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LONDON:
R. CLAY, PRINTER, BREAD STREET HILL.

GLAUCUS;

OR,”

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

BY
CHARLES KINGSLEY, F.S.A, F.LS., &c.
AUTHOR OF “WESTWARD HO!” ‘‘HYPATIA.” ETC.

FOURTH EDITION CORRECTED AND ENLARGED ;

WITH COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS.

Cambridge ;
VW ACS MET Ty) EeASN sAND.€) 0:
AND 23, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON.
1859.

[The Right of Translation is reserved.]

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re 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.

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The basis of this little book was an Article which appeared in the
North British Review for November, 1854.

Bryonp the shadow of the ship
T watch’d the water snakes ;
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they rear’d, the elfish ght
Fell off in hoary flakes.

* * * *
O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare :
A spring of love gush’d from my heart,
And I bless’d them unaware.

CoLERIDGE’s Ancient Mariner.

GTP Oe:

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

B

2 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 imnocent 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 rechauffé of third-rate London
frivolity ; this is the life-in-death in which thou-
sands 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:”

DSI.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 3

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 em-
ployed ages and ages, further back than wisdom
can guess or imagination picture, and upholds that
least part every moment by laws and forces so com-
plex 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 their 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 Won-
ders of the Shore? For wonders there are there

BQ

4 GLAUCUS ; OR,

around you at every step, stranger than ever opium-
eater dreamed, and yet to be seen at no greater
expense than a very little time and trouble.
Perhaps you smile, in answer, at the notion of
becoming a “Naturalist:” and yet you cannot
deny that there must be a fascination in the study
of natural history, though what it is is as yet
unknown to you. Your daughters, perhaps, have
been seized with the prevailing “ Pteridomania,”
and are collecting and buying ferns, with Ward’s
cases wherein to keep them (for which you have to
pay), and wrangling over unpronounceable names of
species (which seem to be different in each new
Fern-book that they buy), till the Pteridomania
seems to you somewhat of a bore: and yet you
cannot deny that they find an enjoyment in it, and
are more active, more cheerful, more self-forgetful
over it, than they would have been over novels and
gossip, crochet and Berlin-wool. At least you will
confess that the abomination of “Fancy-work”—
that standing cloak for dreamy idleness (not to

mention the injury which it does to poor starving

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 5

needlewomen)—has all but vanished from your
drawing-room since the “ Lady-ferns” and “ Venus’s
hair” appeared ; and that you could not help your-
self 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 fasci-
nation 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 lan-
tern, a jar of strange sweet compound, and innu-
merable 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

6 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 “use-
less” 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, hke the philosopher of old

Greece, is considered, by virtue of his science, fit

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 7

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 genera-
tions 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 explormg which

8 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 brought a book about “cock sparrows”? and
had to justify himself again and again, simply by
lending the book to his brother sportsmen, to con-
vince 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 gen-
tleman 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 every one else’s. And all gentlemen, from the
Weald of Kent to the Vale of Blackmore, shrugged
their shoulders mysteriously, and said, “Poor fel-

low!” till they opened the book itself, and disco-

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 9

vered 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 Sal-
tero (as no doubt the Neapolitan gentlemen talked
of Ferrante Imperato the apothecary, and his mu-
seum) ; great excuses for Voltaire, when he classes
the collection of butterflies among the other “ bigar-
rures de l’esprit humain.” For, in the last gene-
ration, 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

10 GLAUCUS ; OR,

were such as would raise up men to fight him; so
the coarse, fierce, hard-handed training of our grand-
fathers came when it was wanted, and did the work
which was required of it, else we had not been here
now. Let us be thankful that we have had leisure
for science; and show now in war that our science
has at least not unmanned us.

Moreover, Natural History, if not fifty years ago,
certainly a hundred years ago, was hardly worthy
of men of practical common sense. After, indeed,
Linné, by his invention of generic and _ specific
names, had made classification possible, and by his
own enormous labours had shown how much could
be done when once a method was established, the
science has grown rapidly enough. But before him
little or nothing had been put imto 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 11

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 the four
elements, the ws 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 speci-
men. 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.

12 GLAUCUS ; OR,

For, when questions belonging to the most sacred
hereditary beliefs of Christendom were supposed to
be effected by the verification of a fossil shell, or
the proving that the Maestricht “homo diluvi
testis” was, after all, a monstrous eft, 1t 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 Mathe-
matics 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 steadfastly set themselves to the task

of proving and of asserting at all risks, that the

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 13

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,
Delabéche and Phillips, Forbes and Jamieson, and the
eroup 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, deter-

14 GLAUCUS ; OR,

mined 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 con-
sonant with, but as corroborative thereof; and sound
practical geologists—lhke Hugh Miller, in his “ Foot-
prints of the Creator,’ and Professor Sedgwick, in

the invaluable notes to his “ Discourse on the

Studies of Cambridge”—are wielding in defence of

Christianity the very science which was faithlessly

and cowardly expected to subvert 1t.*

* It is with real pain that I have seen my friend Mr. Gosse, since
this book was written, make a step in the direction of obscurantism,
which I can only call desperate, by publishing a book called “ Om-
phalos.” In it he tries to vindicate what he thinks (though very
few good Christians do so now) to be the teaching of Scripture about
Creation, by the supposition that fossils are not the remains of
plants and animals which have actually existed, but may have been
created as they are and where they are, for the satisfaction of the
Divine mind; and that therefore the whole science, not merely of
paleontology, but (as he seems to forget) of geognosy also, is based
on a mistake, and cannot truly exist, save as a play of the fancy.

It seems to me that such a notion is more likely to make infidels,
than tocure them. For what rational man, who knows even a little

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 15

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, har-
monies, 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 stragele across
the turf, and the tufted alpine clubmoss takes its
of geology, will not be tempted to say—If Scripture can only be
vindicated by such an outrage to common sense and fact, then I
will give up Scripture, and stand by common sense? For my part,
I have seen no book for some years past, which I should more
carefully keep out of the hands of the young. I am sorry to have
to say this of the work of a friend, both because he is my friend,
and because there are thoughts therein, about the creative workings
of the Divine mind, which however misapplied, are full of deep
truth and beauty, and are too much forgotten now-a-days. But, as

Aristotle says where he differs from Plato, “Truth and Plato are
both my friends; but it is a sacred duty to prefer Truth.”

16 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 hfe impossible
to one species, possible to another. And it is a still
more solemn thought to him, that it was not always
so; that eons 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
“oemsen-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 Ledum,
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-

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. Lie

liquid lake of ice above, which ploughed those fur-
rows. Atons and eons 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 unmistake-
able, boundless in significance, like Crusoe’s one
savage footprint on the sea-shore: and the natu-
ralist 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

C

18 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 hunts-
man, who, by discovering a law for the mysterious
and seemingly capricious phenomena of “scent,”
might perhaps throw light on a hundred dark pas-
sages of hygrometry. The fisherman, too,—what
an inexhaustible treasury of wonders 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 19

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 fiirchterlich ;”

as Gothe has it—

‘““Und der schiffer sieht bekiimmert

Glatte fliche 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

c2

20 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 ques-
tion, “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, re-
mained 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. yA |

spectator would have had some difficulty in keeping
his footing.

And when you learn that this convulsion probably
took place 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
erumble.

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 carefully.

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 gra-
dually 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 op-

posite side, that vast flat-topped wall of rock towers

22 GLAUCUS ; OR,

up shoreless into the sky, seven hundred feet per-
pendicular; 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 down-
ward: you see the loose stones peeping out every-
where. 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 23

time in the condition of hasty-pudding heated to
some 800 degrees of Fahrenheit, and in that con-
dition 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 1s 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 those 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 car-

ried them ; for stones do not fly, nor swim either.

24 GLAUCUS ; OR,

Shot out of a volcano? As you seem deter-
mined to have a prodigy, it may as well be a
sufficiently huge one. |

Well—these stones le 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 25

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 awhile
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 nevé, 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 nevé, polishing

the face of the rock in its descent: but the snow,

26 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 upon the mountain-
side, and kept from further progress by daily melt-
ing. 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 Aigwille de Charmoz.

This explains our pebble-ridge. The stones which
the glacier rubbed off the cliff beneath it, 1t carried
forward, slowly but surely, till they saw the lght
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
nevé and glacier melted away: but the “moraine”
of stones did not, and remain to this day, the dam

which keeps up the waters of the lake.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. QT

There is my explanation. If you can find a
better, do: but remember always that it must in-
clude 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 hun-
dreds. 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

28 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 en-
tomologist, 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 inyself, that I principally
write) must be content to tread in the tracks of
greater men who have preceded him, and accept
at second and third hand their foregone conclusions.

But this is most unsatisfactory ; for in giving up
discovery, one gives up one of the highest enjoy-
ments of natural history. There is a mysterious

delight in the discovery of a new species, akin to

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 29

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 plea-
sure 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 foun-
dation 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

30 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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
ereen Roller-birds, walking behind the plough like
rooks in the tobacco-fields of Witthch; 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
Ephemeree, fluttermg 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. Si

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 Ar-
dennes, 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, un-
comprehended? 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

32 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 last winter from the
Torbay shores three entirely new species, beside
several rare animals which had escaped all natu-
ralists since the lynx-eye of Colonel Montagu dis-
cerned them forty years ago.

And do not despise the creatures because they
are minute. No doubt we should both of us prefer
helping Rajah Brooke to discover monstrous apes in
the tropical forests of Borneo, or stumbling with

Hooker upon herds of gigantic Ammon sheep amid

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 35

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 mon-
sters, whose models fill the lake at the New 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
the 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,” “vege-

D

34 GLAUCUS ; OR,

table,” 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 (f 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, in this summer of 1854, the

centenary year of British zoophytology, looks back

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. oD

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 réswmé thereof in Dr.
Landsborough’s book on the same subject, is really
a saddening one, as one sees how loth were not
merely dreamers like Marsigli or Bonnet, but
sound-headed men like Pallas and Linné, to give up
the old sense-bound fancy, that these corals were
vegetables, and their polypes some sort of living
flowers. Yet, after all, there are excuses for them.
Without our improved microscopes, and while the
sciences of comparative anatomy and chemistry
were yet infantile, it was difficult to believe what
was the truth; and for this simple reason: that, as
usual, the truth, when discovered, turned out far

D2

36 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 Marsigh’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 of the year 1854;
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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 30

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.*
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

* Sertularia operculata and Gemellaria loriculata ; or any of the
small Sertularie, compared with Crisiw and Cellulariw, are very

good examples. For a fuller description of these, see Appendix,
explaining Plate I.

38 GLAUCUS ; OR,

a quadruped is from a fish. You see in some Mus-
selburgh 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-rmgs 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 it has no more to do with the beautiful tubular
corals among which it was growing, than a bird
has with a worm; and 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 39

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 know-
ledge 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

40) GLAUCUS ; OR,

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,

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 4]

however, who have followed it out, especially on the
sea-shore, know better. They can tell from expe-
rience, 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 settle-
ments the bread-fruit, the mangosteen, and every
plant and seed which he hoped might be useful for
medicine, agriculture, and commerce, could yet feel
himself justified in devoting large portions of his
ever well-spent time to the fighting the battle of
the corallines against Parsons and the rest, and even
in measuring pens with Linné, the prince of natu-
ralists. 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

42 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 greatest living
English geologist, Sir Roderick Murchison, is also
an old Peninsular officer. I doubt 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, 1s concerned, whom England
has ever seen, was the Devonshire squire, Colonel
George Montagu, of whom Mr. 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.”

* © British Star-fishes.” This delightful writer, and eager
investigator, has just died, in the prime of life, from disease con-
tracted (it is said) during a scientific journey in Asia Minor: one
more martyr to the knight-errantry of science.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 43

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 Mr. E. Forbes, after bewailing
the vagueness of most naturalists, “about the iden-
tity of any animal Montagu described. .... He
was a forward-looking philosopher; he spoke of
every creature as if one exceeding like it, yet dif-
ferent from it, would be washed up by the waves
next tide. Consequently his descriptions are per-
manent.” Scientific men will recognise in this the
highest praise which can be bestowed, because it
attributes to him that 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

44 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 45

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
elving 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

46 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 him
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 naturalist’s faculty—the very

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. A'7

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 every-
thing 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
mean 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

48 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 man-
ful 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.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 49

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 natur-
alist 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 shallow and con-
ceited 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 obser-
vation, which the counting-house or the library will

E

50 GLAUCUS ; OR,

never bestow; above all, how to develop the phy-
sical 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 advan-
tages 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 5h

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 fri-
volity, 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 unwhole-
some 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

5

52 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 into a chronic fever of the brain, which
too often urges them on to plunge, as it were to
cool the inward fire, into the ever-restless sea of
doubt and disbelief. 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 53

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,
so artificialized, so expensive, so mixed up with
drinking, gambling, and other evils of which I
need say nothing here, that one cannot wonder at

any parent’s shrinking from allowing their sons to

54 GLAUCUS ; OR,

meddle much with them. And yet the young man
who has had no substitute for such amusements,
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 pos-
sible for us 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 mis-
take in a certain celebrated passage; and that it

was not “sitting on a hill apart,” but tramping four

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 55

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 bound-
less 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 expe-
rience: 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 threat-

ened daily to plunge him into recklessness, if not

56 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 culti-
vated man, craving for travel and for success in hfe,
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 temp-
tation 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 her-
self 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 learn-
ing.” They go out, search, find less than they

expected, and give the subject up in disappoint-

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 57

ment. 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. Five-
and-twenty 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 estab-
lished shore-lectures at some watering-place, like
those up hill and down dale field-lectures which,
in pleasant bygone Cambridge days, Professor Sedg-
wick used to give to young geologists, and Professor
Henslow to young botanists.

This want, however, bids fair to be supplied at
last. Mr. Gosse, whose works will be so often
quoted in these pages, has now established summer
shore-classes ; and I advise any reader whose fancy

such a project pleases, to apply to him for details

58 GLAUCUS ; OR,

of the scheme, either at his own house at Torquay,
or at the Linnean or Microscopic Society.

In the meanwhile, to show something of what
such a class might be, let me put myself, in ima-
gination, in Mr. Gosse’s place, and do his work for
him for half-an-hour, though in a far more shallow
and clumsy way.

Leaving Weymouth to him, let me take you to
a shore where I am more at home, and for whose
richness I can vouch, and choose our season and
our day to start forth, on some glorious morning
of one of our Italian springs, to see what last
night’s easterly 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 59

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, undis-
mayed 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 Brix-
ham, 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

60 GLAUCUS ; OR,

emerald grass, and rich red fallow fields, and parks
full of stately timber trees. Long lines of tall elms,
just flushing green in the spring hedges, run down
to the very water’s edge, their boughs unwarped
by any blast; here and there apple orchards are
just bursting into flower in the soft sunshine, and
narrow strips of water-meadow line the glens, where
the red cattle are already lounging knee-deep in
richest grass, 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 61

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 Frith 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 still survives, at an
age long beyond the natural term of man, to see,
in her cheerful and honoured old age, that know-
ledge become popular and general, which she
pursued for many a year unassisted and alone.
And here too, now, Dr. Battersby possesses a col-
lection of shells, inferior, perhaps, to hardly any
in England. 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-mouths 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

62 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 now work there for a winter
without discovering forms new to science, or meet-
ing with curiosities which have escaped all ob-
servers, 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 limsetone 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 63

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 les 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
ankledeep 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 LElliptica, 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-

64 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 (oar-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), surely contradicting, as do several
other forms, that somewhat hasty assertion of Mr.
Ruskin, that Nature makes no ribbons, unless with
a midrib, and I know not what other limitations,
which seem to me to exist only in Mr. Ruskin’s
fertile, but fastidious fancy. What are they all?
What are the long white razors? What are the
delicate green-grey scimitars? What are the taper-
ing 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

= THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 65

of grey bladders, with something lke a little bud
at the tip? What are the hundreds of little pink-
striked 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; 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 man’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

F

66 GLAUCUS ; OR,

cliffs of the Riviera. Rare in 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 often come up choke full of this great cockle
only. You will see tens of thousands 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
ereat 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 cockle-shell. By its aid it crawls,

leaps, and burrows in the sand, where it lies

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 67

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 tentacles, 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
F2

68 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 hori-
zontally, 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.*

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 Countess, 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!”

* 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.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 69

“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 which
each point, instead of degenerating into a knot, as
in tuberculatum, or developing from delicate, flat,
briar-prickles, into long, straight thorns, as in acu-
leatum, 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.

70 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 alto-
gether 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 lable
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, (and this is a curious
fact, which makes, like most other facts, pretty
strongly against the transmutation of species, and
the production of organs by circumstances demand-
ing them,) prickles, in all three species, are, as far
as we can see, useless in Torbay, where no seal
or wolf-fish, (Anarrhichas lupus,) or other shell-

crushing pairs of jaws wander, terrible to lobster

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. ya

and to cockle. Originally intended, as we suppose,
to face the strong-toothed monsters of the Medi-
terranean, these foreigners have been left behind
on 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; as it
is written, “They continue this day as at the be-
eining ; Thou hast given them a law which shall
never be broken.”

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 siligua 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.*

* These shells are so common, that I have not cared to figure
them.

72 GLAUCUS ; OR,

Now, for the tapering brown spires. They are
Turritelle, snail-like animals (though the form of
shell is different), who crawl and browse by thou-
sands on the beds of Zostera, or grass wrack, which
you see thrown about on the beach, and which
erows 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 how-
ever low in the scale of comparative anatomy,

he has wit enough to take care of himself; mean,

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 73

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 field-glass. 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.*

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 lob-

* Plate II. Fig. 1, represents both parasites on the dead
Turritella,

74 GLAUCUS ; OR,

sters’ 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 lob-
ster’s horns are antennaria antennina; and mingled
with them are Plumularie, always to be distin-
guished from Sertularize 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 Johnston’s Zoophytes, and for a dozen
smaller species, which you would probably find
tangled among them, or parasitic on the sea-weed.
Here are Flustre, or sea-mats. This, which smells
very like verbena, is Flustra coriacea (Pl. I Fig. 2).
That scurf on the frond of oar weed is F. lineata
(Pl. L Fig. 1). The glass bells twined about this
Sertularia are Campanularia syringa (PI. I. Fig. 9) ;

and here is a tiny plant of Cellularia ciliata (Pl. I.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 75

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,

what for ?

snapping and snapping

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 Johnston’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 giant striped pears? They
are sea-anemones, and of a species only lately
well known, Sagartia viduata, the snake-locked
anemone (Pl, V. Fig. 3*). They have been washed
off the loose stones to which they usually adhere by

* A few words on him, and on sea-anemones in general, may be
found in Appendix II. But full details, accompanied with beauti-
ful plates, may be found in Mr. Gosse’s new work on British
sea-anemones and madrepores, which ought to be in every sea-
side library.

76 GLAUCUS ; OR,

the pitiless roll of the ground-swell; but 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 sin-
gular 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. XI. Fig. 2),

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. ri

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 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

78 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 Liver-
mead, 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 curi-
osity 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, suspi-
cious-looking being, unlike any form of life that

we have seen before. The dark concealed interior

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 79

of the sea becomes thus invested with a fresh mys-
tery ; 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 sus-
pected.

“¢Q sea! old sea! who yet knows half
Of thy wonders or thy pride!’”
Gosse’s Aquarium, pp. 226, 227.

But first, as after descending the gap in the sea-
wall we walk along the ribbed floor of hard yellow
sand, be so kind as 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—(They
have given it some new name now, and no thanks
to them: they are always changing the names,
those closet collectors, instead of studying the live
animals where Nature has put them, in which case
they would have no time for word-inventing. Nay,

I verily suspect that the names grow, like other

80 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 lump what we seek. Touch it, and out poke
a pair of astonished and inquiring horns and a
little sharp muzzle: it is a long-armed crab, who
saw us coming, and wisely shovelled himself into
the sand by means of his nether-end. 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,

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 8]

for it 1s 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. Beit 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 (Pi. XII. Fig. 1.), which differs from most
other British Actiniz 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 papille, 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

G

82 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 in-
dulge in reveries, we might say that the Divine
Word realized it before either sea-anemones 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 Actiniz
(sea-anemones), and in a quite opposite one the
Holothuriz, those strange sea-cucumbers, with their
mouth-fringe of feathery gills, of which you shall
see some anon. Not (understand well) that there
has been any “ transmutation” or “ development
of species” (of individuals, as it ought honestly to
be called, if the notion is intended to represent
a supposed fact),—a theory as unsupported by ex-
periment and induction, as it is by & priori reason :
but that there has been, in the Creative Mind, as

it gave life to new species, a development of the

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 83

idea on which older species were created, in order
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 develop-
ment is the only one of which we can conceive,
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; and especially Professor Owen's
invaluable tracts on the Homology of the Vertebrate
Skeleton.

Let us 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.”

a?

84 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 only
the whole one of progress,—lower animals (though
we cannot 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. Both may have been the case ; but
there is utterly no 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 the advocates of the
“Vestiges of Creation” theory should claim the

notion as making for them, and fancy, from our

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 85

unwillingness to allow it, that there would be aught
in it, if proved, contrary to Christianity.

_ Let us, therefore, say boldly, that there has been
a “progress of species,” and that there may be
again, in the true sense of that term: but say, as
boldly, that the Transmutation theory is not one of
a progress of species at all, which would be a change
in the idea of the species, taking place in the Divine
Mind,—in plain words, the creation of a new species.
What the Transmutationists really mean, if they
would express themselves clearly, or carefully ana-
lyse their own notions, is a physical and actual
change, not of species, but of individuals, of already
existing living beings created according to one idea,
into other living beings created according to another
idea. And of this, in spite of the apparent change
of species in the marvellous metamorphoses of lower
animals, Nature has as yet given us no instance
among all the facts which have been observed ; and
there is, therefore, an almost infinite inductive pro-
bability against it. As far as we know yet, though

all the dreams of the Transmutationists are outdone

86 GLAUCUS ; OR,

by the transformations of many a polype, yet the
species remain as permanent and strongly marked
as in the highest mammal. Such progress as expe-
rimental science actually shows us, is quite awful
and beautiful enough to keep us our lives long in
wonder ; but it is one which perfectly agrees with,
and may be perfectly explained by, the simple old
belief which the Bible sets before us, of a LIVING
Gop: 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

d

his finger;” nor again, an “all-pervading spirit,’
words which are mere contradictory jargon, con-
cealing, from those who utter them, blank Mate-
riaism: 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 pur-
pose, yet altering the methods by which that purpose
is attained, from zon to seon, 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 87

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 “ Poie-

3

tes,’ drawing ever fresh forms out of the inex-
haustible treasury of the primeval mind ; and yet never
throwing away a conception to which He has once
given actual birth in time and space, (but to com-
pare reverently small things and great) lovingly
repeating it, reapplying it; producing the same
effects by endlessly different methods; or so deli-
eately modifying the methed 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, neces-
sary 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,

88 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 in-
effable, 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 Him-

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 89

self in nature. Nay, rather, let us believe that, if
our eyes were opened, we should fulfil the re-
quirement 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 sinful souls prevents them from seeing
day and meght in all things, however small or
trivial to human eclecticism, the Lord Jesus Christ
Himself fulfillme His own saying, “My Father
worketh hitherto, and I work.”

And therefore, when we meet with such an excel-
lent passage as this :—*

“Thus if is that Nature advances step by step,
eradually bringing out, through successive stages of
being, new organs and new faculties ; and leaving,
as she moves along, at every step, some animals
which rise no higher, as if to serve for landmarks
of her progress through all succeeding time. And
this it is which makes the study of comparative

anatomy so fascinating. Not that I mean to favour

* Harvey’s Sea-side Book, p. 166.

90 GLAUCUS ; OR,

a theory of ‘development, which would obliterate
all idea of species, by supposing that the more
compound animal forms were developments of their
simple ancestors. For such an hypothesis, Nature
vives us no evidence: but she gives us, through
all her domains, the most beautiful and diversified
proofs of an adherence to a settled order, by which
new combinations are continually brought out. In
this order, the lowest grades of being have certain
characters, above which they do not rise, but propa-
gate beings as simple as themselves. Above them
are others which, passing through stages in their
infancy equal to the adult condition of those below
them, acquire, when at maturity, a perfection of or-
gans peculiarly their own. Others again rise above
these, and their structures become more gradually
compound; till, at last, it may be said that the simpler
animals represent, as in a glass, the scattered organs
of the higher races.”

——wWhen I read such a passage as this, and
confess, as I must, its truth, I cannot help sighing

over certain expressions in it, which do unintention-

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 91

ally coincide with the very theory which Professor
Harvey denies. Is this progress supposed to take
place in time and space ?—or in the mind of a Being
above time and space, who afterwards reduces to act
and fact, in time and space, just so much and no
more of that progress as shall seem good to Him,
some here, some there ; not binding Himself to begin
at the lowest, and end with the highest, but com-
pensating and balancing the lower with the higher in
each successive stage of our planet? This last is
what the Professor really means, I doubt not: but
then, would that he had said boldly, that “God,” and
not “ Nature,” is the agent. So would he have raised
at once the whole matter from the ground of destiny
to that of will, from the material and logical ground
to the moral and spiritual, from time and space into ~
ever-present eternity. 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 ac-
tually discovered in nature, have been proved, espe-
cially by Professor Sedgwick and Mr. Hugh Miller,

to bear every trace of having been produced by

92 GLAUCUS; OR,

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 there-
fore (for to this I boldly confess I have been all
along tending) probably capable, without violence
to its properties, of becoming, Jike the human mind,
INCARNATE.

This progress, then, in the divine works, though
tending ever to perfection in the very highest sense,
need not be always forward and upward, according
to the laws of comparative anatomy. It is possible,
therefore, on the one hand, that the idea of the
Chrysanthellum, and its congeners Scolanthus, and
Synapta, and the lately-discovered Cerianthus Lloydu
of the Menai Straits, (an exquisite creature, whom
you may see in one of the tanks at the Zoological
Gardens), has been developed downwards into the
far lower Actinia, as well as upwards into the higher
Holothurians ; just as the idea of a fish was first
realized in the highest type of that class, and not, as
has been too hastily supposed, in the lowest ; for it

is now discovered that the sharks, the earliest of fish,

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 93

are really higher, not lower, in the scale of creation,
than those salmons and perches which we from habit
consider the archetypes and lords of the finny tribes.
And it is equally possible that all our dream (though
right in many another case, as in that of the shark
just quoted) is here altogether wrong, and that these
Chrysanthella are merely meant to fill up, for the
sake of logical perfection, the space between the
rooted Polypes and the free Echinoderms. Be this as
it may, there is another, and more human, source of
interest about this quaint animal who is wrigeling
himself clean 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

94 GLAUCUS ; OR,

seen in a particular central seat in this section?
That, gentle reader, is perhaps one of the most in-
teresting men who attend the British Association.
He is only a private in the mounted guard (preven-
tive 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, accom-
panied by illustrative papers and drawings: thus,

under circumstances the very opposite of those of

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 95

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 consi-
derable thing to the Fauna of Britain, and a vast
matter to a poor private of the Cornwall mounted
euard. And accordingly he will go home in a few
days, full of the glory of his exhibition, and strung
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 compli-
cation 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 con-
sider everything, thou art an honour to human

nature itself; for where is the heroism like that of

96 GLAUCUS ; OR,

virtuous, intelligent, independent poverty? And
such heroism is thine !”—Chambers’s Edin. Journ.,
Noy. 23, 1844.

Mr. Peach is now, we are glad to say, 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 ex-
presses 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 com-
mon 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 bliss.

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 WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 97

the great Lutrarize in a cove near Goodrington ; but
all my dredging outside failed to procure a specimen.
Mr. Alder, however, and Mr. Cocks (who find every-
thing, and will at last certainly catch Midgard,
the great sea-serpent, as Thor did, by _ bait-
ing for him with a bull’s head), have dredged them
in great numbers; the former, at Helford in Corn-
wall, 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 Mediter-
ranean fauna; for Mr. MacAndrew finds them plen-
tifully in Vigo Bay, and J. Miiller in the Adriatic
off Trieste.

But what is he 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. V., from my drawings of

H

98 GLAUCUS ; OR,

the live animal). These hands it puts down to its
mouth, generally in alternate pairs; but how it
obtains its food by them is as 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 les 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 WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 99

the whole body of the animal. (See on Echinus
Miliaris, p. 89.)* 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 Sagar-
tian 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 per-
haps 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

* 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 Lucas Barrett. See also Quatrefages I. 82, or
Synapta Duvernei.

H 2

100 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 lime-
stone 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 Actinize 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,* an eyeless bag about an inch long,

half bluish grey, half pink, with a strange scalloped

* Thalassema Neptuni (Forbes’ British Star-Fishes, p. 259).

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 101

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 Laminarie, 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. Yor 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, destruc-
tive 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

102 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 gra-
dually 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 pro-
bably a group of milk-white slugs, from two to six
inches long, cuddling snugly together (Plate LX.
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 lke a head of

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 1038

“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 oid 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 Hyndmanni, or Pentactes—

IT say the former, and care little which: but

104 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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*

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 trans-
formed 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 ?—

* he Londoner may see noble specimens of them at the
Zoological Gardens; as also of the rare and beautiful Sabella,
figured in the same plate.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 105

a hand or a net of finest hairs, clutching at some-
thing 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 still 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 ciliz, till, having sown its
wild oats, it settled down in life, built itself a good
stone house, and became a landowner, or rather a
glebze 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 degene-

106 GLAUCUS ; OR,

rated into a vegetable. Of them you must read
for yourselves in Mr. Gosse’s book ; in the meanwhile
he shall tell you something of the beautiful Madre-
pores themselves. His description,* by far the best
yet published, should be read in full; we must con-
tent ourselves with extracts.

“Doubtless you are familiar with the stony ske-
leton 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
the top than just above the bottom. . . . This is
but the skeleton; and though it 1s 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

* A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, p. 110.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 107

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 ex-
panded to an astonishing extent. The space sur-
rounding 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 hum-
ming-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

108 GLAUCUS; OR,

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 imper-
ceptible 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,
eradually 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 swal-
lowing and disgorging various large pieces of shell-
fish, found viands to its taste in “the lean of cooked
meat, and portions of earthworms,” fillmg up the
intervals by a perpetual desert of microscopic animal-
cules, whirled into that lovely avernus, its mouth, by
the currents of the delicate ciliz which clothe every
tentacle. The fact is, that the Madrepore, ike 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 109

beautiful, really comes under the rule which he
seems at first to break, that handsome is who hand-
some does.

Another species of Madrepore* was discovered on
our Devon coast by Mr. Gosse, more gaudy, though
not so delicate in hue as our Caryophyllia; three of
which are at this moment pouting out their conical
orange mouths and pointed golden tentacles in a
vase on my table, entreating for something to eat.
Mr. Gosse’s locality, for this and numberless other
curiosities, is Ilfracombe, on the north coast of
Devon. These last 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 three-

pence, which contain in their centres a milk-white

* Balanophyllia regia, Plate V. Fig. I.

110 GLAUCUS ; OR,

crust of stone, pierced, as you see under the mag-
nifier, into a thousand cells, each with its living
architect within. Here are two sorts: in one the
tubular cells radiate from the centre, giving it the
appearance of a tiny compound flower, daisy or
eroundsel ; 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’s “Mis-
sionary 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.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 11]

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 lime-
stone hills, storing up for generations yet unborn the
materials of agriculture and architecture. Inexpres-
sibly interesting, even solemn, to those who will
think, is the sight of those puny parasites, which, as
it were, connect the ages and the zones: 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 with dates,
perhaps, from ages before the day in which it was
said, “Let us make man in our image, after our like-
ness.” To think that the whole human race, its joys

and its sorrows, its virtues and its sins, its aspirations

112 GLAUCUS; OR,

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 mys-
tery 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 that 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. Lis

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 always, 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,’* which we picked up just now on Paignton
Sands? Or which, again, by its more beautiful little
congener,} five or six of which are adhering tightly to

the slab before us, a ball covered with delicate spines

* Amphidotus cordatus. + Echinus miliaris, Plate VII.

114 GLAUCUS ; OR,

of lilac and green, and stuck over (cunning fellows !)
with strips 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, 7. 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 verte-
brate 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.* Here

the whole animal, with his extraordinary feeding mill,

* See Professor Sedgwick’s last edition of the Discourses on the
Studies of Cambridge.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE, 115

(for neither teeth nor jaws is a fit word for it,) is
inclosed 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 compli-
cation 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 is
comprehended, may be read in Professor Harvey’s

Sea-Side Book, pp. 142—148,

pages from which you
will probably arise with a dizzy sense of the infinity
of nature, and a conviction that the Creative Word,
so far from having commenced, as some fancy, with
the simplest, and, as it were, easiest forms of life,
took delight, if I may so speak, in solving the mosi
difficult and complicated problems first of all, with
a certain divine prodigality of wisdom and of power ;
and that before the mountains were brought forth, or
12

116 | GLAUCUS ; OR,

ever the earth and the world was made, He was God
from everlasting, the same yesterday, to-day, and for
ever. 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 Divine Word has, as it
were, to justify to man His own immutability, fur-
nished 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 halt the
wonders which it holds. Look though, ere you
retreat, at one or two more.

What is that little brown fellow whom you have
just taken off the rock to which he adhered so stoutly

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. Ll7

by his sucking-foot? A limpet? Not at all: he is
of quite a different family and structure ; but, on the
whole, a limpet-hke shell would suit him well enough,
so he had one given him: nevertheless, owing to
certain anatomical peculiarities, he needed one aper-
ture more than a limpet ; so one, if you will examine,
has been given him at the top of his shell.* 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 neces-
sary, namely, the repetition of the same form, shghtly
modified, in totally different animals, sometimes as if
to avoid waste, (for why should not the same concep-
tion 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, use-
less, 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

* Fissurella grzeca, Plate X. Fig. 5.

118 GLAUCUS ; OR,

keep up the family likeness. J am half jesting; that
eannot 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;* another exquisite
little creature of a pearly French white, 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

* Doris tuberculata and bilineata.
+ Eolis papillosa. A Doris and an Eolis, though not of these
species, are figured in Plate X.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 119

are those seemingly identical gills, if you come to
examine them under the microscope, having to
oxygenate fluids of a very different and more com-
plicated 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 Melibeea those clubs are
covered with warts; in Scyllea, 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 Han-
cock’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,

120 GLAUCUS 5 OR,

(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 ex-
press 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 butter-
fly’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 Diatomacee 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 moor-
lands ; 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 inex-

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 121

plicable on all theories of evolution by necessary
laws, as well as 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 un-
trodden 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,

122 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 pos-
sesses 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 123

class of phenomena, it is perhaps better not to talk
about them at all, but observe a stoic “ epoché,”
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 crea-
ture 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, it
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

124 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 chimeera
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. Borlasi ;* 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 end-
less expansion ; a slimy tape of living caoutchoue,
some eighth of an inch in diameter, a dark chocolate-
black, with paler longitudinal lines. Is it alive? It

* Plate III.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 125

hangs, helpless and motionless, a mere velvet string
across the hand. Ask the neighbourmg Annelids
and the fry of the rock fishes, or put it into a vase
at home, and see. It les motionless, trailing itself
among the gravel; you cannot tell where it begins
or ends ; it may be a dead strip of sea-weed, Himan-
thalia 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 lving line, with
elasticity beyond that of the most delicate fly-rod,
which follows every lunge, shortening and lengthen-
ing, 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

126 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 pack-
ing 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.*

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.

* 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. Iam not, J
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.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. iar é

The bivalve* 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 ditt, to extract him; but if you
are fond of shells, secure one or two of those beau-
tiful pink and straw-coloured scallops (Hinnites.
Pusio, Plate X. Fig. 1), who have gradually incorpo-
rated the layers of their lower valve with the rough-
nesses 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 Mangelhze and Nasse} are trailing their

graceful spires up and down in search of food. That

* Saxicava rugosa, Plate II. Fig. 2.

+ 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.

128 GLAUCUS ; OR,

little bright red and yellow pea, too, touch it—the
brilliant coloured cloak is withdrawn, and, instead,
you have a beautifully ribbed pink cowry,* our only
European representative of that grand tropical family.
Cast one wondering glance, too, at the forest of
zoophytes and corals, Lepralize and Flustre, and
those quaint blue stars, set in brown jelly, which
are no zoophytes, but respectable molluscs, each with
his well-formed mouth and intestines,+ 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 lst of species,{

* Cypreea Europea. + Botrylli.

+ Molluses.
Doris tuberculata. Trochus,—2 species. Fissurella.

bilineata. Mangelia. Arca lactea.

Eolis papillosa. Triton. Pecten pusio.
Pleurobranchus plu- Trophon. Tapes pullastra.

mula. Nassa,—2 species, Kellia suborbicularis.
Neritina. Cerithium. Spheenia Binghami.

Cy prea. Sigaretus. Saxicava rugosa.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 1

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

Gastrochcena pholadia. Ophiocoma neglecta, Actinia clavata.

Pholas parva. Cucumaria Hynd- anguicoma.
Anomiz,—2 or 3 spe- manni. crassicornis.

cies. communis. Tubulipora patina.
Cynthia,—2 species. hispida.
Botryllus, do. Polypes. serpens.
Sydinum ? Sertularia pumila. Crisia eburnea.

Ve ene _—— rugosa. pamepor pumicosa.

Phyllodoce, and other fallax. re eee Be

Nereid worms. —— filicula. pote

Polynoe squamata.

Crustacea.

4 or 5 species.
Echinoderms.

Echinus miliaris.

Asterias gibbosa.

Plureularia falcata.

setacea.

Laomedea geniculata.

Campanularia volubi-
lis.

Actinia mesembryan-
themum.

K

Membranipora pilosa.

Cellularia ciliata.

—— scruposa.

—— reptans.

Flustra
cea, Xe.

membrana-

130 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 pecuhar little univalves, their crisp
lichen-like sea-weeds, 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 Alge
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 Laminarie (the great
tangles and oar-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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. liga

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
miniature an analogy to those deep “ barrancos” which
split the high table-land of Mexico, down whose awfu!
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 ever-
lasting vapour-bath of rank hot steam, the mighty
forms and gorgeous colours of a tropic forest.

“TI do not wonder,” says Mr. Gosse, in his charm-
ing “ 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:

“<Tt was a garden still beyond all price,
Even yet it was a place of paradise ;

* * * x

Kee

132 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 wrinkied leaves of purple hue,
Like streamers wide outflowing.—A ehama, 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 hi

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 133

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.

“Tt is a beautiful and fascinating sight for those
who have never seen it before, to see the little shrub-
beries 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 Polysiphonize 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 Rhodymeniz. 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-

134 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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, lke 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 pecular forms in pecular 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. And 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 135

invested the old Greek fable of Glaucus the fisher-
man; how, eating of the herb which gave his fish
streneth 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 his “silent flocks” far below on the
ereen 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 ot
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,

136 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 137

Sleep in soft bosoms for ever, and dream of the surge and the sea-
maids.

So they past 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 can-
not help at moments envying the old Greek imagi-
nation, 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 medusze 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 human, ay, and more divine, than there would

be even in those Triton and Nereid dreams, if realized

138 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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
elimpses of the water-world as our present applances
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 just 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 139

will discover them to us. We shall even thus find
enough to occupy Gf we choose) our life-time. For
we must recollect that this hasty sketch has not even
touched on that vegetable water-world, which is as
wonderful and as various as the animal one. A
hasty 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, re-
production, 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 Algz,” to show the wise man

140 GLAUCUS; OR,

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 alg’,” more worthless than
the very sea-weed, says the old Roman: and yet no
torn scrap of that very sea-weed, which to-morrow
will 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 141

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
but 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 some-
thing 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 :

142 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 super-

natural

miraculous, if you will; for no natural and
physical cause whatsoever can be assigned for them ;
while if any one 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 mecrease the
wonder? Which is more strange, that an imexph-
cable 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 ;

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 143

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

144 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 T cannot give or
take away? Jam 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 thou knowest. Who will tell
thee what life is, save He who is the Lord of life?
And if He will not tell thee, be sure it is because
thou needest not to know. At least, why seek God
in nature, the living among the dead? He is not

here: He is risen.”

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 145

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 key-
note 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

L

146 GLAUCUS; OR,

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 mland:
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,

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 147

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, 1s
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 in-
crease, and not interfere with the amusements of a
water-party.

The naturalist’s dredge, of which Myr. 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

L2

148 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 con-
tents roughly out through the mouth. The drageine-
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,

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 149

and a couple of buckets, to receive the large lumps
of oysters and serpulze which you will probably bring
to the surface.

As for a dredging ground, one may be found, I sup-
pose, 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, in one day, an aquarium
rivalling any of those in the “Tank-house” at the
Zoological Gardens.

In general, the south coast a England, to the
eastward of Portland, affords bad dredging-cround.
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

150 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 change-
able and barren sea-floor. Yet the immense quanti-
ties 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. 4), Notamia Bursaria, and
Serialaria Lendigera, abound within tide marks; and

as the place is so much visited by Londoners, it may

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 151

be worth while to give a few hints as to what might
be done, by any one whose curiosity has been excited
by the salt-water tanks of the Zoological Gardens.
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)*
with strange snipe-bills (which they cannot open)
and snake-lke bodies; small cuttle-fish (Sepiole)
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 sky-lark does in air, by rapid winnow-
ings of their glassy side-fins, while they watch you
with bright lzard-eyes; the whole animal being a
combination of the vertebrate and the mollusc, so
utterly fantastic and abnormal, that (had not the
family been among the commonest, from the earliest
geological epochs) it would have seemed to man’s de-
ductive intellect, a form almost as impossible as the

* Plate XI. Fig. 1,

152 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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: per-
haps 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. 2), 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 Idaha Aspersa of Alder
and Hancock.

At the bottom of the rock pools, behind St. Leo-
nard’s baths, may be found hundreds of the Snipe’s
feather Anemone (Sagartia Troglodytes), of every hue;
from the common brown and grey snipe’s feather

kind, to the white-horned Hesperus, the orange-

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 153

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 strait 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

154 GLAUCUS ; OR,

Pectinaria Belgica. He is an Annelid, or true
worm, connected with the Serpule and Sabelle
of which I have spoken already, and holds him-
self in his case lke 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 (1 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

-

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 155

twisted masses of Serpule,* 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 about one of
the central 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

* Plate X. Fig, 1.
+ Do Serpule see? I cannot help thinking so, with my friend
their keeper at the Zoological Gardens. But wiser men than I say

they can find no organs of vision.

156 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 crim-
son; 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:
but handle them not too roughly, lest, whether in
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 noble 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 157

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
outer edge of the shell as the valves are half open,
but for the sake of the parasites outside: corallines
of exquisite delicacy, Plumulariz and Sertulariz, 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 hand-
somest of our Hydroid Polypes, I must refer you to

Johnston, or, failing him, to Landsborough; and go

158 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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,* which will
open into a furbelowed flower, furred with innumer-
able delicate tentacula; and in the centre, a mouth
of the most brilliant 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, in my opinion, with
which it has pleased God to bedeck this lower world.

These and much more you will find on the scal-
lops, 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,

* There are very fine specimens in the Zoological Gardens.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 159

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, beside, 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 of 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 satisfac-
tion. 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

160 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 but the other
day 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 161

would not come. Two o'clock was past, and still the
red mainsails of the skiffs hung motionless, and their

images quivered held 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 hun-
dred 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 wrapt 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

M

162 GLAUCUS ; OR,

elearer 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
sanatory reform, proved long since a moral duty to
God and man, possible, easy, even pecuniarily profit-
able, 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 perfec-
tion 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 dis-
covering its possibility. Created it? Alas for the

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 1638

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 sanatory reform at best are but clumsy
imitations of the unseen wonders which every ani-
malcule 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

M 2

164 GLAUCUS ; OR,

little geranium did its best, like a heaven-sent angel,
to right the wrong which man’s ignorance had be-
gotten, 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 ae
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 Com-
mons would but summon one of the little Paramecia
from any Thames’ sewer-mouth, to give his evidence
before their next Cholera Committee, sanatory blue-

books, invaluable as they are, would be superseded

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 165

for ever and a day ; and sanatory reformers would no
longer have to confess, that they know of no means
of stopping the smells which sometimes drive 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 per-
quisites, and teaching him how to eat them. Cer-
tainly (without going the length of the Caribs, who

uphold Cannibalism because, they say, it makes war

166 GLAUCUS ; OR,

cheap, and precludes entirely the need of a commis-
sariat), 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 sanatory martyr, having, hike 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
oar-weed (Laminaria), three or four large pieces of
stale thornback, of most evil savour, and highly pre-
judicial to the purity of the sea, and the health of

the neighbouring herrings. Happy Squinado! He

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 167

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 explana-
tions. 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 informa-
tion,’ “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,

168 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 pro-

posals of old Fourier—that scavengers, chimney-

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 169

sweeps, and other workers in disgusting employ-
ments, 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, lke
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-crowned polype, like
(to quote Mr. Gosse’s comparison) the unexpanded
buds of the acacia.*

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,f each of which, too, pro-

trudes its living flower; on another leg is a fresh

* Coryne Ramosa. + Campanularia Integra.

OR: GLAUCUS ; OR,

species, like a little heather-bush of whitest ivory,*
and every needle leaf a polype cell—let us stop
before the imagination grows dizzy with the con-
templation 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.

* Crisidia Eburnea.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. lly,

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

W2 GLAUCUS ; OR,

to their deoxygenating the water while alive, lke
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 Ingen-
housz, and though doubted by the great Ellis, satis-
factorily 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 ?

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 173

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

174 GLAUCUS; OR,

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 reoxygenated 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 experi-
ments, “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 respi-
rations 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 75

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 ex-
hibition of fresh and salt water tanks opened last
year 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 last book, “ The
Aquarium,’ is principally devoted, though it con-
tains, besides, sketches of coast scenery, in his usual
charming style, and descriptions of rare sea-animals,
with wise and godly 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

176 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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,—
abt ev bépet, ovT ev OTwHpn.

Those who have never seen one of them can never
imagine (and neither Mr. Gosse’s pencil nor our
clumsy words can ever describe to them) the gor-
geous 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 chlorists”—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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. ibd

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 either in his study, or
in the tank-house at the Zoological Gardens; and as
it may be seen also, by any one 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 tho-
roughly 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 dif-
ferent circumstances, and especially those movements
which seem to us mere vagaries, undirected by any

N

178 GLAUCUS ; OR,

suggestible motive or cause, well examined. <A rich
fruit of result, often new and curious and unex-
pected, will, I am sure, reward any one 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,* 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
names, and quarrelings as to the first discovery of
that beetle or this butter-cup,—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 im

* Aquarium, p. 163.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 179

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 observa-
tion 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 sqg. ; 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, there-
fore, will not come amiss here. They shall be such
as any one can put into practice, who goes down to

N 2

180 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 181

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-
erained 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.

182 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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.

Now for the live stock. In the crannies of every
rock you will find sea-anemones (Actiniz); 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.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 183

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 chrysanthe-
mums; each has expanded into a hundred-petalled
flower, crimson, pink, purple, or orange; touch one,
and it shrinks together like a sensitive plant, dis-
playing at the root of the petals a ring of brilliant
turquoise beads. That is the commonest of all the
Actinize (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 noble 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 bril-
liant blood-red ; another a delicate sea-blue striped
with pink ; but most have the disc and the innumer-
able arms striped and ringed with various shades of

grey and brown. Shall we get them? By all means

184 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 Actinie stand for a day or two in the
dish, and then, picking out the liveliest and hand-
somest, 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 Cras-
sicornis) 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
cet them, The one is Dianthus, which I have already

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 185

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 fills the lower cracks of
rocks.

But you will want more than these anemones,

186 | GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 he 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 sideling 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

Lard

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 187

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 ulvee, but when the film of young weed
begins to form, you will see it mown off every morn-
ing 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

188 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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.” *

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 beau-
tiful forms which they contain, will prove to you
sufficiently.+

You have two more enemies to guard against; dust,
and heat. Ifthe 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, (it should be done once a day, if pos-

* P, 34. Figures of it are given in Plate VIII.
++ Remember always, moreover, that if you cannot procure these

animals yourself, you may get them all, and more, from my friend,
Mr. Lloyd, of Portland Road.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 189

sible,) 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. Iam 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 how’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 cer-
tainly 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 leht, your sea-
weeds will neither thrive nor keep the water sweet.
With plenty of light you will see, to quote Mr. Gosse

190 GLAUCUS ; OR,

once more,* “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 sum-

mer you find the water in your vase sink below its

= Po 259,

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 191

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 fora
few weeks, it would become a mere brine-pan.

But how will you move your treasures up to town 4

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)

192 GLAUCUS; OR,

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

* Mr. W. Bolton, Chemist, of 146, Holborn Bars, London, or
Mr. Lloyd, will furnish the materials.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 193

among timber, has multiplied, self-sown, to so pro-
digious an extent, that it bids fair, in a few years, to
choke the navigation not only of our canals and fen-
rivers, but of the Thames itself:* 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 (Myriophylium),
whose comb-like leaves are the haunt 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

* 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.

.¢)

194 GLAUCUS ; OR,

pair of oars, in search of animalcules, and the moment
the lights are out, turns head over heels, rights him-
self, 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 interest-
ing of all the tribes of the Naiads,—(Qn 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 httle galleries in the banks: and those
“ caddises,” which crawl on the bottom in the stiller
waters, inclosed, 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 195

surface, become flying Phryganese (caperers and
sand-flies), generally of various shades of fawn-
colour; and the water-crickets (though an unscien-
tific 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 (Ephemeree) ; whose
erace of form, and delicacy of colour, give them a
right to rank among the most exquisite of God’s
creations, from the tiny “Spinner” (Baétis) of in-
descent 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 transforma-
tions, might give many an hours 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 out-

On?

196 GLAUCUS ; OR,

side, 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 men-
tioned these curious water-flies, I cannot help going
a little farther, and saying, that lucky is the fisher-
man who is also a naturalist. A fair scientific know-
ledee 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 inn-doors
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; and which, nevertheless, kill,
simply because they are (in colour, which is all that

fish really care for) exact likenesses of some obscure

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 197

local species, which happens to lie 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 delu-
sion 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 experi-
ment; and that the shop patterns, originally excel-
lent, 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, pos-
sibly, like the brood which came out three years

since on some stream a hundred miles away, is quite

198 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 Ephemere,
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 anglers 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 199

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 exeep-
tion 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

200 GLAUCUS ; OR,

and every one of the party, I will warrant, will find
his fellow-correspondents (perhaps previously un-
known 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, some-
thing 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,” Bells “ 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,

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 201

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 briliant power of word-painting combined with
deep and earnest religious feeling, which makes them
as morally valuable as they are intellectually inte-
resting. 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 syste-
matic or scientific inquirers ; while Mr. Gosse, in his
“ Naturalist on the Shores of Devon,” his “ Tour in
Jamaica,” his “Tenby,” and his “Canadian Natu-

ralist,” has done for those three places what White

202 GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 classifi-
cation, by far the completest handbook extant. He
has contrived in it to compress more sound know-
ledge of vast classes of the animal kingdom than I
ever saw before in so small a space.*

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 to 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

* But far above all these, in interest, ranks M. Quatrefages:
“Rambles of a Naturalist” (about the Mediterranean and the
French Coast), translated by M. Otté.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 203

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 descrip-
tion, 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 (now 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 hable 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 Pro-
fessor Harvey's large work on the British Algw, and
to the new edition of Professor Johnston’s invalu-
able “British Zoophytes.” Miss Gifford’s “Marine
Botanist,’ Ed. 3, and Dr. Cocks’s “Sea-weed Col-
lector’s Guide,” have also been recommended by a
high authority.

For general Zoology the best books for beginners

204 GLAUCUS ; OR,

are, perhaps, as an introduction to comparative
anatomy, Professor Rymer Jones’s “ Animal King-
dom ;” 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 microscopic animalcules, Miss Agnes Catlow’s
“Drops of Water” will teach the young more than
they will ever remember, and serve as a good in-
troduction to those teeming abysses of the unseen
world, which must be afterwards traversed under the
ouidance of Hassall and Ehrenberg.

For Ornithology, there is no book, after all, like
dear old Bewick, passé though he may be in a
scientific point of view. There is a good little
British ornithology, too, published in Sir W.
Jardine’s “Naturalist’s Library,” and another by
Mr. Gosse. And Mr. Knox’s “ Ornithological
Rambles in Sussex,” with Mr. St. John’s “ High-
land Sports,” and “Tour in Sutherlandshire,” are
the monographs of naturalists, gentlemen, and

sportsmen, which remind one at every page (and

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 205

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 Intro-
duction 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 introduc-

206 GLAUCUS ; OR,

tion to systematic botany which has yet appeared.
Trained, and all but selftrained, ike 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 gra-
titude for first lessons in scientific accuracy and
patience,—lessons taught, not dully and dryly at the
book and desk, but livingly and genially, in adven-
turous 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 accom-
pany 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 207

fit for boys (as Botany is for girls) who have no op-
portunity of visiting the sea-shore, Catlow’s “ Popular
British Entomology,” having coloured plates (a de-
light to young people), and saying something of
all the orders, is, probably, still a good work for
beginners. Mr. Dallas’s forthcoming “Elements of
Entomology” promises to be an admirable book, and
also a very cheap one, of the same kind. Douglas's
“World of Insects” is (I am told) “A capital book
to set a beginner on wishing to know more.”

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,

208 GLAUCUS ; OR,

forming a Calendar of Entomological Operations,” *
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 delight-
ful; 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 ex-
pression of a love for all things Deautiful, 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

* Van Voorst & Co. price 3s.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 209

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 awhile 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.”

And so I end this little book, hoping, even pray-
ing, that it may encourage a few more labourers to
eo 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.

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APPENDIX.

EXPLANATION OF PLATES,

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APPENDIX:

Riga be
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 sup-
pose 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

214 APPENDIX.

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 Poly-
zoa Which seem to remove them from Zoophytology
to a place in the system of nature more nearly con-
nected 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 con-
tractile 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

APPENDIX. 215

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. 7 6
indicates the natural size of the piece of branch re-
presented ; but it must be remembered that this is

only a small portion of the bushy shrub,

216 APPENDIX.

CAMPANULARIA SYRINGA. 1. 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 length-

ened, cylindrical, transparent vases.

CAMPANULARIA VOLUBILIS. 2. I. fig. 9.

A still more beautiful species, with lengthened
foot-stalks ringed at each end. ‘The polype is re-
markable for the protrusion and contractile power of

its lips. It has about twenty knobbed tentacula.

POLYZOA.

Among Potyzoa 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

APPENDIX. 217

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 ten-
tacles, 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. 1. I. fig. 3.

From a group in one of Mr. Lloyd’s vases. Fig. 3 a4
is the natural size of the central group of cells, in a

specimen coiled round a thread-like weed. Under-

218 APPENDIX.

neath this, is the same portion enlarged. When
maenified 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. PI. I. fig. 4.

I have only drawn the cells from a prepared speci-

men. ‘The polypes are like those described above.

GEMELLARIA LORICATA. Pl. I. jig. 5.

Here the cells are placed in pairs, back to back.

5 @ is a very small portion on the natural scale.

APPENDIX. 219

CELLULARIA OCILIATA. £1. I. jig. 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 moveable lower beak. The
whole head keeps up a nodding motion, and the
moveable 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 6 shows the form

220 APPENDIX.

of one of these “ birds’ heads,” and fig. 7 ¢, its position

on the cell.

FLUSTRA LINEATA. Pl. I. fig. 1.

In Flustree, 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. fl. I. fig. 10.

Noramia Bursaria. 1. 1. fig. 11.

The “tobacco-pipe” appendages, fig. 11 6, are of
unknown use: they are probably analogous to the
birds’ heads in the Cellulariee.

APPENDIX. 921

PLATE N:

CoRALS AND SEA ANEMONES.

CARYOPHYLL&A SMITHIT. Pl. V. fig.2. Pl. VI. fig. 3.

THE connexion between Brainstones, Mushroom
Corals, and other Madrepores abounding on Poly-
nesian 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. Un-
like Actinia, its body is supported by a stony skeleton
of calcareous plates arranged edgewise so as to ra-

diate from the centre. But as we find some Molluses

Zoe, APPENDIX.

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 Caryophyllea. 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 @ represents a
section of the latter, to be compared with the basal

disk of Sagartia.

SAGARTIA ANGUICOMA. PI. V. jig. 3, a, 0.

This genus has been separated from Actinia on

account of its habit of throwing out threads when

APPENDIX. 223

irritated. Although my specimens often assumed the
form represented 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.

BALANOPHYLLHZA REGIA. Pl. V. jig. 1.

Another species of British madrepore, found by
Mr. Gosse at Ilfracombe, and by Mr. Kingsley at
Lundy Island. It is smaller than C. Smithu, of a
very bright colour, and always covers the upper part
of its bony skeleton, in which the plates are dif
ferently arranged from those of the smaller species.
Fig. 1 shows the tentacles expanded in an unusual
degree; 1 a, animal contracted; 1 0, the coral; lc,

a tentacle enlarged.

224 APPENDIX.

PLATE VI.
CoRALS AND SEA ANEMONES.
ACTINIA MESEMBRYANTHEMUM. Pl. VI. jig. 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 @ 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

APPENDIX. 225

like eyes, but whose purpose is not exactly ascer-
tained. Fig. 1 represents the disk only partially

expanded.

BUNODES ORASSICORNIS. Pl. VI. jig. 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. gem-
macea 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 pro-
duced by the nettling threads which proceed from

them.

CARYOPHYLLZA SmituHi. Pl. VI. jig. 3.

This figure is to show a whiter variety, with the

flesh and tentacles fully expanded.

bo
bo
(=>)

APPENDIX.

PVATH WEEE
MOLLUSCA.

NASSA RETICULATA. PI. VIII. fig. 2, a, b, ¢, d, 6 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
Nassee 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 6); each capsule con-
tained about a hundred eges. The capsules opened
on the 16th of May, permitting the escape of roti-
ferous 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

APPENDIX. pay)

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 disap-
pointed, as the embryos died. Fig.2 f is the tongue

of a Nassa, from a photograph by Dr. Kingsley.

EXPLANATION OF THE PLATES IN BRIEF.

Ege

IDO

Fig. 1.

PLATE I.

Frustra Linnata. a, enlarged, with polypes protruding.

. FLustRa FOLIACEA.
. VALKERIA CuscuTa, enlarged ; a, nat. size; b, two tentacles ;

c, tentacles bent inwards; d, enlarged, showing the gradual
eversion of the animal.

. CRISIA DENTICULATA, enlarged; a, nat. size.

. GEMELLARIA Loricata, enlarged; a, nat. size.

. SERTULARIA Roses, enlarged; a, nat. size.

. CELLULARIA CILIaTA, enlarged; a, nat. size; 6, one of the

birds’ heads; ¢, cell and bird’s head, much enlarged.

. CAMPANULARIA SYRINGA, enlarged; a, nat. size.

. CAMPANULARIA VOLUBILIS, enlarged.

. SERIALARIA LENDIGERA.

. Notamra Bursarta, enlarged; a,natural size; b, two pairs

of polype cells, with the tobacco-pipe appendages.

PLATE II.

CaRDIUM RusticumM (TUBERCULATUM).

. Pagurus BERNHARDI, in a Periwinkle shell.

Fig. 1.
. SABELLA VOLUTICORNIS,
. SAND TUBE OF TEREBELLA CONCHILEGA.

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

©

229

PLATE III.

NEMERTES BORLASII.

PLATE IV.

. SYNAPTA DIGITATA; a, separating and throwing out capsul-

iferous threads.
THALASSEMA NEPTUNI.

PLATE V.

. BALANOPHYLL#A REGIA, expanded ; a, contracted ; 5, coral ;

ce, same tentacle enlarged.

. CARYOPHYLLZA SMITHII, partly expanded; «a, section of

bony plates; 6, tentacle.
SacartTra ANGUICOMA, closed ; a, basal disk showing radiat-
ing septa.

. Synapra Drertata, see Plate IV.; a, b, fingered tentacles,

enlarged ; c, spicule; d, anchor lying on its transparent
anchor plate.
8. Virrata; perforated anchor plate; a, spicula.

PLATE VI.

. ActiniA MESEMBRYANTHEMUM partly expanded : a, closed.
. BUNODES CRASSICORNIS.

CARYOPHYLLHZA SMITHII.

PLATE VII.

. Eoutnus MIxiaris, creeping over Modiola barbata.

» # creeping up the glass.
i a hiding under stone.

Fig. 1.

Cc bo

Fig.

ID Oo FP ow PD He

Fig.

PLATE VIII.
Litrorina Lirrorea, see Plate IX. ; a, operculum ; d, pallet ;
c, part of pallet magnified.

. Nassa Reticunata, see Plate XI.; a, egg capsules; 6, c¢,

fry magnified; d, shell of fry; e, pallet magnified.

. PATELLA VULGARIS: a, palate nat. size; b,c, palate enlarged.
. Ecuinus Miriaris, see Plate VII.; a, teeth and digesting

mill; 6, suckers enlarged ; c, spine and socket ; d, portion
of shell denuded; e, Pedicellaria.

. NEMERTES Borwast, see Plate III.; a, head enlarged; B,

head expanded, swallowing a Terebella.

PLATE IX.

. CUCUMARIA HYNDMANNI.
. LITTORINA LITTOREA.
. SIPHUNCULUS BERNHARDUS in shell of Turritella, with

living Balani.

PLATE X.

. SERPULA CONTORTUPLICATA.
. Htnnites PUsIo.

Doris REPANDA.
Eouis PELLUCIDA.

. PHOLADIDHA PAPYRACEA.
. PHOLAS PARVA.
. FISSURELLA GR&CA.

PLATE oF

. SYNGNATHUS LUMBRICIFORMIS.
. Saxtcava Rucosa: a, shell of Saxicava Rugosa.
. Nassa RETICULATA.

PLATE XIL

. PEACHIA HASTATA.
. URASTER RUBENS.

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