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Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore

by Charles Kingsley

October, 1996  [Etext #695]


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Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley
Scanned and proofed by David Price
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore




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.



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 RECHAUFFE 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 he 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, Linne, 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, Delabˆche 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 aeons 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.  
AEons and aeons 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 f�rchterlich;"


as G”the has it -


"Und der schiffer sieht bek�mmert
Glatte fl„che 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 Ephemerae, 
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 RESUME 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 Linne, 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. (1)  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 Linne, 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.)

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. (2)

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. (3)

Now for the tapering brown spires.  They are Turritellae, 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. (4)

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 Plumulariae, always to be 
distinguished from Sertulariae 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 Flustrae, 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(5)).  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.

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.

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.

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 antennae," says my friend, 
Mr. Lloyd (6) - 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 Actiniae 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 papillae 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 Actiniae 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 Actiniae (sea-
anemones), and in a quite opposite one the Holothuriae, 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.

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 Euphorbiaceae - 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 Euphorbiaceae, 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, … 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 aeon 
to aeon, 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 primaeval 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.

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 
Lutrariae 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. M�ller 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.) (7)  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 Actiniae 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, (8) 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 Laminariae, 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.

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.  (9)

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 ciliae, till, having 
sown its wild oats, it settled down in life, built itself a good 
stone house, and became a landowner, or rather a glebae 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, (10) 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 ciliae 
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 (11) 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 aeons:  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," (12) which we picked up 
just now on Paignton Sands?  Or which, again, by its more beautiful 
little congener, (13) 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. (14)  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. 
(15)  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.

Look, again, at those sea-slugs.  One, some three inches long, of a 
bright lemon-yellow, clouded with purple; another of a dingy grey; 
(16) another exquisite little creature of a pearly French White, 
(17) 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 Melibaea those 
clubs are covered with warts; in Scyllaea, 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 Diatomaceae 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 chimaera 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; (18) 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. (19)

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 (20) 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 Mangeliae 
and Nassae (21) 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, (22) our only European 
representative of that grand tropical family.  Cast one wondering 
glance, too, at the forest of zoophytes and corals, Lepraliae and 
Flustrae, and those quaint blue stars, set in brown jelly, which 
are no zoophytes, but respectable molluscs, each with his well-
formed mouth and intestines, (23) 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, (24) 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 Algae 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 Laminariae (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 Rhodymeniae.  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 medusae 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 "Algae," 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 algƒ," 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 serpulae 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.

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) (25) with 
strange snipe-bills (which they cannot open) and snake-like bodies; 
small cuttlefish (Sepiolae) 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 Sabellae 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 Serpulae, (26) 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, Plumulariae 
and Sertulariae, 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, (27) 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.

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. (28)

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, 
(29) each of which, too, protrudes its living flower; on another 
leg is a fresh species, like a little heather-bush of whitest 
ivory, (30) 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, -

[Greek text which cannot be reproduced]

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, (31) 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 a‰rating 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 (Actiniae); 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 Actiniae 
(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 Actiniae 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 ulvae; 
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.

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." (32)

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, 
(33) "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:  (34) 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 Phryganeae (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 (Ephemerae); 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" (Ba‰tis 
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 Ephemerae, 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. (35)

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 Algae, 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, 
PASSE 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," (36) 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 Flustrae, 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 Cellularae.



PLATE V.



CORALS AND SEA ANEMONES.


CARYOPHYLLAEA 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 
Caryophyllaea.  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.


BALANOPHYLLAEA 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.


CARYOPHYLLAEA 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 Nassae 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:

(1) SERTULARIA OPERCULATA and GEMELLARIA LOCICULATA; or any of the 
small SERTULARIAE, compared with CRISIAE and CELLULARIAE, are very 
good examples.  For a fuller description of these, see Appendix 
explaining Plate I.

(2) 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.

(3) These shells are so common that I have not cared to figure 
them.

(4) Plate IX. Fig. 3, represents both parasites on the dead 
Turritella.

(5) 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.

(6) Handbook to the Marine Aquarium of the Crystal Palace.

(7) 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 Duvernaei.

(8) Thalassema Neptuni (Forbes' British Star-Fishes, p. 259),

(9) 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.

(10) A Naturalist's Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, p. 110.

(11) Balanophyllia regia, Plate V. fig. 1.

(12) Amphidotus cordatus.

(13) Echinus miliaris, Plate VII.

(14) See Professor Sedgwick's last edition of the "Discourses on 
the Studies of Cambridge."

(15) Fissurella graeca, Plate X. fig. 5.

(16) Doris tuberculata and bilineata.

(17) Eolis papi losa.  A Doris and an Eolis, though not of these 
species, are figured in Plate X.

(18) Plate III.

(19) 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.

(20) Saxicava rugosa, Plate XI. fig. 2.

(21) 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.)

(22) Cyproea Europoea.

(23) Botrylli.

(24) Molluscs.

Doris tuberculata.
- bilineata.
Eolis papillosa.
Pleurobranchus plumila.
Neritina.
Cypraea.
Trochus, - 2 species.
Mangelia.
Triton.
Trophon.
Nassa, - 2 species.
Cerithium.
Sigaretus.
Fissurella.
Arca lactea.
Pecten pusio.
Tapes pullastra.
Kellia suborbicularis.
Shaenia Binghami.
Saxicava rugosa.
Gastrochoena pholadia.
Pholas parva.
Anomiae, -2 or 3 species
Cynthia,-2 species.
Botryllus,  do.

ANNELIDS.

Phyllodoce, and other Nereid worms.
Polynoe squamata.

CRUSTACEA.

4 or 5 species.

ECHINODERMS.

Echinus miliaris.
Asterias gibbosa.
Ophiocoma neglecla.
Cucumaria Hyndmanni.
- communis.

POLYPES.

Sertularia pumila.
- rugosa.
- fallax.
- filicula.
Plumularia falcata.
- setacea.
Laomedea geniculata.
Campanularia volubilis.
Actinia mesembryanthemum.
Actinia clavata.
- anguicoma.
- crassicornis.
Tubulipora patina.
- hispida.
- serpens.
Crisia eburnea.
Cellepora pumicosa.
Lepraliae,- many species.
Membranipora pilosa.
Cellularia ciliata.
- scruposa.
- reptans.
Flustra membranacea, &c.

(25) Plate XI. fig. 1.

(26) Plate X. fig. 1.

(27) There are very fine specimens in the Crystal Palace.

(28) Coryne ramosa.

(29) Campanularia integra.

(30) Crisidia Eburnea.

(31) Aquarium, p. 163.

(32) P. 34.  Figures of it are given in Plate VIII.

(33) P. 259.

(34) 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.

(35) Very highly also, in interest, ranks M. Quatrefages' "Rambles 
of a Naturalist" (about the Mediterranean and the French Coast), 
translated by M. Otte.

(36) Van Voorst & Co. price 3s.





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore