonshire Coast” (p. 187), “that when Southey had an opportunity
+of seeing some of those beautiful quiet basins hollowed in the living
+rock, and stocked with elegant plants and animals, having all the charm
+of novelty to his eye, they should have moved his poetic fancy, and found
+more than one place in the gorgeous imagery of his Oriental romances.
+Just listen to him
+
+    “It was a garden still beyond all price,
+    Even yet it was a place of paradise;
+    * * * * * *
+       And here were coral bowers,
+          And grots of madrepores,
+    And banks of sponge, as soft and fair to eye
+             As e’er was mossy bed
+          Whereon the wood-nymphs lie
+    With languid limbs in summer’s sultry hours.
+          Here, too, were living flowers,
+          Which, like a bud compacted,
+          Their purple cups contracted;
+          And now in open blossom spread,
+    Stretch’d, like green anthers, many a seeking head.
+          And arborets of jointed stone were there,
+    And plants of fibres fine as silkworm’s thread;
+          Yea, beautiful as mermaid’s golden hair
+             Upon the waves dispread.
+    Others that, like the broad banana growing,
+    Raised their long wrinkled leaves of purple hue,
+          Like streamers wide outflowing.’—_Kehama_, xvi. 5.
+
+“A hundred times you might fancy you saw the type, the very original of
+this description, tracing, line by line, and image by image, the details
+of the picture; and acknowledging, as you proceed, the minute
+truthfulness with which it has been drawn.  For such is the loveliness of
+nature in these secluded reservoirs, that the accomplished poet, when
+depicting the gorgeous scenes of Eastern mythology—scenes the wildest and
+most extravagant that imagination could paint—drew not upon the resources
+of his prolific fancy for imagery here, but was well content to jot down
+the simple lineaments of Nature as he saw her in plain, homely England.
+
+“It is a beautiful and fascinating sight for those who have never seen it
+before, to see the little shrubberies of pink coralline—‘the arborets of
+jointed stone’—that fringe those pretty pools.  It is a charming sight to
+see the crimson banana-like leaves of the Delesseria waving in their
+darkest corners; and the purple fibrous tufts of Polysiphonia and
+Ceramia, ‘fine as silkworm’s thread.’  But there are many others which
+give variety and impart beauty to these tide-pools.  The broad leaves of
+the Ulva, finer than the finest cambric, and of the brightest
+emerald-green, adorn the hollows at the highest level, while, at the
+lowest, wave tiny forests of the feathery Ptilota and Dasya, and large
+leaves, cut into fringes and furbelows, of rosy Rhodymeniæ.  All these
+are lovely to behold; but I think I admire as much as any of them, one of
+the commonest of our marine plants, Chondrus crispus.  It occurs in the
+greatest profusion on this coast, in every pool between tide-marks; and
+everywhere—except in those of the highest level, where constant exposure
+to light dwarfs the plant, and turns it of a dull umber-brown tint—it is
+elegant in form and brilliant in colour.  The expanding fan-shaped
+fronds, cut into segments, cut, and cut again, make fine bushy tufts in a
+deep pool, and every segment of every frond reflects a flush of the most
+lustrous azure, like that of a tempered sword-blade.”—GOSSE’S _Devonshire
+Coast_, pp. 187–189.
+
+And the sea-bottom, also, has its zones, at different depths, and its
+peculiar forms in peculiar spots, affected by the currents and the nature
+of the ground, the riches of which have to be seen, alas! rather by the
+imagination than the eye; for such spoonfuls of the treasure as the
+dredge brings up to us, come too often rolled and battered, torn from
+their sites and contracted by fear, mere hints to us of what the populous
+reality below is like.  Often, standing on the shore at low tide, has one
+longed to walk on and in under the waves, as the water-ousel does in the
+pools of the mountain burn, and see it all but for a moment; and a solemn
+beauty and meaning has invested the old Greek fable of Glaucus the
+fisherman: how eating of the herb which gave his fish strength to leap
+back into their native element, he was seized on the spot with a strange
+longing to follow them under the waves, and became for ever a companion
+of the fair semi-human forms with which the Hellenic poets peopled their
+sunny bays and firths, feeding “silent flocks” far below on the green
+Zostera beds, or basking with them on the sunny ledges in the summer
+noon, or wandering in the still bays on sultry nights amid the choir of
+Amphitrite and her sea-nymphs:—
+
+    “Joining the bliss of the gods, as they waken the coves with their
+    laughter,”
+
+in nightly revels, whereof one has sung,—
+
+    “So they came up in their joy; and before them the roll of the surges
+    Sank, as the breezes sank dead, into smooth green foam-flecked marble
+    Awed; and the crags of the cliffs, and the pines of the mountains,
+    were silent.
+    So they came up in their joy, and around them the lamps of the
+    sea-nymphs,
+    Myriad fiery globes, swam heaving and panting, and rainbows,
+    Crimson, and azure, and emerald, were broken in star-showers,
+    lighting,
+    Far in the wine-dark depths of the crystal, the gardens of Nereus,
+    Coral, and sea-fan, and tangle, the blooms and the palms of the
+    ocean.
+    So they went on in their joy, more white than the foam which they
+    scattered,
+    Laughing and singing and tossing and twining; while, eager, the
+    Tritons
+    Blinded with kisses their eyes, unreproved, and above them in worship
+    Fluttered the terns, and the sea-gulls swept past them on silvery
+    pinions,
+    Echoing softly their laughter; around them the wantoning dolphins
+    Sighed as they plunged, full of love; and the great sea-horses which
+    bore them
+    Curved up their crests in their pride to the delicate arms of their
+    riders,
+    Pawing the spray into gems, till a fiery rainfall, unharming,
+    Sparkled and gleamed on the limbs of the maids, and the coils of the
+    mermen.
+    So they went on in their joy, bathed round with the fiery coolness,
+    Needing nor sun nor moon, self-lighted, immortal: but others,
+    Pitiful, floated in silence apart; on their knees lay the sea-boys
+    Whelmed by the roll of the surge, swept down by the anger of Nereus;
+    Hapless, whom never again upon quay or strand shall their mothers
+    Welcome with garlands and vows to the temples; but, wearily pining,
+    Gaze over island and main for the sails which return not; they,
+    heedless,
+    Sleep in soft bosoms for ever, and dream of the surge and the
+    sea-maids.
+    So they passed by in their joy, like a dream, on the murmuring
+    ripple.”
+
+Such a rhapsody may be somewhat out of order, even in a popular
+scientific book; and yet one cannot help at moments envying the old Greek
+imagination, which could inform the soulless sea-world with a human life
+and beauty.  For, after all, star-fishes and sea-anemones are dull
+substitutes for Sirens and Tritons; the lamps of the sea-nymphs, those
+glorious phosphorescent medusæ whose beauty Mr. Gosse sets forth so well
+with pen and pencil, are not as attractive as the sea-nymphs themselves
+would be; and who would not, like Menelaus, take the grey old man of the
+sea himself asleep upon the rocks, rather than one of his seal-herd,
+probably too with the same result as the world-famous combat in the
+Antiquary, between Hector and Phoca?  And yet—is there no human interest
+in these pursuits, more humanity and more divine, than there would be
+even in those Triton and Nereid dreams, if realized to sight and sense?
+Heaven forbid that those should say so, whose wanderings among rock and
+pool have been mixed up with holiest passages of friendship and of love,
+and the intercommunion of equal minds and sympathetic hearts, and the
+laugh of children drinking in health from every breeze and instruction at
+every step, running ever and anon with proud delight to add their little
+treasure to their parents’ stock, and of happy friendly evenings spent
+over the microscope and the vase, in examining, arranging, preserving,
+noting down in the diary the wonders and the labours of the happy, busy
+day.  No; such short glimpses of the water-world as our present
+appliances afford us are full enough of pleasure; and we will not envy
+Glaucus: we will not even be over-anxious for the success of his only
+modern imitator, the French naturalist who is reported to have fitted
+himself with a waterproof dress and breathing apparatus, in order to walk
+the bottom of the Mediterranean, and see for himself how the world goes
+on at the fifty-fathom line: we will be content with the wonders of the
+shore and of the sea-floor, as far as the dredge will discover them to
+us.  We shall even thus find enough to occupy (if we choose) our
+lifetime.  For we must recollect that this hasty sketch has hardly
+touched on that vegetable water-world, which is as wonderful and as
+various as the animal one.  A hint or two of the beauty of the sea-weeds
+has been given; but space has allowed no more.  Yet we might have spent
+our time with almost as much interest and profit, had we neglected
+utterly the animals which we have found, and devoted our attention
+exclusively to the flora of the rocks.  Sea-weeds are no mere playthings
+for children; and to buy at a shop some thirty pretty kinds, pasted on
+paper, with long names (probably mis-spelt) written under each, is not by
+any means to possess a collection of them.  Putting aside the number and
+the obscurity of their species, the questions which arise in studying
+their growth, reproduction, and organic chemistry are of the very deepest
+and most important in the whole range of science; and it will need but a
+little study of such a book as Harvey’s “Algæ,” to show the wise man that
+he who has comprehended (which no man yet does) the mystery of a single
+spore or tissue-cell, has reached depths in the great “Science of Life”
+at which an Owen would still confess himself “blind by excess of light.”
+“Knowest thou how the bones grow in the womb?” asks the Jewish sage,
+sadly, half self-reprovingly, as he discovers that man is not the measure
+of all things, and that in much learning may be vanity and vexation of
+spirit, and in much study a weariness of the flesh; and all our deeper
+physical science only brings the same question more awfully near.
+“Vilior algâ,” more worthless than the very sea-weed, says the old Roman:
+and yet no torn scrap of that very sea-weed, which to-morrow may manure
+the nearest garden, but says to us, “Proud man! talking of spores and
+vesicles, if thou darest for a moment to fancy that to have seen spores
+and vesicles is to have seen _me_, or to know what I am, answer this.
+Knowest thou how the bones do grow in the womb?  Knowest thou even how
+one of these tiny black dots, which thou callest spores, grow on my
+fronds?”  And to that question what answer shall we make?  We see tissues
+divide, cells develop, processes go on—but How and Why? These are but
+phenomena; but what are phenomena save effects? Causes, it may be, of
+other effects; but still effects of other causes.  And why does the cause
+cause that effect?  Why should it not cause something else?  Why should
+it cause anything at all? Because it obeys a law.  But why does it obey
+the law? and how does it obey the law?  And, after all, what is a law?  A
+mere custom of Nature.  We see the same phenomenon happen a great many
+times; and we infer from thence that it has a custom of happening; and
+therefore we call it a law: but we have not seen the law; all we have
+seen is the phenomenon which we suppose to indicate the law.  We have
+seen things fall: but we never saw a little flying thing pulling them
+down, with “gravitation” labelled on its back; and the question, _why_
+things fall, and _how_, is just where it was before Newton was born, and
+is likely to remain there.  All we can say is, that Nature has her
+customs, and that other customs ensue, when those customs appear: but
+that as to what connects cause and effect, as to what is the reason, the
+final cause, or even the _causa causans_, of any phenomenon, we know not
+more but less than ever; for those laws or customs which seem to us
+simplest (“endosmose,” for instance, or “gravitation”), are just the most
+inexplicable, logically unexpected, seemingly arbitrary, certainly
+supernatural—miraculous, if you will; for no natural and physical cause
+whatsoever can be assigned for them; while if anyone shall argue against
+their being miraculous and supernatural on the ground of their being so
+common, I can only answer, that of all absurd and illogical arguments,
+this is the most so.  For what has the number of times which the miracle
+occurs to do with the question, save to increase the wonder?  Which is
+more strange, that an inexplicable and unfathomable thing should occur
+once and for all, or that it should occur a million times every day all
+the world over?
+
+Let those, however, who are too proud to wonder, do as seems good to
+them.  Their want of wonder will not help them toward the required
+explanation: and to them, as to us, as soon as we begin asking, “_How_?”
+and “_Why_?” the mighty Mother will only reply with that magnificent
+smile of hers, most genial, but most silent, which she has worn since the
+foundation of all worlds; that silent smile which has tempted many a man
+to suspect her of irony, even of deceit and hatred of the human race; the
+silent smile which Solomon felt, and answered in “Ecclesiastes;” which
+Goethe felt, and did not answer in his “Faust;” which Pascal felt, and
+tried to answer in his “Thoughts,” and fled from into self-torture and
+superstition, terrified beyond his powers of endurance, as he found out
+the true meaning of St. John’s vision, and felt himself really standing
+on that fragile and slippery “sea of glass,” and close beneath him the
+bottomless abyss of doubt, and the nether fires of moral retribution.  He
+fled from Nature’s silent smile, as that poor old King Edward (mis-called
+the Confessor) fled from her hymns of praise, in the old legend of
+Havering-atte-bower, when he cursed the nightingales because their songs
+confused him in his prayers: but the wise man need copy neither, and fear
+neither the silence nor the laughter of the mighty mother Earth, if he
+will be but wise, and hear her tell him, alike in both—“Why call me
+mother? Why ask me for knowledge which I cannot teach, peace which I
+cannot give or take away?  I am only your foster-mother and your
+nurse—and I have not been an unkindly one.  But you are God’s children,
+and not mine.  Ask Him.  I can amuse you with my songs; but they are but
+a nurse’s lullaby to the weary flesh.  I can awe you with my silence; but
+my silence is only my just humility, and your gain.  How dare I pretend
+to tell you secrets which He who made me knows alone?  I am but inanimate
+matter; why ask of me things which belong to living spirit?  In God I
+live and move, and have my being; I know not how, any more than you know.
+Who will tell you what life is, save He who is the Lord of life?  And if
+He will not tell you, be sure it is because you need not to know.  At
+least, why seek God in nature, the living among the dead?  He is not
+here: He is risen.”
+
+He is not here: He is risen.  Good reader, you will probably agree that
+to know that saying, is to know the key-note of the world to come.
+Believe me, to know it, and all it means, is to know the keynote of this
+world also, from the fall of dynasties and the fate of nations, to the
+sea-weed which rots upon the beach.
+
+It may seem startling, possibly (though I hope not, for my readers’ sake,
+irreverent), to go back at once after such thoughts, be they true or
+false, to the weeds upon the cliff above our heads.  But He who is not
+here, but is risen, yet is here, and has appointed them their services in
+a wonderful order; and I wish that on some day, or on many days, when a
+quiet sea and offshore breezes have prevented any new objects from coming
+to land with the rising tide, you would investigate the flowers peculiar
+to our sea-rocks and sandhills.  Even if you do not find the delicate
+lily-like Trichonema of the Channel Islands and Dawlish, or the almost as
+beautiful Squill of the Cornish cliffs, or the sea-lavender of North
+Devon, or any of those rare Mediterranean species which Mr. Johns has so
+charmingly described in his “Week at the Lizard Point,” yet an average
+cliff, with its carpeting of pink thrift and of bladder catchfly, and
+Lady’s finger, and elegant grasses, most of them peculiar to the sea
+marge, is often a very lovely flower-bed.
+
+Not merely interesting, too, but brilliant in their vegetation are
+sandhills; and the seemingly desolate dykes and banks of salt marshes
+will yield many a curious plant, which you may neglect if you will: but
+lay to your account the having to repent your neglect hereafter, when,
+finding out too late what a pleasant study botany is, you search in vain
+for curious forms over which you trod every day in crossing flats which
+seemed to you utterly ugly and uninteresting, but which the good God was
+watching as carefully as He did the pleasant hills inland: perhaps even
+more carefully; for the uplands He has completed, and handed over to man,
+that he may dress and keep them: but the tide-flats below are still
+unfinished, dry land in the process of creation, to which every tide is
+adding the elements of fertility, which shall grow food, perhaps in some
+future state of our planet, for generations yet unborn.
+
+But to return to the water-world, and to dredging; which of all sea-side
+pursuits is perhaps the most pleasant, combining as it does fine weather
+sailing with the discovery of new objects, to which, after all, the waifs
+and strays of the beach, whether “flotsom jetsom, or lagand,” as the old
+Admiralty laws define them, are few and poor.  I say particularly fine
+weather sailing; for a swell, which makes the dredge leap along the
+bottom, instead of scraping steadily, is as fatal to sport as it is to
+some people’s comfort.  But dredging, if you use a pleasure boat and the
+small naturalist’s dredge, is an amusement in which ladies, if they will,
+may share, and which will increase, and not interfere with, the
+amusements of a water-party.
+
+The naturalist’s dredge, of which Mr. Gosse’s “Aquarium” gives a detailed
+account, should differ from the common oyster dredge in being smaller;
+certainly not more than four feet across the mouth; and instead of having
+but one iron scraping-lip like the oyster dredge, it should have two, one
+above and one below, so that it will work equally well on whichsoever
+side it falls, or how often soever it may be turned over by rough ground.
+The bag-net should be of strong spunyarn, or (still better) of hide “such
+as those hides of the wild cattle of the Pampas, which the tobacconists
+receive from South America,” cut into thongs, and netted close.  It
+should be loosely laced together with a thong at the tail edge in order
+to be opened easily, when brought on board, without canting the net over,
+and pouring the contents roughly out through the mouth.  The
+dragging-rope should be strong, and at least three times as long as the
+perpendicular depth of the water in which you are working; if, indeed,
+there is much breeze, or any swell at all, still more line should be
+veered out.  The inboard end should be made fast somewhere in the stern
+sheets, the dredge hove to windward, the boat put before the wind; and
+you may then amuse yourself as you will for the next quarter of an hour,
+provided that you have got ready various wide-mouthed bottles for the
+more delicate monsters, and a couple of buckets, to receive the large
+lumps of oysters and serpulæ which you will probably bring to the
+surface.
+
+As for a dredging ground, one may be found, I suppose, off every
+watering-place.  The most fertile spots are in rough ground, in not less
+than five fathoms water.  The deeper the water, the rarer and more
+interesting will the animals generally be: but a greater depth than
+fifteen fathoms is not easily reached on this side of Plymouth; and, on
+the whole, the beginner will find enough in seven or eight fathoms to
+stock an aquarium rivalling any of those in the “Tank-house” at the
+Zoological Gardens.
+
+In general, the south coast of England, to the eastward of Portland,
+affords bad dredging ground.  The friable cliffs, of comparatively recent
+formations, keep the sea shallow, and the bottom smooth and bare, by the
+vast deposits of sand and gravel.  Yet round the Isle of Wight,
+especially at the back of the Needles, there ought to be fertile spots;
+and Weymouth, according to Mr. Gosse and other well-known naturalists, is
+a very garden of Nereus.  Torbay, as may well be supposed, is an
+admirable dredging spot; perhaps its two best points are round the
+isolated Thatcher and Oare-rock, and from the mouth of Brixham harbour to
+Berry Head; along which last line, for perhaps three hundred years, the
+decks of all Brixham trawlers have been washed down ere running into
+harbour, and the sea-bottom thus stored with treasures scraped up from
+deeper water in every direction for miles and miles.
+
+Hastings is, I fear, but a poor spot for dredging.  Its friable cliffs
+and strong tides produce a changeable and barren sea-floor.  Yet the
+immense quantities of Flustra thrown up after a storm indicate dredging
+ground at no great distance outside; its rocks, uninteresting as they are
+compared with our Devonians, have yielded to the industry and science of
+M. Tumanowicz a vast number of sea-weeds and sponges.  Those three
+curious polypes, Valkeria cuscuta (Plate I. fig. 3), Notamia Bursaria,
+and Serialaria Lendigera, abound within tide-marks; and as the place is
+so much visited by Londoners, it may be worth while to give a few hints
+as to what might be done, by anyone whose curiosity has been excited by
+the salt-water tanks of the Zoological Gardens and the Crystal Palace.
+
+           [Picture: Plate 11: Syngnathus Lumbriciformis etc.]
+
+An hour or two’s dredging round the rocks to the eastward, would probably
+yield many delicate and brilliant little fishes; Gobies, brilliant Labri,
+blue, yellow, and orange, with tiny rabbit mouths, and powerful
+protruding teeth; pipe fishes (Syngnathi) {163} with strange snipe-bills
+(which they cannot open) and snake-like bodies; small cuttlefish
+(Sepiolæ) of a white jelly mottled with brilliant metallic hues, with a
+ring of suckered arms round their tiny parrots’ beaks, who, put into a
+jar, will hover and dart in the water, as the skylark does in air, by
+rapid winnowings of their glassy side-fins, while they watch you with
+bright lizard-eyes; the whole animal being a combination of the
+vertebrate and the mollusc, so utterly fantastic and abnormal, that (had
+not the family been amongst the commonest, from the earliest geological
+epochs) it would have seemed, to man’s deductive intellect, a form almost
+as impossible as the mermaid, far more impossible than the sea-serpent.
+These, and perhaps a few handsome sea-slugs and bivalve shells, you will
+be pretty sure to find: perhaps a great deal more.
+
+Meanwhile, without dredging, you may find a good deal on the shore.  In
+the spring Doris bilineata comes to the rocks in thousands, to lay its
+strange white furbelows of spawn upon their overhanging edges.  Eolides
+of extraordinary beauty haunt the same spots.  The great Eolis papillosa,
+of a delicate French grey; Eolis pellucida (?) (Plate X. fig. 4), in
+which each papilla on the back is beautifully coloured with a streak of
+pink, and tipped with iron blue; and a most fantastical yellow little
+creature, so covered with plumes and tentacles that the body is
+invisible, which I believe to be the Idalia aspersa of Alder and Hancock.
+
+At the bottom of the rock pools, behind St. Leonard’s baths, may be found
+hundreds of the snipe’s feather Anemone (Sagartia troglodytes), of every
+line; from the common brown and grey snipe’s feather kind, to the
+white-horned Hesperus, the orange-horned Aurora, and a rich lilac and
+crimson variety, which does not seem to agree with either the Lilacinia
+or Rubicunda of Gosse.  A more beautiful living bouquet could hardly be
+seen, than might be made of the varieties of this single species, from
+this one place.
+
+On the outside sands between the end of the Marina and the Martello
+tower, you may find, at very low tides, great numbers of a sand-tube,
+about three inches long, standing up out of the sand.  I do not mean the
+tubes of the Terebella, so common in all sands, which are somewhat
+flexible, and have their upper end fringed with a ragged ring of sandy
+arms: those I speak of are straight and stiff, and ending in a point
+upward.  Draw them out of the sand—they will offer some resistance—and
+put them into a vase of water; you will see the worm inside expand two
+delicate golden combs, just like old-fashioned back-hair combs, of a
+metallic lustre, which will astonish you.  With these combs the worm
+seems to burrow head downward into the sand; but whether he always
+remains in that attitude I cannot say.  His name is Pectinaria Belgica.
+He is an Annelid, or true worm, connected with the Serpulea and Sabellæ
+of which I have spoken already, and holds himself in his case like them,
+by hooks and bristles set on each ring of his body.  In confinement he
+will probably come out of his case and die; when you may dissect him at
+your leisure, and learn a great deal more about him thereby than (I am
+sorry to say) I know.
+
+But if you have courage to run out fifteen or twenty miles to the
+Diamond, you may find really rare and valuable animals.  There is a risk,
+of course, of being blown over to the coast of France, by a change of
+wind; there is a risk also of not being able to land at night on the
+inhospitable Hastings beach, and of sleeping, as best you can, on board:
+but in the long days and settled fine weather of summer, the trip, in a
+stout boat, ought to be a safe and a pleasant one.
+
+On the Diamond you will find many, or most of those gay creatures which
+attract your eye in the central row of tanks at the Zoological Gardens:
+great twisted masses of Serpulæ, {167} those white tubes of stone, from
+the mouth of which protrude pairs of rose-coloured or orange fans,
+flashing in, quick as light, the moment that your finger approaches them
+or your shadow crosses the water.
+
+You will dredge, too, the twelve-rayed sun-star (Solaster papposa), with
+his rich scarlet armour; and more strange, and quite as beautiful, the
+bird’s foot star (Palmipes membranaceus), which you may see crawling by
+its thousand sucking-feet in the Crystal Palace tanks, a pentagonal
+webbed bird’s foot, of scarlet and orange shagreen.  With him, most
+probably, will be a specimen of the great purple heart-urchin (Spatangus
+purpureus), clothed in pale lilac horny spines, and other Echinoderms,
+for which you must consult Forbes’s “British Star-fishes:” but perhaps
+the species among them which will interest you most, will be the common
+brittle-star (Ophiocoma rosula), of which a hundred or so, I can promise,
+shall come up at a single haul of the dredge, entwining their long
+spine-clad arms in a seemingly inextricable confusion of “kaleidoscope”
+patterns (thanks to Mr. Gosse for the one right epithet), purple and
+azure, fawn, brown, green, grey, white and crimson; as if a whole bed of
+China-asters should have first come to life, and then gone mad, and
+fallen to fighting.  But pick out, one by one, specimens from the tangled
+mass, and you will agree that no China-aster is so fair as this living
+stone-flower of the deep, with its daisy-like disc, and fine long prickly
+arms, which never cease their graceful serpentine motion, and its colours
+hardly alike in any two specimens.  Handle them not, meanwhile, too
+roughly, lest, whether modesty or in anger, they begin a desperate course
+of gradual suicide, and, breaking off arm after arm piecemeal, fling them
+indignantly at their tormentor.  Along with these you will certainly
+obtain a few of that fine bivalve, the great Scallop, which you have seen
+lying on every fishmonger’s counter in Hastings.  Of these you must pick
+out those which seem dirtiest and most overgrown with parasites, and
+place them carefully in a jar of salt water, where they may not be
+rubbed; for they are worth your examination, not merely for the sake of
+that ring of gem-like eyes which borders their “cloak,” lying along the
+extreme out edge of the shell as the valves are half open, but for the
+sake of the parasites outside: corallines of exquisite delicacy,
+Plumulariæ and Sertulariæ, dead men’s hands (Alcyonia), lumps of white or
+orange jelly, which will protrude a thousand star-like polypes, and the
+Tubularia indivisa, twisted tubes of fine straw, which ought already to
+have puzzled you; for you may pick them up in considerable masses on the
+Hastings beach after a south-west gale, and think long over them before
+you determine whether the oat-like stems and spongy roots belong to an
+animal, or a vegetable.  Animals they are, nevertheless, though even now
+you will hardly guess the fact, when you see at the mouth of each tube a
+little scarlet flower, connected with the pink pulp which fills the tube.
+For a further description of this largest and handsomest of our Hydroid
+Polypes, I must refer you to Johnston, or, failing him, to Landsborough;
+and go on, to beg you not to despise those pink, or grey, or white lumps
+of jelly, which will expand in salt water into exquisite sea-anemones, of
+quite different forms from any which we have found along the rocks.  One
+of them will certainly be the Dianthus, {170} which will open into a
+furbelowed flower, furred with innumerable delicate tentacula; and in the
+centre a mouth of the most delicate orange, the size of the whole animal
+being perhaps eight inches high and five across.  Perhaps it will be of a
+satiny grey, perhaps pale rose, perhaps pure white; whatever its colour,
+it is the very maiden queen of all the beautiful tribe, and one of the
+loveliest gems with which it has pleased God to bedeck this lower world.
+
+                [Picture: Plate 7: Echinus Miliaris etc.]
+
+These and much more you will find on the scallops, or even more
+plentifully on any lump of ancient oysters; and if you do not dredge, it
+would be well worth your while to make interest with the fish-monger for
+a few oyster lumps, put into water the moment they are taken out of the
+trawl.  Divide them carefully, clear out the oysters with a knife, and
+put the shells into your aquarium, and you will find that an oyster at
+home is a very different thing from an oyster on a stall.
+
+You ought, besides, to dredge many handsome species of shells, which you
+would never pick up along the beach; and if you are conchologizing in
+earnest, you must not forget to bring home a tin box of shell sand, to be
+washed and picked over in a dish at your leisure, or forget either to
+wash through a fine sieve, over the boat’s side, any sludge and ooze
+which the dredge brings up.  Many—I may say, hundreds—rare and new shells
+are found in this way, and in no other.
+
+But if you cannot afford the expense of your own dredge and boat, and the
+time and trouble necessary to follow the occupation scientifically, yet
+every trawler and oyster-boat will afford you a tolerable satisfaction.
+Go on board one of these; and while the trawl is down, spend a pleasant
+hour or two in talking with the simple, honest, sturdy fellows who work
+it, from whom (if you are as fortunate as I have been for many a year
+past) you may get many a moving story of danger and sorrow, as well as
+many a shrewd practical maxim, and often, too, a living recognition of
+God, and the providence of God, which will send you home, perhaps, a
+wiser and more genial man.  And when the trawl is hauled, wait till the
+fish are counted out, and packed away, and then kneel down and inspect
+(in a pair of Mackintosh leggings, and your oldest coat) the crawling
+heap of shells and zoophytes which remains behind about the decks, and
+you will find, if a landsman, enough to occupy you for a week to come.
+Nay, even if it be too calm for trawling, condescend to go out in a
+dingy, and help to haul some honest fellow’s deep-sea lines and
+lobster-pots, and you will find more and stranger things about them than
+even fish or lobsters: though they, to him who has eyes to see, are
+strange enough.
+
+I speak from experience; for it was not so very long ago that, in the
+north of Devon, I found sermons, not indeed in stones, but in a creature
+reputed among the most worthless of sea-vermin.  I had been lounging
+about all the morning on the little pier, waiting, with the rest of the
+village, for a trawling breeze which would not come.  Two o’clock was
+past, and still the red mainsails of the skiffs hung motionless, and
+their images quivered head downwards in the glassy swell,
+
+    “As idle as a painted ship
+    Upon a painted ocean.”
+
+It was neap-tide, too, and therefore nothing could be done among the
+rocks.  So, in despair, finding an old coast-guard friend starting for
+his lobster-pots, I determined to save the old man’s arms, by rowing him
+up the shore; and then paddled homeward again, under the high green
+northern wall, five hundred feet of cliff furred to the water’s edge with
+rich oak woods, against whose base the smooth Atlantic swell died
+whispering, as if curling itself up to sleep at last within that
+sheltered nook, tired with its weary wanderings.  The sun sank lower and
+lower behind the deer-park point; the white stair of houses up the glen
+was wrapped every moment deeper and deeper in hazy smoke and shade, as
+the light faded; the evening fires were lighted one by one; the soft
+murmur of the waterfall, and the pleasant laugh of children, and the
+splash of homeward oars, came clearer and clearer to the ear at every
+stroke: and as we rowed on, arose the recollection of many a brave and
+wise friend, whose lot was cast in no such western paradise, but rather
+in the infernos of this sinful earth, toiling even then amid the
+festering alleys of Bermondsey and Bethnal Green, to palliate death and
+misery which they had vainly laboured to prevent, watching the strides of
+that very cholera which they had been striving for years to ward off, now
+re-admitted in spite of all their warnings, by the carelessness, and
+laziness, and greed of sinful man.  And as I thought over the whole
+hapless question of sanitary reform, proved long since a moral duty to
+God and man, possible, easy, even pecuniarily profitable, and yet left
+undone, there seemed a sublime irony, most humbling to man, in some of
+Nature’s processes, and in the silent and unobtrusive perfection with
+which she has been taught to anticipate, since the foundation of the
+world, some of the loftiest discoveries of modern science, of which we
+are too apt to boast as if we had created the method by discovering its
+possibility.  Created it?  Alas for the pride of human genius, and the
+autotheism which would make man the measure of all things, and the centre
+of the universe!  All the invaluable laws and methods of sanitary reform
+at best are but clumsy imitations of the unseen wonders which every
+animalcule and leaf have been working since the world’s foundation; with
+this slight difference between them and us, that they fulfil their
+appointed task, and we do not.
+
+The sickly geranium which spreads its blanched leaves against the cellar
+panes, and peers up, as if imploringly, to the narrow slip of sunlight at
+the top of the narrow alley, had it a voice, could tell more truly than
+ever a doctor in the town, why little Bessy sickened of the scarlatina,
+and little Johnny of the hooping-cough, till the toddling wee things who
+used to pet and water it were carried off each and all of them one by one
+to the churchyard sleep, while the father and mother sat at home, trying
+to supply by gin that very vital energy which fresh air and pure water,
+and the balmy breath of woods and heaths, were made by God to give; and
+how the little geranium did its best, like a heaven-sent angel, to right
+the wrong which man’s ignorance had begotten, and drank in, day by day,
+the poisoned atmosphere, and formed it into fair green leaves, and
+breathed into the children’s faces from every pore, whenever they bent
+over it, the life-giving oxygen for which their dulled blood and festered
+lungs were craving in vain; fulfilling God’s will itself, though man
+would not, too careless or too covetous to see, after thousands of years
+of boasted progress, why God had covered the earth with grass, herb, and
+tree, a living and life-giving garment of perpetual health and youth.
+
+It is too sad to think long about, lest we become very Heraclituses.  Let
+us take the other side of the matter with Democritus, try to laugh man
+out of a little of his boastful ignorance and self-satisfied clumsiness,
+and tell him, that if the House of Commons would but summon one of the
+little Paramecia from any Thames’ sewer-mouth, to give his evidence
+before their next Cholera Committee, sanitary blue-books, invaluable as
+they are, would be superseded for ever and a day; and sanitary reformers
+would no longer have to confess, that they know of no means of stopping
+the smells which in past hot summers drove the members out of the House,
+and the judges out of Westminster Hall.
+
+Nay, in the boat at the minute of which I have been speaking, silent and
+neglected, sat a fellow-passenger, who was a greater adept at removing
+nuisances than the whole Board of Health put together; and who had done
+his work, too, with a cheapness unparalleled; for all his good deeds had
+not as yet cost the State one penny.  True, he lived by his business; so
+do other inspectors of nuisances: but Nature, instead of paying Maia
+Squinado, Esquire, some five hundred pounds sterling per annum for his
+labour, had contrived, with a sublime simplicity of economy which Mr.
+Hume might have envied and admired afar off, to make him do his work
+gratis, by giving him the nuisances as his perquisites, and teaching him
+how to eat them.  Certainly (without going the length of the Caribs, who
+upheld cannibalism because, they said, it made war cheap, and precluded
+entirely the need of a commissariat), this cardinal virtue of cheapness
+ought to make Squinado an interesting object in the eyes of the present
+generation; especially as he was at that moment a true sanitary martyr,
+having, like many of his human fellow-workers, got into a fearful scrape
+by meddling with those existing interests, and “vested rights which are
+but vested wrongs,” which have proved fatal already to more than one
+Board of Health.  For last night, as he was sitting quietly under a stone
+in four fathoms water, he became aware (whether by sight, smell, or that
+mysterious sixth sense, to us unknown, which seems to reside in his
+delicate feelers) of a palpable nuisance somewhere in the neighbourhood;
+and, like a trusty servant of the public, turned out of his bed instantly
+and went in search; till he discovered, hanging among what he judged to
+be the stems of ore-weed (Laminaria), three or four large pieces of stale
+thornback, of most evil savour, and highly prejudicial to the purity of
+the sea, and the health of the neighbouring herrings.  Happy Squinado!
+He needed not to discover the limits of his authority, to consult any
+lengthy Nuisances’ Removal Act, with its clauses, and counter-clauses,
+and explanations of interpretations, and interpretations of explanations.
+Nature, who can afford to be arbitrary, because she is perfect, and to
+give her servants irresponsible powers, because she has trained them to
+their work, had bestowed on him and on his forefathers, as general health
+inspectors, those very summary powers of entrance and removal in the
+watery realms for which common sense, public opinion, and private
+philanthropy are still entreating vainly in the terrestrial realms; so
+finding a hole, in he went, and began to remove the nuisance, without
+“waiting twenty-four hours,” “laying an information,” “serving a notice,”
+or any other vain delay.  The evil was there,—and there it should not
+stay; so having neither cart nor barrow, he just began putting it into
+his stomach, and in the meanwhile set his assistants to work likewise.
+For suppose not, gentle reader, that Squinado went alone; in his train
+were more than a hundred thousand as good as he, each in his office, and
+as cheaply paid; who needed no cumbrous baggage train of force-pumps,
+hose, chloride of lime packets, whitewash, pails or brushes, but were
+every man his own instrument; and, to save expense of transit, just grew
+on Squinado’s back.  Do you doubt the assertion?  Then lift him up
+hither, and putting him gently into that shallow jar of salt water, look
+at him through the hand-magnifier, and see how Nature is maxima in
+minimis.
+
+There he sits, twiddling his feelers (a substitute, it seems, with
+crustacea for biting their nails when they are puzzled), and by no means
+lovely to look on in vulgar eyes;—about the bigness of a man’s fist; a
+round-bodied, spindle-shanked, crusty, prickly, dirty fellow, with a
+villanous squint, too, in those little bony eyes, which never look for a
+moment both the same way.  Never mind: many a man of genius is ungainly
+enough; and Nature, if you will observe, as if to make up to him for his
+uncomeliness, has arrayed him as Solomon in all his glory never was
+arrayed, and so fulfilled one of the proposals of old Fourier—that
+scavengers, chimney-sweeps, and other workers in disgusting employments,
+should be rewarded for their self-sacrifice in behalf of the public weal
+by some peculiar badge of honour, or laurel crown.  Not that his crown,
+like those of the old Greek games, is a mere useless badge; on the
+contrary, his robe of state is composed of his fellow-servants.  His
+whole back is covered with a little grey forest of branching hairs, fine
+as a spider’s web, each branchlet carrying its little pearly ringed club,
+each club its rose-coloured polype, like (to quote Mr. Gosse’s
+comparison) the unexpanded birds of the acacia. {181a}
+
+On that leg grows, amid another copse of the grey polypes, a delicate
+straw-coloured Sertularia, branch on branch of tiny double combs, each
+tooth of the comb being a tube containing a living flower; on another leg
+another Sertularia, coarser, but still beautiful; and round it again has
+trained itself, parasitic on the parasite, plant upon plant of glass ivy,
+bearing crystal bells, {181b} each of which, too, protrudes its living
+flower; on another leg is a fresh species, like a little heather-bush of
+whitest ivory, {182} and every needle leaf a polype cell—let us stop
+before the imagination grows dizzy with the contemplation of those
+myriads of beautiful atomies.  And what is their use?  Each living
+flower, each polype mouth is feeding fast, sweeping into itself, by the
+perpetual currents caused by the delicate fringes upon its rays (so
+minute these last, that their motion only betrays their presence), each
+tiniest atom of decaying matter in the surrounding water, to convert it,
+by some wondrous alchemy, into fresh cells and buds, and either build up
+a fresh branch in their thousand-tenanted tree, or form an egg-cell, from
+whence when ripe may issue, not a fixed zoophyte, but a free swimming
+animal.
+
+And in the meanwhile, among this animal forest grows a vegetable one of
+delicatest sea-weeds, green and brown and crimson, whose office is, by
+their everlasting breath, to reoxygenate the impure water, and render it
+fit once more to be breathed by the higher animals who swim or creep
+around.
+
+Mystery of mysteries!  Let us jest no more,—Heaven forgive us if we have
+jested too much on so simple a matter as that poor spider-crab, taken out
+of the lobster-pots, and left to die at the bottom of the boat, because
+his more aristocratic cousins of the blue and purple armour will not
+enter the trap while he is within.
+
+I am not aware whether the surmise, that these tiny zoophytes help to
+purify the water by exhaling oxygen gas, has yet been verified.  The
+infusorial animalcules do so, reversing the functions of animal life, and
+instead of evolving carbonic acid gas, as other animals do, evolve pure
+oxygen.  So, at least, says Liebig, who states that he found a small
+piece of matchwood, just extinguished, burst out again into a flame on
+being immersed in the bubbles given out by these living atomies.
+
+I myself should be inclined to doubt that this is the case with
+zoophytes, having found water in which they were growing (unless, of
+course, sea-weeds were present) to be peculiarly ready to become foul;
+but it is difficult to say whether this is owing to their deoxygenating
+the water while alive, like other animals, or to the fact that it is very
+rare to get a specimen of zoophyte in which a large number of the polypes
+have not been killed in the transit home, or at least so far knocked
+about, that (in the Anthozoa, which are far the most abundant) the
+polype—or rather living mouth, for it is little more—is thrown off to
+decay, pending the growth of a fresh one in the same cell.
+
+But all the sea-weeds, in common with other vegetables, perform this
+function continually, and thus maintain the water in which they grow in a
+state fit to support animal life.
+
+This fact—first advanced by Priestley and Ingenhousz, and though doubted
+by the great Ellis, satisfactorily ascertained by Professor Daubeny, Mr.
+Ward, Dr. Johnston, and Mr. Warrington—gives an answer to the question,
+which I hope has ere now arisen in the minds of some of my readers,—
+
+How is it possible to see these wonders at home?  Beautiful and
+instructive as they may be, can they be meant for any but dwellers by the
+sea-side?  Nay more, even to them, must not the glories of the
+water-world be always more momentary than those of the rainbow, a mere
+Fata Morgana which breaks up and vanishes before the eyes? If there were
+but some method of making a miniature sea-world for a few days; much more
+of keeping one with us when far inland.—
+
+This desideratum has at last been filled up; and science has shown, as
+usual, that by simply obeying Nature, we may conquer her, even so far as
+to have our miniature sea, of artificial salt-water, filled with living
+plants and sea-weeds, maintaining each other in perfect health, and each
+following, as far as is possible in a confined space, its natural habits.
+
+To Dr. Johnston is due, as far as is known, the honour of the first
+accomplishment of this as of a hundred other zoological triumphs.  As
+early as 1842, he proved to himself the vegetable nature of the common
+pink Coralline, which fringes every rock-pool, by keeping it for eight
+weeks in unchanged salt-water, without any putrefaction ensuing.  The
+ground, of course, on which the proof rested in this case was, that if
+the coralline were, as had often been thought, a zoophyte, the water
+would become corrupt, and poisonous to the life of the small animals in
+the same jar; and that its remaining fresh argued that the coralline had
+re-oxygenated it from time to time, and was therefore a vegetable.
+
+In 1850, Mr. Robert Warrington communicated to the Chemical Society the
+results of a year’s experiments, “On the Adjustment of the Relations
+between the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms, by which the Vital Functions
+of both are permanently maintained.”  The law which his experiments
+verified was the same as that on which Mr. Ward, in 1842, founded his
+invaluable proposal for increasing the purity of the air in large towns,
+by planting trees and cultivating flowers in rooms, _that the animal and
+vegetable respirations might counterbalance each other_; the animal’s
+blood being purified by the oxygen given off by the plants, the plants
+fed by the carbonic acid breathed out by the animals.
+
+On the same principle, Mr. Warrington first kept, for many months, in a
+vase of unchanged water, two small gold fish and a plant of Vallisneria
+spiralis; and two years afterwards began a similar experiment with
+sea-water, weeds, and anemones, which were, at last, as successful as the
+former ones.  Mr. Gosse had, in the meanwhile, with tolerable success
+begun a similar method, unaware of what Mr. Warrington had done; and now
+the beautiful and curious exhibition of fresh and salt water tanks in the
+Zoological Gardens in London, bids fair to be copied in every similar
+institution, and we hope in many private houses, throughout the kingdom.
+
+To this subject Mr. Gosse’s book, “The Aquarium,” is principally devoted,
+though it contains, besides, sketches of coast scenery, in his usual
+charming style, and descriptions of rare sea-animals, with wise and
+goodly reflections thereon.  One great object of interest in the book is
+the last chapter, which treats fully of the making and stocking these
+salt-water “Aquaria;” and the various beautifully coloured plates, which
+are, as it were, sketches from the interior of tanks, are well fitted to
+excite the desire of all readers to possess such gorgeous living
+pictures, if as nothing else, still as drawing-room ornaments,
+flower-gardens which never wither, fairy lakes of perpetual calm which no
+storm blackens,—
+
+    οὐτ’ ἐν θέρει, οὐτ’ ἐν ὁπώρῃ.
+
+Those who have never seen one of them can never imagine (and neither Mr.
+Gosse’s pencil nor my clumsy words can ever describe to them) the
+gorgeous colouring and the grace and delicacy of form which these
+subaqueous landscapes exhibit.
+
+As for colouring,—the only bit of colour which I can remember even
+faintly resembling them (for though Correggio’s Magdalene may rival them
+in greens and blues, yet even he has no such crimsons and purples) is the
+Adoration of the Shepherds, by that “prince of colorists”—Palma Vecchio,
+which hangs on the left-hand side of Lord Ellesmere’s great gallery.  But
+as for the forms,—where shall we see their like?  Where, amid miniature
+forests as fantastic as those of the tropics, animals whose shapes outvie
+the wildest dreams of the old German ghost painters which cover the walls
+of the galleries of Brussels or Antwerp?  And yet the uncouthest has some
+quaint beauty of its own, while most—the star-fishes and anemones, for
+example—are nothing but beauty.  The brilliant plates in Mr. Gosse’s
+“Aquarium” give, after all, but a meagre picture of the reality, as it
+may be seen in the tank-house at the Zoological Gardens; and as it may be
+seen also, by anyone who will follow carefully the directions given at
+the end of his book, stock a glass vase with such common things as he may
+find in an hour’s search at low tide, and so have an opportunity of
+seeing how truly Mr. Gosse says, in his valuable preface, that—
+
+“The habits” (and he might well have added, the marvellous beauty) “of
+animals will never be thoroughly known till they are observed in detail.
+Nor is it sufficient to mark them with attention now and then; they must
+be closely watched, their various actions carefully noted, their
+behaviour under different circumstances, and especially those movements
+which seem to us mere vagaries, undirected by any suggestible motive or
+cause, well examined.  A rich fruit of result, often new and curious and
+unexpected, will, I am sure, reward anyone who studies living animals in
+this way.  The most interesting parts, by far, of published Natural
+History are those minute, but graphic particulars, which have been
+gathered up by an attentive watching of individual animals.”
+
+Mr. Gosse’s own books, certainly, give proof enough of this.  We need
+only direct the reader to his exquisitely humorous account of the ways
+and works of a captive soldier-crab, {190} to show them how much there is
+to be seen, and how full Nature is also of that ludicrous element of
+which we spoke above.  And, indeed, it is in this form of Natural
+History: not in mere classification, and the finding out of means, and
+quarrellings as to the first discovery of that beetle or this
+buttercup,—too common, alas! among mere closet-collectors,—“endless
+genealogies,” to apply St. Paul’s words by no means irreverently or
+fancifully, “which do but gender strife;”—not in these pedantries is that
+moral training to be found, for which we have been lauding the study of
+Natural History: but in healthful walks and voyages out of doors, and in
+careful and patient watching of the living animals and plants at home,
+with an observation sharpened by practice, and a temper calmed by the
+continual practice of the naturalist’s first virtues—patience and
+perseverance.
+
+Practical directions for forming an “Aquarium” may be found in Mr.
+Gosse’s book bearing that name, at pp. 101, 255, _et seq._; and those who
+wish to carry out the notion thoroughly, cannot do better than buy his
+book, and take their choice of the many different forms of vase, with
+rockwork, fountains, and other pretty devices which he describes.
+
+But the many, even if they have Mr. Gosse’s book, will be rather inclined
+to begin with a small attempt; especially as they are probably half
+sceptical of the possibility of keeping sea-animals inland without
+changing the water.  A few simple directions, therefore, will not come
+amiss here.  They shall be such as anyone can put into practice, who goes
+down to stay in a lodging-house at the most cockney of watering-places.
+
+Buy at any glass-shop a cylindrical glass jar, some six inches in
+diameter and ten high, which will cost you from three to four shillings;
+wash it clean, and fill it with clean salt-water, dipped out of any pool
+among the rocks, only looking first to see that there is no dead fish or
+other evil matter in the said pool, and that no stream from the land runs
+into it.  If you choose to take the trouble to dip up the water over a
+boat’s side, so much the better.
+
+So much for your vase; now to stock it.
+
+Go down at low spring-tide to the nearest ledge of rocks, and with a
+hammer and chisel chip off a few pieces of stone covered with growing
+sea-weed.  Avoid the common and coarser kinds (fuci) which cover the
+surface of the rocks; for they give out under water a slime which will
+foul your tank: but choose the more delicate species which fringe the
+edges of every pool at low-water mark; the pink coralline, the dark
+purple ragged dulse (Rhodymenia), the Carrageen moss (Chondrus), and
+above all, the commonest of all, the delicate green Ulva, which you will
+see growing everywhere in wrinkled fan-shaped sheets, as thin as the
+finest silver-paper.  The smallest bits of stone are sufficient, provided
+the sea-weeds have hold of them; for they have no real roots, but adhere
+by a small disc, deriving no nourishment from the rock, but only from the
+water.  Take care, meanwhile, that there be as little as possible on the
+stone, beside the weed itself.  Especially scrape off any small sponges,
+and see that no worms have made their twining tubes of sand among the
+weed-stems; if they have, drag them out; for they will surely die, and as
+surely spoil all by sulphuretted hydrogen, blackness, and evil smells.
+
+Put your weeds into your tank, and settle them at the bottom; which last,
+some say, should be covered with a layer of pebbles: but let the beginner
+leave it as bare as possible; for the pebbles only tempt cross-grained
+annelids to crawl under them, die, and spoil all by decaying: whereas if
+the bottom of the vase is bare, you can see a sickly or dead inhabitant
+at once, and take him out (which you must do) instantly.  Let your weeds
+stand quietly in the vase a day or two before you put in any live
+animals; and even then, do not put any in if the water does not appear
+perfectly clear: but lift out the weeds, and renew the water ere you
+replace them.
+
+This is Mr. Gosse’s method.  But Mr. Lloyd, in his “Handbook to the
+Crystal Palace Aquarium,” advises that no weed should be put into the
+tank.  “It is better,” he says, “to depend only on those which gradually
+and naturally appear on the rocks of the aquarium by the action of light,
+and which answer every chemical purpose.”  I should advise anyone
+intending to set up an aquarium, however small, to study what Mr. Lloyd
+says on this matter in pp. 17–19, and also in page 30, of his pamphlet;
+and also to go to the Crystal Palace Aquarium, and there see for himself
+the many beautiful species of sea-weeds which have appeared spontaneously
+in the tanks from unsuspected spores floating in the sea-water.  On the
+other hand, Mr. Lloyd lays much stress on the necessity of aërating the
+water, by keeping it in perpetual motion; a process not easy to be
+carried out in small aquaria; at least to that perfection which has been
+attained at the Crystal Palace, where the water is kept in continual
+circulation by steam-power.  For a jar-aquarium, it will be enough to
+drive fresh air through the water every day, by means of a syringe.
+
+Now for the live stock.  In the crannies of every rock you will find
+sea-anemones (Actiniæ); and a dozen of these only will be enough to
+convert your little vase into the most brilliant of living
+flower-gardens.  There they hang upon the under side of the ledges,
+apparently mere rounded lumps of jelly: one is of dark purple dotted with
+green; another of a rich chocolate; another of a delicate olive; another
+sienna-yellow; another all but white.  Take them from their rock; you can
+do it easily by slipping under them your finger-nail, or the edge of a
+pewter spoon.  Take care to tear the sucking base as little as possible
+(though a small rent they will darn for themselves in a few days, easily
+enough), and drop them into a basket of wet sea-weed; when you get home
+turn them into a dish full of water and leave them for the night, and go
+to look at them to-morrow.  What a change!  The dull lumps of jelly have
+taken root and flowered during the night, and your dish is filled from
+side to side with a bouquet of chrysanthemums; each has expanded into a
+hundred-petalled flower, crimson, pink, purple, or orange; touch one, and
+it shrinks together like a sensitive plant, displaying at the root of the
+petals a ring of brilliant turquoise beads.  That is the commonest of all
+the Actiniæ (Mesembryanthemum); you may have him when and where you will:
+but if you will search those rocks somewhat closer, you will find even
+more gorgeous species than him.  See in that pool some dozen large ones,
+in full bloom, and quite six inches across, some of them.  If their
+cousins whom we found just now were like Chrysanthemums, these are like
+quilled Dahlias.  Their arms are stouter and shorter in proportion than
+those of the last species, but their colour is equally brilliant.  One is
+a brilliant blood-red; another a delicate sea-blue striped with pink; but
+most have the disc and the innumerable arms striped and ringed with
+various shades of grey and brown.  Shall we get them?  By all means if we
+can.  Touch one.  Where is he now?  Gone?  Vanished into air, or into
+stone?  Not quite.  You see that knot of sand and broken shell lying on
+the rock, where your Dahlia was one moment ago.  Touch it, and you will
+find it leathery and elastic.  That is all which remains of the live
+Dahlia.  Never mind; get your finger into the crack under him, work him
+gently but firmly out, and take him home, and he will be as happy and as
+gorgeous as ever to-morrow.
+
+Let your Actiniæ stand for a day or two in the dish, and then, picking
+out the liveliest and handsomest, detach them once more from their hold,
+drop them into your vase, right them with a bit of stick, so that the
+sucking base is downwards, and leave them to themselves thenceforth.
+
+These two species (Mesembryanthemum and Crassicornis) are quite beautiful
+enough to give a beginner amusement: but there are two others which are
+not uncommon, and of such exceeding loveliness, that it is worth while to
+take a little trouble to get them.  The one is Dianthus, which I have
+already mentioned; the other Bellis, the sea-daisy, of which there is an
+excellent description and plates in Mr. Gosse’s “Rambles in Devon,” pp.
+24 to 32.
+
+It is common at Ilfracombe, and at Torquay; and indeed everywhere where
+there are cracks and small holes in limestone or slate rock.  In these
+holes it fixes its base, and expands its delicate brown-grey star-like
+flowers on the surface: but it must be chipped out with hammer and
+chisel, at the expense of much dirt and patience; for the moment it is
+touched it contracts deep into the rock, and all that is left of the
+daisy flower, some two or three inches across, is a blue knot of half the
+size of a marble.  But it will expand again, after a day or two of
+captivity, and will repay all the trouble which it has cost.  Troglodytes
+may be found, as I have said already, in hundreds at Hastings, in similar
+situations to that of Bellis; its only token, when the tide is down,
+being a round dimple in the muddy sand which firs the lower cracks of
+rocks.
+
+But you will want more than these anemones, both for your own amusement,
+and for the health of your tank.  Microscopic animals will breed, and
+will also die; and you need for them some such scavenger as our poor
+friend Squinado, to whom you were introduced a few pages back.  Turn,
+then, a few stones which lie piled on each other at extreme low-water
+mark, and five minutes’ search will give you the very animal you want,—a
+little crab, of a dingy russet above, and on the under side like smooth
+porcelain.  His back is quite flat, and so are his large angular fringed
+claws, which, when he folds them up, lie in the same plane with his
+shell, and fit neatly into its edges.  Compact little rogue that he is,
+made especially for sidling in and out of cracks and crannies, he carries
+with him such an apparatus of combs and brushes as Isidor or Floris never
+dreamed of; with which he sweeps out of the sea-water at every moment
+shoals of minute animalcules, and sucks them into his tiny mouth.  Mr.
+Gosse will tell you more of this marvel, in his “Aquarium,” p. 48.
+
+Next, your sea-weeds, if they thrive as they ought to do, will sow their
+minute spores in millions around them; and these, as they vegetate, will
+form a green film on the inside of the glass, spoiling your prospect: you
+may rub it off for yourself, if you will, with a rag fastened to a stick;
+but if you wish at once to save yourself trouble, and to see how all
+emergencies in nature are provided for, you will set three or four live
+shells to do it for you, and to keep your sub-aqueous lawn close mown.
+
+That last word is no figure of speech.  Look among the beds of sea-weed
+for a few of the bright yellow or green sea-snails (Nerita), or Conical
+Tops (Trochus), especially that beautiful pink one spotted with brown
+(Ziziphinus), which you are sure to find about shaded rock-ledges at dead
+low tide, and put them into your aquarium.  For the present, they will
+only nibble the green ulvæ; but when the film of young weed begins to
+form, you will see it mown off every morning as fast as it grows, in
+little semicircular sweeps, just as if a fairy’s scythe had been at work
+during the night.
+
+               [Picture: Plate 8: Littorina Littorea etc.]
+
+And a scythe has been at work; none other than the tongue of the little
+shell-fish; a description of its extraordinary mechanism (too long to
+quote here, but which is well worth reading) may be found in Gosse’s
+“Aquarium.” {201}
+
+A prawn or two, and a few minute star-fish, will make your aquarium
+complete; though you may add to it endlessly, as one glance at the
+salt-water tanks of the Zoological Gardens, and the strange and beautiful
+forms which they contain, will prove to you sufficiently.
+
+You have two more enemies to guard against, dust, and heat.  If the
+surface of the water becomes clogged with dust, the communication between
+it and the life-giving oxygen of the air is cut off; and then your
+animals are liable to die, for the very same reason that fish die in a
+pond which is long frozen over, unless a hole be broken in the ice to
+admit the air.  You must guard against this by occasional stirring of the
+surface, or, as I have already said, by syringing and by keeping on a
+cover.  A piece of muslin tied over will do; but a better defence is a
+plate of glass, raised on wire some half-inch above the edge, so as to
+admit the air.  I am not sure that a sheet of brown paper laid over the
+vase is not the best of all, because that, by its shade, also guards
+against the next evil, which is heat.  Against that you must guard by
+putting a curtain of muslin or oiled paper between the vase and the sun,
+if it be very fierce, or simply (for simple expedients are best) by
+laying a handkerchief over it till the heat is past.  But if you leave
+your vase in a sunny window long enough to let the water get tepid, all
+is over with your pets.  Half an hour’s boiling may frustrate the care of
+weeks.  And yet, on the other hand, light you must have, and you can
+hardly have too much.  Some animals certainly prefer shade, and hide in
+the darkest crannies; and for them, if your aquarium is large enough, you
+must provide shade, by arranging the bits of stone into piles and
+caverns.  But without light, your sea-weeds will neither thrive nor keep
+the water sweet.  With plenty of light you will see, to quote Mr. Gosse
+once more, {203} “thousands of tiny globules forming on every plant, and
+even all over the stones, where the infant vegetation is beginning to
+grow; and these globules presently rise in rapid succession to the
+surface all over the vessel, and this process goes on uninterruptedly as
+long as the rays of the sun are uninterrupted.
+
+“Now these globules consist of _pure oxygen_, given out by the plants
+under the stimulus of light; and to this oxygen the animals in the tank
+owe their life.  The difference between the profusion of oxygen-bubbles
+produced on a sunny day, and the paucity of those seen on a dark cloudy
+day, or in a northern aspect, is very marked.”  Choose, therefore, a
+south or east window, but draw down the blind, or throw a handkerchief
+over all if the heat become fierce.  The water should always feel cold to
+your hand, let the temperature outside be what it may.
+
+Next, you must make up for evaporation by _fresh_ water (a very little
+will suffice), as often as in summer you find the water in your vase sink
+below its original level, and prevent the water from getting too salt.
+For the salts, remember, do not evaporate with the water; and if you left
+the vase in the sun for a few weeks, it would become a mere brine-pan.
+
+But how will you move your treasures up to town?
+
+The simplest plan which I have found successful is an earthen jar.  You
+may buy them with a cover which screws on with two iron clasps.  If you
+do not find such, a piece of oilskin tied over the mouth is enough.  But
+do not fill the jar full of water; leave about a quarter of the contents
+in empty air, which the water may absorb, and so keep itself fresh.  And
+any pieces of stone, or oysters, which you send up, hang by a string from
+the mouth, that they may not hurt tender animals by rolling about the
+bottom.  With these simple precautions, anything which you are likely to
+find will well endure forty-eight hours of travel.
+
+What if the water fails, after all?
+
+Then Mr. Gosse’s artificial sea-water will form a perfect substitute.
+You may buy the requisite salts (for there are more salts than “salt” in
+sea-water) from any chemist to whom Mr. Gosse has entrusted his
+discovery, and, according to his directions, make sea-water for yourself.
+
+One more hint before we part.  If, after all, you are not going down to
+the sea-side this year, and have no opportunities of testing “the wonders
+of the shore,” you may still study Natural History in your own
+drawing-room, by looking a little into “the wonders of the pond.”
+
+I am not jesting; a fresh-water aquarium, though by no means as beautiful
+as a salt-water one, is even more easily established.  A glass jar,
+floored with two or three inches of pond-mud (which should be covered
+with fine gravel to prevent the mud washing up); a specimen of each of
+two water-plants which you may buy now at any good shop in Covent Garden,
+Vallisneria spiralis (which is said to give to the Canvas-backed duck of
+America its peculiar richness of flavour), and Anacharis alsinastrum,
+that magical weed which, lately introduced from Canada among timber, has
+multiplied, self-sown, to so prodigious an extent, that it bid fair, a
+few years since, to choke the navigation not only of our canals and
+fen-rivers, but of the Thames itself: {206} or, in default of these, some
+of the more delicate pond-weeds; such as Callitriche, Potamogeton
+pusillum, and, best of all, perhaps, the beautiful Water-Milfoil
+(Myriophyllium), whose comb-like leaves are the haunts of numberless rare
+and curious animalcules:—these (in themselves, from the transparency of
+their circulation, interesting microscopic objects) for oxygen-breeding
+vegetables; and for animals, the pickings of any pond; a minnow or two,
+an eft; a few of the delicate pond-snails (unless they devour your plants
+too rapidly): water-beetles, of activity inconceivable, and that wondrous
+bug the Notonecta, who lies on his back all day, rowing about his
+boat-shaped body, with one long pair of oars, in search of animalcules,
+and the moment the lights are out, turns head over heels, rights himself,
+and opening a pair of handsome wings, starts to fly about the dark room
+in company with his friend the water-beetle, and (I suspect) catch flies;
+and then slips back demurely into the water with the first streak of
+dawn.  But perhaps the most interesting of all the tribes of the
+Naiads,—(in default, of course, of those semi-human nymphs with which our
+Teutonic forefathers, like the Greeks, peopled each “sacred
+fountain,”)—are the little “water-crickets,” which may be found running
+under the pebbles, or burrowing in little galleries in the banks: and
+those “caddises,” which crawl on the bottom in the stiller waters,
+enclosed, all save the head and legs, in a tube of sand or pebbles,
+shells or sticks, green or dead weeds, often arranged with quaint
+symmetry, or of very graceful shape.  Their aspect in this state may be
+somewhat uninviting, but they compensate for their youthful ugliness by
+the strangeness of their transformations, and often by the delicate
+beauty of the perfect insects, as the “caddises,” rising to the surface,
+become flying Phryganeæ (caperers and sand-flies), generally of various
+shades of fawn-colour; and the water-crickets (though an unscientific eye
+may be able to discern but little difference in them in the “larva,” or
+imperfect state) change into flies of the most various shapes;—one,
+perhaps, into the great sluggish olive “Stone-fly” (Perla bicaudata);
+another into the delicate lemon-coloured “Yellow Sally” (Chrysoperla
+viridis); another into the dark chocolate “Alder” (Sialis lutaria): and
+the majority into duns and drakes (Ephemeræ); whose grace of form, and
+delicacy of colour, give them a right to rank among the most exquisite of
+God’s creations, from the tiny “Spinners” (Baëtis or Chloron) of
+incandescent glass, with gorgeous rainbow-coloured eyes, to the great
+Green Drake (Ephemera vulgata), known to all fishermen as the prince of
+trout-flies.  These animals, their habits, their miraculous
+transformations, might give many an hour’s quiet amusement to an invalid,
+laid on a sofa, or imprisoned in a sick-room, and debarred from reading,
+unless by some such means, any page of that great green book outside,
+whose pen is the finger of God, whose covers are the fire kingdoms and
+the star kingdoms, and its leaves the heather-bells, and the polypes of
+the sea, and the gnats above the summer stream.
+
+I said just now, that happy was the sportsman who was also a naturalist.
+And, having once mentioned these curious water-flies, I cannot help going
+a little farther, and saying, that lucky is the fisherman who is also a
+naturalist.  A fair scientific knowledge of the flies which he imitates,
+and of their habits, would often ensure him sport, while other men are
+going home with empty creels.  One would have fancied this a self-evident
+fact; yet I have never found any sound knowledge of the natural
+water-flies which haunt a given stream, except among cunning old
+fishermen of the lower class, who get their living by the gentle art, and
+bring to indoors baskets of trout killed on flies, which look as if they
+had been tied with a pair of tongs, so rough and ungainly are they; but
+which, nevertheless, kill, simply because they are (in _colour_, which is
+all that fish really care for) exact likenesses of some obscure local
+species, which happen to be on the water at the time.  Among
+gentlemen-fishermen, on the other hand, so deep is the ignorance of the
+natural fly, that I have known good sportsmen still under the delusion
+that the great green May-fly comes out of a caddis-bait; the gentlemen
+having never seen, much less fished with, that most deadly bait the
+“Water-cricket,” or free creeping larva of the May-fly, which may be
+found in May under the river-banks.  The consequence of this ignorance is
+that they depend for good patterns of flies on mere chance and
+experiment; and that the shop patterns, originally excellent, deteriorate
+continually, till little or no likeness to their living prototype
+remains, being tied by town girls, who have no more understanding of what
+the feathers and mohair in their hands represent than they have of what
+the National Debt represents.  Hence follows many a failure at the
+stream-side; because the “Caperer,” or “Dun,” or “Yellow Sally,” which is
+produced from the fly-book, though, possibly, like the brood which came
+out three years since on some stream a hundred miles away, is quite
+unlike the brood which is out to-day on one’s own river.  For not only do
+most of these flies vary in colour in different soils and climates, but
+many of them change their hue during life; the Ephemeræ, especially, have
+a habit of throwing off the whole of their skins (even, marvellously
+enough, to the skin of the eyes and wings, and the delicate “whisks” at
+their tail), and appearing in an utterly new garb after ten minutes’
+rest, to the discomfiture of the astonished angler.
+
+The natural history of these flies, I understand from Mr. Stainton (one
+of our most distinguished entomologists), has not yet been worked out, at
+least for England.  The only attempt, I believe, in that direction is one
+made by a charming book, “The Fly-fisher’s Entomology,” which should be
+in every good angler’s library; but why should not a few fishermen
+combine to work out the subject for themselves, and study for the
+interests both of science and their own sport, “The Wonders of the Bank?”
+The work, petty as it may seem, is much too great for one man, so
+prodigal is Nature of her forms, in the stream as in the ocean; but what
+if a correspondence were opened between a few fishermen—of whom one
+should live, say, by the Hampshire or Berkshire chalk streams; another on
+the slates and granites of Devon; another on the limestones of Yorkshire
+or Derbyshire; another among the yet earlier slates of Snowdonia, or some
+mountain part of Wales; and more than one among the hills of the Border
+and the lakes of the Highlands?  Each would find (I suspect), on
+comparing his insects with those of the others, that he was exploring a
+little peculiar world of his own, and that with the exception of a
+certain number of typical forms, the flies of his county were unknown a
+hundred miles away, or, at least, appeared there under great differences
+of size and colour; and each, if he would take the trouble to collect the
+caddises and water-crickets, and breed them into the perfect fly in an
+aquarium, would see marvels in their transformations, their instincts,
+their anatomy, quite as great (though not, perhaps, as showy and
+startling) as I have been trying to point out on the sea-shore.
+Moreover, each and every one of the party, I will warrant, will find his
+fellow-correspondents (perhaps previously unknown to him) men worth
+knowing; not, it may be, of the meditative and half-saintly type of dear
+old Izaak Walton (who, after all, was no fly-fisher, but a sedentary
+“popjoy” guilty of float and worm), but rather, like his fly-fishing
+disciple Cotton, good fellows and men of the world, and, perhaps,
+something better over and above.
+
+The suggestion has been made.  Will it ever be taken up, and a “Naiad
+Club” formed, for the combination of sport and science?
+
+And, now, how can this desultory little treatise end more usefully than
+in recommending a few books on Natural History, fit for the use of young
+people; and fit to serve as introductions to such deeper and larger works
+as Yarrell’s “Birds and Fishes,” Bell’s “Quadrupeds” and “Crustacea,”
+Forbes and Hanley’s “Mollusca,” Owen’s “Fossil Mammals and Birds,” and a
+host of other admirable works?  Not that this list will contain all the
+best; but simply the best of which the writer knows; let, therefore, none
+feel aggrieved, if, as it may chance, opening these pages, they find
+their books omitted.
+
+First and foremost, certainly, come Mr. Gosse’s books.  There is a
+playful and genial spirit in them, a brilliant power of word-painting
+combined with deep and earnest religious feeling, which makes them as
+morally valuable as they are intellectually interesting.  Since White’s
+“History of Selborne,” few or no writers on Natural History, save Mr.
+Gosse, Mr. G. H. Lewes, and poor Mr. E. Forbes, have had the power of
+bringing out the human side of science, and giving to seemingly dry
+disquisitions and animals of the lowest type, by little touches of pathos
+and humour, that living and personal interest, to bestow which is
+generally the special function of the poet: not that Waterton and Jesse
+are not excellent in this respect, and authors who should be in every
+boy’s library: but they are rather anecdotists than systematic or
+scientific inquirers; while Mr. Gosse, in his “Naturalist on the Shores
+of Devon,” his “Tour in Jamaica,” his “Tenby,” and his “Canadian
+Naturalist,” has done for those three places what White did for Selborne,
+with all the improved appliances of a science which has widened and
+deepened tenfold since White’s time.  Mr. Gosse’s “Manual of the Marine
+Zoology of the British Isles” is, for classification, by far the
+completest handbook extant.  He has contrived in it to compress more
+sound knowledge of vast classes of the animal kingdom than I ever saw
+before in so small a space. {215}
+
+Miss Anne Pratt’s “Things of the Sea-coast” is excellent; and still
+better is Professor Harvey’s “Sea-side Book,” of which it is impossible
+to speak too highly; and most pleasant it is to see a man of genius and
+learning thus gathering the bloom of his varied knowledge, to put it into
+a form equally suited to a child and a _savant_.  Seldom, perhaps, has
+there been a little book in which so vast a quantity of facts have been
+told so gracefully, simply, without a taint of pedantry or
+cumbrousness—an excellence which is the sure and only mark of a perfect
+mastery of the subject.  Mr. G. H. Lewes’s “Sea-shore Studies” are also
+very valuable; hardly perhaps a book for beginners, but from his
+admirable power of description, whether of animals or of scenes, is
+interesting for all classes of readers.
+
+Two little “Popular” Histories—one of British Zoophytes, the other of
+British Sea-weeds, by Dr. Landsborough (since dead of cholera, at
+Saltcoats, the scene of his energetic and pious ministry)—are very
+excellent; and are furnished, too, with well-drawn and coloured plates,
+for the comfort of those to whom a scientific nomenclature (as liable as
+any other human thing to be faulty and obscure) conveys but a vague
+conception of the objects.  These may serve well for the beginner, as
+introductions to Professor Harvey’s large work on British Algæ, and to
+the new edition of Professor Johnston’s invaluable “British Zoophytes,”
+Miss Gifford’s “Marine Botanist,” third edition, and Dr. Cocks’s
+“Sea-weed Collector’s Guide,” have also been recommended by a high
+authority.
+
+For general Zoology the best books for beginners are, perhaps, as a
+general introduction, the Rev. J. A. L. Wood’s “Popular Zoology,” full of
+excellent plates; and for systematic Zoology, Mr. Gosse’s four little
+books, on Mammals, Birds, Reptiles, and Fishes, published with many
+plates, by the Christian Knowledge Society, at a marvellously cheap rate.
+For miscroscopic animalcules, Miss Agnes Catlow’s “Drops of Water” will
+teach the young more than they will ever remember, and serve as a good
+introduction to those teeming abysses of the unseen world, which must be
+afterwards traversed under the guidance of Hassall and Ehrenberg.
+
+For Ornithology, there is no book, after all, like dear old Bewick,
+_passé_ though he may be in a scientific point of view.  There is a good
+little British ornithology, too, published in Sir W. Jardine’s
+“Naturalist’s Library,” and another by Mr. Gosse.  And Mr. Knox’s
+“Ornithological Rambles in Sussex,” with Mr. St. John’s “Highland
+Sports,” and “Tour in Sutherlandshire,” are the monographs of
+naturalists, gentlemen, and sportsmen, which remind one at every page
+(and what higher praise can one give?) of White’s “History of Selborne.”
+These last, with Mr. Gosse’s “Canadian Naturalist,” and his little book
+“The Ocean,” not forgetting Darwin’s delightful “Voyage of the Beagle and
+Adventure,” ought to be in the hands of every lad who is likely to travel
+to our colonies.
+
+For general Geology, Professor Ansted’s Introduction is excellent; while,
+as a specimen of the way in which a single district may be thoroughly
+worked out, and the universal method of induction learnt from a narrow
+field of objects, what book can, or perhaps ever will, compare with Mr.
+Hugh Miller’s “Old Red Sandstone”?
+
+For this last reason, I especially recommend to the young the Rev. C. A.
+Johns’s “Week at the Lizard,” as teaching a young person how much there
+is to be seen and known within a few square miles of these British Isles.
+But, indeed, all Mr. Johns’s books are good (as they are bound to be,
+considering his most accurate and varied knowledge), especially his
+“Flowers of the Field,” the best cheap introduction to systematic botany
+which has yet appeared.  Trained, and all but self-trained, like Mr. Hugh
+Miller, in a remote and narrow field of observation, Mr. Johns has
+developed himself into one of our most acute and persevering botanists,
+and has added many a new treasure to the Flora of these isles; and one
+person, at least, owes him a deep debt of gratitude for first lessons in
+scientific accuracy and patience,—lessons taught, not dully and dryly at
+the book and desk, but livingly and genially, in adventurous rambles over
+the bleak cliffs and ferny woods of the wild Atlantic shore,—
+
+    “Where the old fable of the guarded mount
+    Looks toward Namancos and Bayona’s hold.”
+
+Mr. Henfrey’s “Rudiments of Botany” might accompany Mr. Johns’s books.
+Mr. Babington’s “Manual of British Botany” is also most compact and
+highly finished, and seems the best work which I know of from which a
+student somewhat advanced in English botany can verify species; while for
+ferns, Moore’s “Handbook” is probably the best for beginners.
+
+For Entomology, which, after all, is the study most fit for boys (as
+Botany is for girls) who have no opportunity for visiting the sea-shore,
+Catlow’s “Popular British Entomology,” having coloured plates (a delight
+to young people), and saying something of all the orders, is, probably,
+still a good work for beginners.
+
+Mr. Stainton’s “Entomologist’s Annual for 1855” contains valuable hints
+of that gentleman’s on taking and arranging moths and butterflies; as
+well as of Mr. Wollaston’s on performing the same kind office for that
+far more numerous, and not less beautiful class, the beetles.  There is
+also an admirable “Manual of British Butterflies and Moths,” by Mr.
+Stainton, in course of publication; but, perhaps, the most interesting of
+all entomological books which I have seen (and for introducing me to
+which I must express my hearty thanks to Mr. Stainton), is “Practical
+Hints respecting Moths and Butterflies, forming a Calendar of
+Entomological Operations,” {220} by Richard Shield, a simple London
+working-man.
+
+I would gladly devote more space than I can here spare to a review of
+this little book, so perfectly does it corroborate every word which I
+have said already as to the moral and intellectual value of such studies.
+Richard Shield, making himself a first-rate “lepidopterist,” while
+working with his hands for a pound a week, is the antitype of Mr. Peach,
+the coast-guardsman, among his Cornish tide-rocks.  But more than this,
+there is about Shield’s book a tone as of Izaak Walton himself, which is
+very delightful; tender, poetical, and religious, yet full of quiet
+quaintness and humour; showing in every page how the love for Natural
+History is in him only one expression of a love for all things beautiful,
+and pure, and right.  If any readers of these pages fancy that I
+over-praise the book, let them buy it, and judge for themselves.  They
+will thus help the good man toward pursuing his studies with larger and
+better appliances, and will be (as I expect) surprised to find how much
+there is to be seen and done, even by a working-man, within a day’s walk
+of smoky Babylon itself; and how easily a man might, if he would, wash
+his soul clean for a while from all the turmoil and intrigue, the vanity
+and vexation of spirit of that “too-populous wilderness,” by going out to
+be alone a while with God in heaven, and with that earth which He has
+given to the children of men, not merely for the material wants of their
+bodies, but as a witness and a sacrament that in Him they live and move,
+and have their being, “not by bread alone, but by _every_ word that
+proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Thus I wrote some twenty years ago, when the study of Natural History was
+confined mainly to several scientific men, or mere collectors of shells,
+insects, and dried plants.
+
+Since then, I am glad to say, it has become a popular and common pursuit,
+owing, I doubt not, to the impulse given to it by the many authors whose
+works I then recommended.  I recommend them still; though a swarm of
+other manuals and popular works have appeared since, excellent in their
+way, and almost beyond counting.  But all honour to those, and above all
+to Mr. Gosse and Mr. Johns, who first opened people’s eyes to the wonders
+around them all day long.  Now, we have, in addition to amusing books on
+special subjects, serials on Natural History more or less profound, and
+suited to every kind of student and every grade of knowledge.  I mention
+the names of none.  For first, they happily need no advertisement from
+me; and next, I fear to be unjust to any one of them by inadvertently
+omitting its name.  Let me add, that in the advertising columns of those
+serials, will be found notices of all the new manuals, and of all
+apparatus, and other matters, needed by amateur naturalists, and of many
+who are more than amateurs.  Microscopy, meanwhile, and the whole study
+of “The Wonders of the Little,” have made vast strides in the last twenty
+years; and I was equally surprised and pleased, to find, three years ago,
+in each of two towns of a few thousand inhabitants, perhaps a dozen good
+microscopes, all but hidden away from the public, worked by men who knew
+how to handle them, and who knew what they were looking at; but who
+modestly refrained from telling anybody what they were doing so well.
+And it was this very discovery of unsuspected microscopists which made me
+more desirous than ever to see—as I see now in many places—scientific
+societies, by means of which the few, who otherwise would work apart, may
+communicate their knowledge to each other, and to the many.  These
+“Microscopic,” “Naturalist,” “Geological,” or other societies, and the
+“Field Clubs” for excursions into the country, which are usually
+connected with them, form a most pleasant and hopeful new feature in
+English Society; bringing together, as they do, almost all ranks, all
+shades of opinion; and it has given me deep pleasure to see, in the case
+at least of the Country Clubs with which I am acquainted, the clergy of
+the Church of England taking an active, and often a leading, interest in
+their practical work.  The town clergy are, for the most part, too
+utterly overworked to follow the example of their country brethren.  But
+I have reason to know that they regard such societies, and Natural
+History in general, with no unfriendly eyes; and that there is less fear
+than ever that the clergy of the Church of England should have to
+relinquish their ancient boast—that since the formation of the Royal
+Society in the seventeenth century, they have done more for sound
+physical science than any other priesthood or ministry in the world.  Let
+me advise anyone who may do me the honour of reading these pages, to
+discover whether such a Club or Society exists in his neighbourhood, and
+to join it forthwith, certain that—if his experience be at all like
+mine—he will gain most pleasant information and most pleasant
+acquaintances, and pass most pleasant days and evenings, among people
+whom he will be glad to know, and whom he never would have known save for
+the new—and now, I hope, rapidly spreading—freemasonry of Natural
+History.
+
+Meanwhile, I hope—though I dare not say I trust—to see the day when the
+boys of each of our large schools shall join—like those of Marlborough
+and Clifton—the same freemasonry; and have their own Naturalists’ Clubs;
+nay more; when our public schools and universities shall awake to the
+real needs of the age, and—even to the curtailing of the time usually
+spent in not learning Latin and Greek—teach boys the rudiments at least
+of botany, zoology, geology, and so forth; and when the public opinion,
+at least of the refined and educated, shall consider it as ludicrous—to
+use no stronger word—to be ignorant of the commonest facts and laws of
+this living planet, as to be ignorant of the rudiments of two dead
+languages.  All honour to the said two languages.  Ignorance of them is a
+serious weakness; for it implies ignorance of many things else; and
+indeed, without some knowledge of them, the nomenclature of the physical
+sciences cannot be mastered.  But I have got to discover that a boy’s
+time is more usefully spent, and his intellect more methodically trained,
+by getting up Ovid’s Fasti with an ulterior hope of being able to write a
+few Latin verses, than in getting up Professor Rolleston’s “Forms of
+Animal Life,” or any other of the excellent Scientific Manuals for
+beginners, which are now, as I said, happily so numerous.
+
+May that day soon come; and an old dream of mine, and of my scientific
+friends, be fulfilled at last.
+
+And so I end this little book, hoping, even praying, that it may
+encourage a few more labourers to go forth into a vineyard, which those
+who have toiled in it know to be full of ever-fresh health, and wonder
+and simple joy, and the presence and the glory of Him whose name is LOVE.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX.
+
+
+PLATE I.
+ZOOPHYTA.  POLYZOA.
+
+
+THE forms of animal life which are now united in an independent class,
+under the name Polyzoa, so nearly resemble the Hydroid Zoophytes in
+general form and appearance that a casual observer may suppose them to be
+nearly identical.  In all but the more recent works, they are treated as
+distinct indeed, but still included under the general term “ZOOPHYTES.”
+The animals of both groups are minute, polypiform creatures, mostly
+living in transparent cells, springing from the sides of a stem which
+unites a number of individuals in one common life, and grows in a
+shrub-like form upon any submarine body, such as a shell, a rock, a weed,
+or even another polypidom to which it is parasitically attached.  Each
+polype, in both classes, protrudes from and retreats within its cell by
+an independent action, and when protruded puts forth a circle of
+tentacles whose motion round the mouth is the means of securing
+nourishment.  There are, however, peculiarities in the structure of the
+Polyzoa which seem to remove them from Zoophytology to a place in the
+system of nature more nearly connected with Molluscan types.  Some of
+them come so near to the compound ascidians that they have been termed,
+as an order, “Zoophyta ascidioida.”
+
+The simplest form of polype is that of a fleshy bag open at one end,
+surmounted by a circle of contractile threads or fingers called
+tentacles.  The plate shows, on a very minute scale, at figs. 1, 3, and
+6, several of these little polypiform bodies protruding from their cells.
+But the Hydra or Fresh-water Polype has no cell, and is quite unconnected
+with any root thread, or with other individuals of the same species.  It
+is perfectly free, and so simple in its structure, that when the sac
+which forms its body is turned inside out it will continue to perform the
+functions of life as before.  The greater part, however, of these
+Hydraform Polypes, although equally simple as individuals, are connected
+in a compound life by means of their variously formed _polypidom_, as the
+branched system of cells is termed.  The Hydroid Zoophytes are
+represented in the first plate by the following examples.
+
+
+
+HYDROIDA.
+
+
+SERTULARIA ROSEA.  _Pl._ I. _fig._ 6.
+
+
+A species which has the cells in pairs on opposite sides of the central
+tube, with the openings turned outwards.  In the more enlarged figure is
+seen a septum across the inner part of each cell which forms the base
+upon which the polype rests.  Fig. 6 _b_ indicates the natural size of
+the piece of branch represented; but it must be remembered that this is
+only a small portion of the bushy shrub.
+
+
+Campanularia syringa.  _Pl._ I. _fig._ 8.
+
+
+This Zoophyte twines itself parasitically upon a species of Sertularia.
+The cells in this species are thrown out at irregular intervals upon
+flexible stems which are wrinkled in rings.  They consist of lengthened,
+cylindrical, transparent vases.
+
+
+
+CAMPANULARIA VOLUBILIS.  _Pl._ I. _fig._ 9.
+
+
+A still more beautiful species, with lengthened foot-stalks ringed at
+each end.  The polype is remarkable for the protrusion and contractile
+power of its lips.  It has about twenty knobbed tentacula.
+
+
+
+POLYZOA.
+
+
+Among Polyzoa the animal’s body is coated with a membraneous covering,
+like that of the Tunicated Mollusca, but which is a continuation of the
+edge of the cell, which doubles back upon the body in such a manner that
+when the animal protrudes from its cell it pushes out the flexible
+membrane just as one would turn inside out the finger of a glove.  This
+oneness of cell and polype is a distinctive character of the group.
+Another is the higher organization of the internal parts.  The mouth,
+surrounded by tentacles, leads by gullet and gizzard through a channel
+into a digesting stomach, from which the rejectable matter passes upwards
+through an intestinal canal till it is discharged near the mouth.  The
+tentacles also differ much from those of true Polypes.  Instead of being
+fleshy and contractile, they are rather stiff, resembling spun glass, set
+on the sides with vibrating cilia, which by their motion up one side and
+down the other of each tentacle, produce a current which impels their
+living food into the mouth.  When these tentacles are withdrawn, they are
+gathered up in a bundle, like the stays of an umbrella.  Our Plate I.
+contains the following examples of Polyzoa.
+
+
+VALKERIA CUSCUTA.  _Pl._ I. _fig._ 3.
+
+
+From a group in one of Mr. Lloyd’s vases.  Fig. 3 A is the natural size
+of the central group of cells, in a specimen coiled round a thread-like
+weed.  Underneath this is the same portion enlarged.  When magnified to
+this apparent size, the cells could be seen in different states, some
+closed, and others with their bodies protruded.  When magnified to 3 D,
+we could pleasantly watch the gradual eversion of the membrane, then the
+points of the tentacles slowly appearing, and then, when fully protruded,
+suddenly expanding into a bell-shaped circle.  This was their usual
+appearance, but sometimes they could be noticed bending inwards, as in
+fig. 3 C, as if to imprison some living atom of importance.  Fig. B
+represents two tentacles, showing the direction in which the cilia
+vibrate.
+
+
+CRISIA DENTICULATA.  _Pl._ I. _fig._ 4.
+
+
+I have only drawn the cells from a prepared specimen.  The polypes are
+like those described above.
+
+
+GEMELLARIA LORICATA.  _Pl._ I. _fig._ 5.
+
+
+Here the cells are placed in pairs, back to back.  5 A is a very small
+portion on the natural scale.
+
+
+CELLULARIA CILIATA.  _Pl._ I. _fig._ 7
+
+
+The cells are alternate on the stem, and are curiously armed with long
+whip-like cilia or spines.  On the back of some of the cells is a very
+strange appendage, the use of which is not with certainty ascertained.
+It is a minute body, slightly resembling a vulture’s head, with a movable
+lower beak.  The whole head keeps up a nodding motion, and the movable
+beak occasionally opens widely, and then suddenly snaps to with a jerk.
+It has been seen to hold an animalcule between its jaws till the latter
+has died, but it has no power to communicate the prey to the polype in
+its cell or to swallow and digest it on its own account.  It is certainly
+not an independent parasite, as has been supposed, and yet its purpose in
+the animal economy is a mystery.  Mr. Gosse conjectures that its use may
+be, by holding animalcules till they die and decay, to attract by their
+putrescence crowds of other animalcules, which may thus be drawn within
+the influence of the polype’s ciliated tentacles.  Fig. 7 B shows the
+form of one of these “birds’ heads,” and fig. 7 C, its position on the
+cell.
+
+
+FLUSTRA LINEATA.  _Pl._ I. _fig._ 1.
+
+
+In Flustræ, the cells are placed side by side on an expanded membrane.
+Fig. 1 represents the general appearance of a species which at least
+resembles F. lineata as figured in Johnston’s work.  It is spread upon a
+Fucus.  Fig. A is an enlarged view of the cells.
+
+
+FLUSTRA FOLIACEA.  _Pl._ I. _fig._ 2.
+
+
+We figure a frond or two of the common species, which has cells on both
+sides.  It is rarely that the polypes can be seen in a state of
+expansion.
+
+
+SERIALARIA LENDIGERA.  _Pl._ I. _fig._ 10.
+NOTAMIA BURSARIA.  _Pl._ I. _fig._ 11.
+
+
+The “tobacco-pipe”“ appendages, fig. 11 B, are of unknown use: they are
+probably analogous to the birds’ heads in the Cellularæ.
+
+
+
+PLATE V.
+CORALS AND SEA ANEMONES.
+
+
+CARYOPHYLLÆA SMITHII.  _Pl._ V. _fig._ 2.  _Pl._ VI. _fig._ 3.
+
+
+THE connection between Brainstones, Mushroom Corals, and other Madrepores
+abounding on Polynesian reefs, and the “Sea Anemones,” which have lately
+become so familiar to us all, can be seen by comparing our comparatively
+insignificant C. Smithii with our commonest species of Actinia and
+Sagartia.  The former is a beautiful object when the fleshy part and
+tentacles are wholly or partially expanded.  Like Actinia, it has a
+membranous covering, a simple sac-like stomach, a central mouth, a disk
+surrounded by contractile and adhesive tentacles.  Unlike Actinia, it is
+fixed to submarine bodies, to which it is glued in very early life, and
+cannot change its place.  Unlike Actinia, its body is supported by a
+stony skeleton of calcareous plates arranged edgewise so as to radiate
+from the centre.  But as we find some Molluscs furnished with a shell,
+and others even of the same character and habits without one, so we find
+that in spite of this seemingly important difference, the animals are
+very similar in their nature.  Since the introduction of glass tanks we
+have opportunities of seeing anemones crawling up the sides, so as to
+exhibit their entire basal disk, and then we may observe lightly coloured
+lines of a less transparent substance than the interstices, radiating
+from the margin to the centre, some short, others reaching the entire
+distance, and arranged in exactly the same manner as the plates of
+Caryophyllæa.  These are doubtless flexible walls of compartments
+dividing the fleshy parts of the softer animals, and corresponding with
+the septa of the coral.  Fig. 2 _a_ represents a section of the latter,
+to be compared with the basal disk of Sagartia.
+
+
+SAGARTIA ANGUICOMA.  _Pl._ V. _fig._ 3, _a_, _b_.
+
+
+This genus has been separated from Actinia on account of its habit of
+throwing out threads when irritated.  Although my specimens often assumed
+the form represented in fig. 3, Mr. Lloyd informs me that it must have
+arisen from unhealthiness of condition, its usual habit being to contract
+into a more flattened form.  When fully expanded, its transparent and
+lengthened tentacles present a beautiful appearance.  Fig. 3 _a_, showing
+a basal disk, is given for the purpose already described.
+
+
+BALANOPHYLLÆA REGIA.  _Pl._ V. _fig._ 1.
+
+
+Another species of British madrepore, found by Mr. Gosse at Ilfracombe,
+and by Mr. Kingsley at Lundy Island.  It is smaller than O. Smithii, of a
+very bright colour, and always covers the upper part of its bony
+skeleton, in which the plates are differently arranged from those of the
+smaller species.  Fig. 1 shows the tentacles expanded in an unusual
+degree; 1 _a_, animal contracted; 1 _b_, the coral; 1 _c_, a tentacle
+enlarged.
+
+
+
+PLATE VI.
+CORALS AND SEA ANEMONES.
+
+
+ACTINIA MESEMBRYANTHEMUM.  _Pl._ VI. _fig._ 1 _a_.
+
+
+THIS common species is more frequently met with than many others, because
+it prefers shallow water, and often lives high up among rocks which are
+only covered by the sea at very high tide; so that the creature can, if
+it will, spend but a short portion of its time immersed.  When uncovered
+by the tide, it gathers up its leathery tunic, and presents the
+appearance of fig. 1 _a_.  When under water it may often be seen
+expanding its flower-like disk and moving its feelers in search of food.
+These feelers have a certain power of adhesion, and any not too vigorous
+animals which they touch are easily drawn towards the centre and
+swallowed.  Around the margin of the tunic are seen peeping out between
+the tentacles certain bright blue globules looking very like eyes, but
+whose purpose is not exactly ascertained.  Fig. 1 represents the disk
+only partially expanded.
+
+
+BUNODES CRASSICORNIS.  _Pl._ VI. _fig._ 2.
+
+
+This genus of Actinioid zoophytes is distinguished from Actinia proper by
+the tubercles or warts which stud the outer covering of the animal.  In
+B. gemmacea these warts are arranged symmetrically, so as to give a
+peculiarly jewelled appearance to the body.  Being of a large size, the
+tentacles of B. crassicornis exhibit in great perfection the adhesive
+powers produced by the nettling threads which proceed from them.
+
+
+CARYOPHYLLÆA SMITHII.  _Pl._ VI. _fig._ 3.
+
+
+This figure is to show a whiter variety, with the flesh and tentacles
+fully expanded.
+
+
+
+PLATE VIII.
+MOLLUSCA.
+
+
+NASSA RETICULATA.  _Pl._ VIII. fig. 2, _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_, _e_, _f_
+
+
+A VERY active Mollusc, given here chiefly on account of the opportunity
+afforded by the birth of young fry in Mr. Lloyd’s tanks.  The _Nassa_
+feeds on small animalcules, for which, in aquaria, it may be seen routing
+among the sand and stones, sometimes burying itself among them so as only
+to show its caudal tube moving along between them.  A pair of Nassæ in
+Mr. Lloyd’s collection, deposited, on the 5th of April, about fifty
+capsules or bags of eggs upon the stems of weeds (fig. 2 _b_); each
+capsule contained about a hundred eggs.  The capsules opened on the 16th
+of May, permitting the escape of rotiferous fry (fig. 2, _c_, _d_, _e_),
+not in the slightest degree resembling the parent, but presenting minute
+nautilus-shaped transparent shells.  These shells rather hang on than
+cover the bodies, which have a pair of lobes, around which vibrate minute
+cilia in such a manner as to give them an appearance of rotatory motion.
+Under a lens they may be seen moving about very actively in various
+positions, but always with the look of being moved by rapidly turning
+wheels.  We should have been glad to witness the next step towards
+assuming their ultimate form, but were disappointed, as the embryos died.
+Fig. 2 _f_ is the tongue of a Nassa, from a photograph by Dr. Kingsley.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+{37}  _Sertularia operculata_ and _Gemellaria lociculata_; or any of the
+small _Sertulariæ_, compared with _Crisiæ_ and _Cellulariæ_, are very
+good examples.  For a fuller description of these, see Appendix
+explaining Plate I.
+
+{67}  If any inland reader wishes to see the action of this foot, in the
+bivalve Molluscs, let him look at the Common Pond-Mussel (Anodon
+Cygneus), which he will find in most stagnant waters, and see how he
+burrows with it in the mud, and how, when the water is drawn off, he
+walks solemnly into deeper water, leaving a furrow behind him.
+
+{70}  These shells are so common that I have not cared to figure them.
+
+{72}  Plate IX. Fig. 3, represents both parasites on the dead Turritella.
+
+{74}  A few words on him, and on sea-anemones in general, may be found in
+Appendix II.  But full details, accompanied with beautiful plates, may be
+found in Mr. Gosse’s work on British sea-anemones and madrepores, which
+ought to be in every seaside library.
+
+{90}  Handbook to the Marine Aquarium of the Crystal Palace.
+
+{111}  An admirable paper on this extraordinary family may be found in
+the Zoological Society’s Proceedings for July 1858, by Messrs. S. P.
+Woodward and the late lamented Lucas Barrett.  See also Quatrefages, I.
+82, or Synapta Duvernæi.
+
+{113}  Thalassema Neptuni (Forbes’ British Star-Fishes, p. 259),
+
+{116}  The Londoner may see specimens of them at the Zoological Gardens
+and at the Crystal Palace; as also of the rare and beautiful Sabella,
+figured in the same plate; and of the Balanophyllia, or a closely-allied
+species, from the Mediterranean, mentioned in p. 109.
+
+{118}  A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, p. 110.
+
+{121}  Balanophyllia regia, Plate V. fig. 1.
+
+{126a}  Amphidotus cordatus.
+
+{126b}  Echinus miliaris, Plate VII.
+
+{127}  See Professor Sedgwick’s last edition of the “Discourses on the
+Studies of Cambridge.”
+
+{129}  Fissurella græca, Plate X. fig. 5.
+
+{130a}  Doris tuberculata and bilineata.
+
+{130b}  Eolis papi losa.  A Doris and an Eolis, though not of these
+species, are figured in Plate X.
+
+{136}  Plate III.
+
+{138}  Certain Parisian zoologists have done me the honour to hint that
+this description was a play of fancy.  I can only answer, that I saw it
+with my own eyes in my own aquarium.  I am not, I hope, in the habit of
+drawing on my fancy in the presence of infinitely more marvellous Nature.
+Truth is quite strange enough to be interesting without lies.
+
+{139a}  Saxicava rugosa, Plate XI. fig. 2.
+
+{139b}  Plate VIII. represents the common Nassa, with the still more
+common Littorina littorea, their teeth-studded palates, and the free
+swimming young of the Nassa.  (_Vide_ Appendix.)
+
+{140a}  Cypræa Europæa.
+
+{140b}  Botrylli.
+
+{140c}
+
+                             _Molluscs_.
+Doris tuberculata.                  Sigaretus.
+
+— bilineata.                        Fissurella.
+
+Eolis papillosa.                    Arca lactea.
+
+Pleurobranchus plumila.             Pecten pusio.
+
+Neritina.                           Tapes pullastra.
+
+Cypræa.                             Kellia suborbicularis.
+
+Trochus,—2 species.                 Shænia Binghami.
+
+Mangelia.                           Saxicava rugosa.
+
+Triton.                             Gastrochoena pholadia.
+
+Trophon.                            Pholas parva.
+
+Nassa,—2 species.                   Anomiæ,—2 or 3 species
+
+Cerithium.                          Cynthia,—2 species.
+
+                                    Botryllus, do.
+                             _Annelids_.
+Phyllodoce, and other Nereid        Polynoe squamata.
+worms.
+                             _Crustacea_.
+4 or 5 species.
+                            _Echinoderms_.
+Echinus miliaris.                   Ophiocoma neglecla.
+
+Asterias gibbosa.                   Cucumaria Hyndmanni.
+
+                                    — communis.
+                              _Polypes_.
+Sertularia pumila.                  Tubulipora patina.
+
+— rugosa.                           — hispida.
+
+— fallax.                           — serpens.
+
+— filicula.                         Crisia eburnea.
+
+Plumularia falcata.                 Cellepora pumicosa.
+
+— setacea.                          Lepraliæ,—many species.
+
+Laomedea geniculata.                Membranipora pilosa.
+
+Campanularia volubilis.             Cellularia ciliata.
+
+Actinia mesembryanthemum.           — scruposa.
+
+Actinia clavata.                    — reptans.
+
+— anguicoma.                        Flustra membranacea, &c.
+
+— crassicornis.
+
+{163}  Plate XI. fig. 1.
+
+{167}  Plate X. fig. 1.
+
+{170}  There are very fine specimens in the Crystal Palace.
+
+{181a}  Coryne ramosa.
+
+{181b}  Campanularia integra.
+
+{182}  Crisidia Eburnea.
+
+{190}  Aquarium, p. 163.
+
+{201}  P. 34.  Figures of it are given in Plate VIII.
+
+{203}  P. 259.
+
+{206}  But if any young lady, her aquarium having failed, shall (as
+dozens do) cast out the same Anacharis into the nearest ditch, she shall
+be followed to her grave by the maledictions of all millers and
+trout-fishers.  Seriously, this is a wanton act of injury to the
+neighbouring streams, which must be carefully guarded against.  As well
+turn loose queen-wasps to build in your neighbour’s banks.
+
+{215}  Very highly also, in interest, ranks M. Quatrefages’ “Rambles of a
+Naturalist” (about the Mediterranean and the French Coast), translated by
+M. Otté.
+
+{220}  Van Voorst & Co. price 3s.
+
+
+
+
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