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Presented to the

\

LIBRARY of the
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

by

Mrs. Hilary Nicholls

—

GLAUCUS;

OK,

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2018 with funding from
University of Toronto

https://archive.org/details/glaucusorwonders00king_0

GLAUCUS;

. OR,

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

CY

CHARLES KINGSLEY,

AUTHOR OF “AMYAS LEIGH,” “ HYPATIA,” ETC.

BOSTON:

TICKNOR AND FIELDS.

M DCCC LY.

CAMBRIDGE;

METCALF AND COMPANY, PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY.

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 me¬
morial 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 to¬
gether the works of our Father in Heaven.

Yours ever gratefully and faithfully,

C. KINGSLEY.

Bideford, April 24, 1855.

Beyond the shadow of the ship
I watched the water-snakes :

They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfin light
Fell off in hoary flakes.

0 happy living things ! no tongue
Their beauty might declare :

A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware.

Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.

GL AU CHS;

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, lialf-ashamed, of making one more in the
“ ignoble army of idlers,” who saunter about the
cliffs, and sands, and quays ; to whom every
wharf is but a “ wharf of Lethe,” by which they
rot “ dull as the oozy weed.” You foreknow
your doom by sad experience. A great deal of
dressing, a lounge in the club-room, a stare out
of the window with the telescope, an attempt to
take a bad sketch, a walk up one parade and
down another, interminable reading of the silliest

1

9

GLAUCU3 ; OR,

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 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 inno¬
cent gulls and willocks, who go off to die slowly,
a sport which you feel in your heart to be
wanton, and cowardly, and cruel, and yet cannot
find in your heart to stop, because “ the lads
have nothing else to do, and at all events it
keeps them out of the billiard-room ” ; and
after all, and worst of all, at night a soulless
rechauffe, of third-rate London frivolity ; this is
the life-in-death in which thousands spend the
golden weeks of summer, and in which you
confess with a sigh that you are going to spend
them.

Now I will not be so rude as to apply to you
the old hymn-distich about one who

“ Finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do” :

but does it not seem to you, that there must
surely be many a thing worth looking at ear-

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

o

O

nestly, and thinking over earnestly, in a world
like this, about the making of the least part
whereof God has employed ages and ages,
further back than wisdom can guess or imagi-
nation picture, and upholds that least part every
moment by laws and forces so complex and so
wonderful, that science, when it tries to fathom
them, can only learn how little it can learn ?
And does it not seem to you that six weeks’
rest, free from the cares of town business, and
the whirlwind of town pleasure, could not be
better spent than in examining those wonders
a little, instead of wandering up and down like
the many, still wrapt up each in 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
Wonders of the Shore? For wonders there are
there around you at every step, stranger than
ever opium-eater dreamed, and yet to be seen
at no greater expense than a very little time
and trouble.

4

GLAUCUS ; OR,

Perhaps you smile in answer, at the notion
of becoming a “ Naturalist ” : and yet you can¬
not 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 some¬
what of a bore : and yet you cannot deny that
they find an enjoyment in it, and are more active,
more cheerful, more self-forgetful over it, than
they would have been over novels and gossip,
crochet and Berlin-wool. At least you will
confess that the abomination of “Fancy work,”
that standing cloak for dreamy idleness, (not
to mention the injury which it does to poor
starving needlewomen,) lias all but vanished
from your drawing-room since the “ Lady-ferns ”
and “Venus’s hair” appeared; and that you
could not help yourself looking now and then
at the said “Venus’s hair,” and agreeing that
nature’s real beauties were somewhat superior

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

0

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 wander¬
ing in Epping Forest at dead of night, with a
dark lantern, a jar of strange sweet compound,
and innumerable pocketsful 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, or poison pheasants, but was simply
“ sugaring the trees for moths,” as a blameless
entomologist? And when, in self-justification,
he took you to his house in Islington, and
showed you the glazed and corked drawers full
of delicate insects, which had evidently cost him
in the collecting the spare hours of many busy
years, and many a pound too, out of his small
salary, were you not a little puzzled to make out
what spell there could be in those “ useless ”
moths, to draw out of his warm bed, twenty
miles down the Eastern Counties Railway, and
into the damp forest like a deer-stealer, a sober
white-headed Tim Linkinwater like him, your

0

GLAUCUS ; OR,

very best man of business, given to the reading
of Scotch political economy, and gifted with
peculiarly clear notions on the currency ques¬
tion ?

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
honorable one. A Cromarty stone-mason is
now perhaps the most important man in the
city of Edinburgh, by dint of a work on fos¬
sil fishes ; and the successful investigator of
the minutest animals takes place unquestioned
among men of genius, and, like the philosopher
of old Greece, is considered, by virtue of his
science, fit company for dukes and princes. Nay,
the study is now more than honorable ; it is
(what to many readers will be a far higher
recommendation) even fashionable. Every wTell-
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

TIIE WONDERS OF THE SHORE,

i

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 gen¬
erations since, when the naturalist was looked
on as a harmless enthusiast, who went “ bug-
hunting,” simply because lie 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 ITordle Cliffs, for exploring which there is
now established a society of subscribers and cor¬
respondents. They can remember, too, when, on
the first appearance of Bewick’s “ British Birds,”
the excellent sportsman who brought it down
to the Forest was asked, Why on earth he had
bought a book about “ cock-sparrows ” ? and had
to justify himself again and again, simply by
lending the book to his brother sportsmen, to
convince them that there were rather more than
a dozen sorts of birds (as they then held) indi¬
genous to Hampshire. But the book, perhaps,
which turned the tide in favor of Natural His-

8

GLAUCUS ; OE,

tory, among the higher classes at least, in the
South of England, was White’s “ History of Sel-
bourne.” A Hampshire gentleman and sports¬
man, 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 fellow!”
till they opened the book itself, and discovered
to their surprise that it read like any novel.
And then came a burst of confused, but honest
admiration ; from the young squire’s “ Bless me !
who would have thought that there were so many
wonderful things to be seen in one’s own park ! ”
to the old squire’s more morally valuable “ Bless
me ! why I have seen that and that a hundred
times, and never thought till now how wonderful
they were ! ”

There were great excuses, though, of old, for
the contempt in which the naturalist was held ;
great excuses for the pitying tone of banter with
which the Spectator talks of “ the ingenious ”
Don Saltero (as no doubt the Neapolitan gen¬
tlemen talked of Ferrante Imperato the apoth-

THE WONDERS OF TnE SHORE.

9

ecary, and liis museum) ; great excuses for Vol¬
taire, when he classes the collection of butterflies
among the other “ bigarrures de l’esprit humain.”
For, in the last generation, the needs of the
world were different. It had no time for butter¬
flies and fossils. While Buonaparte was hover¬
ing on the Boulogne coast, the pursuits and the
education which were needed were such as
would raise up men to tight him ; so the coarse,
fierce, hard-handed training of our grandfathers
came when it was wanted, and did the work
which was required of it, else we had not been
here now. Let us be thankful that we have
had leisure for science ; and show now in war
that our science has at least not unmanned us.

Moreover, Natural History, if not fifty years
ago, certainly a hundred years ago, was hard¬
ly worthy of men of practical common sense.
After, indeed, Linne, by his invention of ge¬
neric and specific names, had made classification
possible, and by his own enormous labors had
shown how much could be done when once a
method was established, the science has grown
rapidly enough. But before him little or noth¬
ing had been put into form definite enough
to allure those who (as the many always will)

10

GLAUCUS ; OR,

prefer to profit by others’ discoveries, than to
discover for themselves ; and Natural History
was attractive only to a few earnest seekers, who
found too much trouble in disencumbering their
own minds of the dreams of bygone generations,
(whether facts, like cockatrices, basilisks, and
krakens, the breeding of bees out of a dead ox,
and of geese from barnacles, or theories, like
those of the four elements, the vis plastrix in
Nature, animal spirits, and the other musty
heirlooms of Aristotleism and Neo-Platonism,)
to try to make a science popular, which as yet
was not even a science at all. Honor to them,
nevertheless. Honor to Ray and his illustrious
contemporaries in Holland and France. Honor
to Seba and Aldrovandus ; to Pomet, with his
“ Ilistorie of Drugges ” ; even to the ingenious
Don Saltero, and his tavern-museum in Cheyne
Walk. Where all was chaos, every man was
useful who could contribute a single spot of
organized standing-ground in the shape of a fact
or a specimen. But it is a question whether
Natural History would have ever attained its
present honors, had not Geology arisen, to con¬
nect every other branch of Natural History with
problems as vast and awful as they are captivat-

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 11

ing to the imagination. Nay, the very opposition
with which Geology met was of as great benefit
to the sister sciences as to itself. For, when
questions belonging to the most sacred hereditary
beliefs of Christendom were supposed to be
affected by the verification of a fossil shell, or
the proving that the Maestricht “ homo diluvii
testis ” was, after all, a monstrous eft, it became
necessary to work upon Conchology, Botany, and
Comparative Anatomy, with a care and a rev¬
erence, 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 man¬
ly mind as Mathematics and Metaphysics.

But how very lately have they attained that
firm and honorable standing-ground ! It is a
question, whether, even twenty years ago, Geol¬
ogy, as it then stood, was worth troubling one’s
head about, so little had been really proved.
And heavy and up-hill was the work, even with¬
in the last fifteen years, of those who stead¬
fastly set themselves to the task of proving, and
of asserting at all risks, that the Maker of

12

GLAUCUS ; OR,

the coal seam and the diluvial cave could not
be a “ Deus quidam deceptor,” and that the facts
which the rocks and the silt revealed were sa¬
cred, 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,
Lyell and Jamieson, and the group of brave men
who accompanied and followed them, will be
looked back to as moral benefactors to their
race ; and almost as martyrs, also, when it is re¬
membered 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 labored
on with a noble recklessness, determined to
speak the thing which they had seen, and
neither more nor less, sure that God could
take better care than they of Ilis own ever-

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

1 9
1 O

lasting truth ; and now they have conquered ;
the facts which were twenty years ago denounced
as contrary to Revelation, are at last accepted
not merely as consonant with, but as corrobo¬
rative thereof ; and sound practical geologists,
like Hugh Miller, in his “ Footprints of the
Creator,” and Professor Sedgwick, in the inval¬
uable notes to his “ Discourse on the Studies of
Cambridge,” are wielding in defence of Chris¬
tianity the very science which was faithlessly
and cowardly expected to subvert it.

But if you seek, reader, rather for pleasure
than for wisdom, you can find it in such studies,
pure and undefiled.

Happy, truly, is the naturalist. lie has no
time for melancholy dreams. The earth becomes
to him transparent ; everywhere he sees signifi¬
cances, harmonies, laws, chains of cause and
effect endlessly interlinked, which draw him
out of the narrow sphere of self-interest and
self-pleasing, into a pure and wholesome region
of solemn joy and wonder. He goes up some
Snowdon valley ; to him it is a solemn spot
(though unnoticed by his companions), where
the stag’s-horn club-moss ceases to straggle
across the turf, and the tufted alpine club-

14

GLAUCUS ; OR,

moss takes its place ; for he is now in a new
world ; a region whose climate is eternally influ¬
enced by some fresh law (after which he vainly
guesses with a sigh at his own ignorance) which
renders life impossible to one species, possible
to another. And it is a still more solemn
thought to him, that it was not always so ; that
aeons and ages back, that rock which he passed
a thousand feet below was fringed, not as now
with fern, and blue bugle, and white bramble-
flowers, but perhaps with the alp-rose and the
“ gemsen-kraut ” of Mont Blanc, at least with
Alpine Saxifrages which have now retreated fif¬
teen hundred 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 smoothed and rounded sur¬
face of rock, polished, remark, across the strata,
and against the grain ; and furrowed here and
there, as if by iron talons, with long parallel
scratches. It was the crawling of a glacier
which polished that rock-face ; the stones fallen
from Snowdon peak into the half-liquid lake of
ice above, which ploughed those furrows. ACons
and aeons ago, before the time when Adam first

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

15

“ Embraced his Eve in happy hour,

And every bird of 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 unmis¬
takable, boundless in significance, like Crusoe’s
one savage footprint on the sea-shore : and the
naturalist acknowledges the finger-mark of God,
and wonders, and worships.

Happy, especially, is the sportsman who is
also a naturalist: for as he roves in pursuit of
his game,- over hills or up the beds of streams
where no one but a sportsman ever thinks of
going, he will be certain to see things note-
worthy, which the mere naturalist would never
find, simply because he could never guess that
they were there to be found. I do not speak
merely of the rare birds. which may be shot, the
curious facts as to the habits of fish which may
be observed, great as these pleasures are. I
speak of the scenery, the weather, the geological
formation of the country, its vegetation, and the
living habits of its denizens. A sportsman out
in all weathers, and often dependent for success
on his knowledge of “what the sky is going to

16

GLAUCUS ; OR,

do,” has opportunities for becoming a meteo¬
rologist which no one beside but a sailor pos¬
sesses ; and one has often longed for a scientific
gamekeeper or huntsman, who, by discovering a
law for the mysterious and seemingly capricious
phenomena of “ scent,” might perhaps throw
light on a hundred dark passages of liygrome-
try. The fisherman, too, — what an inexhaustible
treasury of wonders lies at his feet, in the sub¬
aqueous 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 ob¬
serving 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. More¬
over 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

17

“ Come when you do call for them.”

What to do then? You are sitting, perhaps,
in your coracle, upon some mountain tarn, wait¬
ing for a wind, and waiting in vain.

“ Kerne luft an kerne seite,

Todes-stille furchterlich ” ;

As Gothe has it, —

“ Und der schiffer sieht bekummert
Glatte flache rings umher.”

You paddle to the shore on the side whence
the wind ought to come, if it had any spirit
in it ; tie the coracle to a stone, light your
cigar, lie down on your back upon the grass,
grumble, and finally fall asleep. In the mean
while, probably, the breeze has come on, and
there has been half an hour’s lively fishing curl ;
and you wake just in time to see the last ripple
of it sneaking off at the other side of the lake,
leaving all as dead calm as before.

Now how much better, instead of falling
asleep, to have walked quietly round the lake¬
side, and asked of your own brains and of
nature the question, “ How did this lake come
here ? What does it mean ? ”

It is a hole in the earth. True, but how was
the hole made ? There must have been huge

2

18

GLAUCUS ; OR,

forces at work to form such a cliasm. Probably
the mountain was actually opened from within by
an earthquake, and when the strata fell together
again, the portion at either end of the chasm,
being perhaps crushed together with greater
force, remained higher than the centre, and so
the water lodged between them. Perhaps it
was formed thus. You will at least agree that
its formation must have been a grand sight
enough, and one during which a spectator would
have had some difficulty in keeping his footing.

And when you learn that this convulsion prob¬
ably took place at the bottom of an ocean, hun¬
dreds 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 grum¬
ble, and ashamed to grumble.

Yet after all, I hardly think the lake was
formed in this way, and suspect that it may have
been dry land 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

19

into the valley behind us, while before us, it
shelves gradually into the lake ; forty yards out,
as you know, there is not ten feet water ;
and then a steep bank, the edge whereof we
and the big trout know well, sinks suddenly to
unknown depths. On the opposite side, that
vast flat-topped wall of rock towers up shore¬
less into the sky, seven hundred feet perpendic¬
ular ; the deepest water of all, we know, is at
its very foot. Right and left, two shoulders
of down slope into the lake. Now turn round
and look down the gorge. Remark that this
pebble-bank on which we stand reaches some
fifty yards downward : you see the loose stones
peeping out everywhere. We may fairly sup¬
pose 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,

f

20

GLAUCUS ; OR,

right and left, are slate too ; you can see that
at a glance. But the stones of the pebble-
bank are a close-grained, yellow-spotted rock.
They are Syenite ; and (you may believe me
or not, as you will) they were once upon a time
in the condition of hasty-pudding heated to some
800 degrees of Fahrenheit, and in that condition
shoved their way up somewhere or other through
these slates. But where ? whence on earth did
these Syenite pebbles come ? Let us walk round
to the cliff on the opposite side, and see. It is
worth while ; for even if my guess be wrong,
there is good spinning with a brass minnow round
the angles of the rocks.

Now see. Between the cliff-foot and the slop¬
ing 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 ? Hun¬
dreds 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

21

something, must have carried them ; for stones
do not fly, nor swim either.

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 lie all together; and a
volcano would have hardly made so compact a
shot, not being in the habit of using Ely’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 pogslie, 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 earth-
bank ? And do you 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 in¬
clined to come away, till the solid core of the rock

22

GLAUCUS ; OK,

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 those effects ?

There is but one ; and that, if you have been
an Alpine traveller, much more if you have been
a chamois hunter, you have seen many a time
(whether you knew it or not) at the very same
work.

Ice? Yes; ice; Hrymir the frost-giant, and
no one else. And if you will look at the facts,
you will see how ice may have done it. Our
friend John Jones’s report of plains and bogs
and a lake above makes it quite possible that in
the “ Ice age ” (Glacial Epoch, as the big-word-
mongers call it) there was above that cliff a great
neve, or snowfield, such as you have seen often
in the Alps at the head of each glacier. Over
the face of this cliff a glacier has crawled down
from that neve, polishing the face of the rock in
its descent : but the snow, having no large and
deep outlet, has not slid down in a sufficient
stream to reach the vale below, and form a gla¬
cier of the first order ; and has therefore stopped
short on the other side of the lake, as a glacier of

THE WONDERS OF TIIE SHORE.

23

the second order, which ends in an ice-cliff hang¬
ing high upon the mountain-side, and kept from
further progress by daily melting. If you have
ever gone up the Mer de Glace to the Tacul, you
saw a magnificent specimen of this sort on your
right hand, just opposite the Tacul, in the Gla¬
cier de Trelaporte, which comes down from the
Aio-uille de Charmoz.

O

This explains our pebble-ridge. The stones
which the glacier rubbed off the cliff beneath it,
it carried forward, slowly but surely, till they saw
the light again in the face of the ice-cliff, and
dropped out of it under the melting of the sum¬
mer sun, to form a huge dam across the ravine ;
till the “Ice age” past, a more genial climate
succeeded, and neve and glacier melted away: but
the “ moraine ” of stones did not, and remain to
this day, the dam which keeps up the waters of
the lake.

There is my explanation. If you can find a
better, do ; but remember always that it must
include an answer to — “ flow 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

24

GLAUCUS ; OK,

gone back, or been led back by fact and common
sense, into the most awful and sublime depths,
into an epos of the destruction and re-creation of
a former world.

This is but a single instance ; I might give
hundreds. This one, nevertheless, may have
some effect in awakening you to the boundless
world of wonders which is all around you, and
make you ask yourself seriously, “ What branch
of Natural History shall I begin to investigate, if
it be but for a few weeks, this summer ? ”

To which I answer, Try “the Wonders of the
Shore.” There are along every sea-beacli more
strange things to be seen, and those to be seen
easily, than in any other field of observation
which you will find in these islands. And on
the shore only will you have the enjoyment of
finding new species, of adding your mite to the
treasures of science.

For not only the English ferns, but the natural
history of all our land species, are now well-nigh
exhausted. Our home botanists, entomologists,
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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

25

geologist, indeed, especially in the remotest dis¬
tricts, much remains to be done, but only at a
heavy outlay of time, labor, and study ; and the
dilettante (and it is for dilettanti, like myself, that
I principally write) must be content to tread in
the tracks of greater men who have preceded
him, and accept at second and third hand their
foregone conclusions.

But this is most unsatisfactory ; for in giving
up discovery, one gives up one of the highest
enjoyments of natural history. There is a mys¬
terious delight in the discovery of a new species,
akin to that of seeing for the first time in their
native haunts, plants or animals of which one
has till then only read. Some, surely, who read
these pages, have experienced that latter de¬
light ; and, though they might find it hard to
define whence the pleasure arose, know well that
it was a solid pleasure, the memory of which they
would not give up for hard cash. Some, surely,
can recollect at their first sight of the Alpine
Soldanella, the Rhododendron, or the black
Orchis, growing upon the edge of the eternal
snow, a thrill of emotion, not unmixed with
awe ; a sense that they were, as it were, brought
face to face with the creatures of another world ;

26

CLAUCUS ; OR,

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
those who will excuse, or even approve of a
writer for saying that, among the memories of a
month’s eventful tour, those which stand out
as beacon-points, those round which all the
others group themselves, are the first wolf-track
by the road-side in the Kyllwald ; the first sight
of the blue and green Roller-birds, walking
behind the plough like rooks in the tobacco-
fields of Wittlich ; the first ball of Olivine
scraped out of the volcanic slag-heaps of the
Dreisser-Weiher ; the first pair of the Lesser
Bustard which we flushed upon the downs of
the Mosel-kopf ; the first sight of the cloud of
white Ephemerae, fluttering in the dusk like a
summer snowstorm between us and the black
cliffs of the Rheinstein, while the broad Rhine
beneath flashed blood-red in the blaze of the

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

27

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 cra¬
ter, just above the point where the weight of
the fiery lake has burst the side of the great
slag-cup, and rushed forth between two cliffs of
clink-stone across the downs, in a clanging
stream of fire, damming up rivulets, and blasting
its path through forests, far away toward the
valley of the Moselle, the sight of an object
for which was forgotten for the moment that
battle-field of the Titans at our feet, and all
the glorious panorama, Hundsruck and Taunus,
Siebengebirge and Ardennes, and all the crater
peaks around ; and which was — smile not, reader
— our first yellow foxglove.

But what is even this to the delight of finding
a new species ? — of rescuing (as it seems to you)
one more thought of the divine mind from Ilela,
and the realms of the unknown, unclassified,
uncomprehended ? As it seems to you : though
in reality it only seems so, in a world wherein
not a sparrow falls to the ground unnoticed by
our Father who is in heaven.

The truth is, the pleasure of finding new

28

GLAUCUS ; OK,

species is too great ; it is morally dangerous ; for
it brings with it the temptation to look on the
thing found as your own possession, all but your
own creation ; to pride yourself on it, as if God
had not known it for ages since ; even to
squabble jealously for the right of having it
named after you, and of being recorded in the
Transactions of I-know-not-what Society as its
first discoverer : — as if all the angels in heaven
had not been admiring it long before you were
born or thought of.

But to be forewarned is to be forearmed ; and
I seriously counsel you to try if you cannot find
something new this summer along the coast to
which you are going. There is no reason why
you should not be as successful as a friend of
mine, who, with a very slight smattering of sci¬
ence, and very desultory research, obtained last
winter from the Torbay shores three entirely new
species, beside several rare animals which had
escaped all ^naturalists since the lynx-eye of
Colonel Montagu discerned them forty years ago.

And do not despise the creatures because they
are minute. N o doubt we should both of us
prefer helping Rajah Brooke to discover mon¬
strous apes in the tropical forests of Borneo, or

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

29

stumbling with Hooker upon herds of gigantic
“Ammon sheep ” amid the rhododendron thickets
of the Himalaya : but it cannot be ; and “ he is
a fool,” says old Hesiod, “ who knows not how
much better half is than the whole.” Let us be
content with what is within our reach. And
doubt not that in these tiny creatures are myste¬
ries more than we shall ever fathom.

The zoophytes and microscopic animalcules
which people every shore and every drop of
water, have been now raised to a rank in the
human mind, more important, perhaps, than
even those gigantic monsters, whose models fill
the lake at the New Crystal Palace. The re¬
search 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 learn¬
ing ; 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 ap¬
parent pedantry of zoophytology, in which our
old distinctions of “ animal,” “ vegetable,” and

30

GLAUCUS ; OR,

“ mineral ” are trembling in the balance, seem¬
ingly ready to vanish like their fellows, “ the
four elements ” of fire, air, earth, 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 ob¬
jects in proportion to the number of feet or
inches which they occupy in space. No branch,
moreover, has been more humbling to the
boasted rapidity and omnipotence of the human
reason, and taught those who have eyes to see,
and hearts to understand, how weak and way¬
ward, staggering and slow, are the steps of our
fallen race (rapid and triumphant enough in
that broad road of theories which leads to
intellectual destruction) whensoever they tread
the narrow path of true science, which leads
(if I may be allowed to transfer our Lord’s
great parable from moral to intellectual matters)
to Life ; to the living and permanent knowl¬
edge 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 zoopliytology, looks back to the summer of
1754, when good Mr. Ellis, the wise and benev¬
olent West Indian merchant, read before the

TIIE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

31

Royal Society his famous paper proving the
animal nature of corals, and followed it up the
year after by that “ Essay toward a Natural
History of the Corallines, and other like Marine
Productions of the British Coasts,” which forms
the groundwork of all our knowledge on the
subject to this day. The chapter in Dr. G.
Johnston’s British Zoophytes, p. 407, or the
excellent little resume thereof in Dr. Lands-
borough’s book on the same subject, is really a
saddening one, as one sees how loath were not
merely dreamers like Marsigli or Bonnet, but
sound-headed men like Pallas and Linne, to give
up the old sense-bound fancy, that these corals
were vegetables, and their polypes some sort of
living flowers. Yet after all there are excuses
for them. Without our improved microscopes,
and while the sciences of comparative anatomy
and chemistry were yet infantile, it was difficult
to believe what was the truth ; and for this
simple reason ; that, as usual, the truth, when
discovered, turned out far more startling and
prodigious than the dreams which men had
hastily substituted for it ; more strange than
Ovid’s old story that the coral was soft under
the sea, and hardened by exposure to air ; than

32

GLAUCUS ; OR,

Marsigli’s notion, that the coral-polypes were its
flowers ; than Dr. Parsons’ contemptuous denial,
that these complicated forms could be “ the
operations of little, poor, helpless, jelly-like ani¬
mals, 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 labored amid disbelief, ridicule,
and error ; needing again and again to retrace
their steps, and to unlearn more than they learnt,
seeming to go backwards when they were really
progressing most ; and now we have entered into
their labors, 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

33

connected by a common life, and forming a seem¬
ing plant invariable in eacli 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 alike the dead horny polypidoms
which you hold may be, the two species of animal
which have formed them are at least as far apart
in the scale of creation as a quadruped is from a
fish. You see in some Musselburgh dredger’s
boat the phosphorescent sea-pen, (unknown in
England,) a living feather, of the look and con¬
sistency of a cock’s comb ; or the still stranger
sea-rush, ( Virgularia mirabilis,) a spine two feet
long, with hundreds of rosy flowerets arranged in
half-rings round it from end to end ; and you
are told that these are the congeners of the great
stony Venus’s fan which hangs in seamen’s cot¬
tages, brought home from the West Indies. And

* Sertularia operculata and Gemellaria loriculcita ; or any
of the small Sertularia, compared with Crisioe and Cellularice ,
are very good examples.

34

GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 beau¬
tiful madrepore or brainstone 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
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 : —

“ 0 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.

F or much more eath to tell the stars on high,

O 7

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

O r-

o b

Albe they endless seem in estimation,

Than to recount the sea’s posterity;

So fertile be the flouds in generation,

So huge their numbers, and so numberless their nation.”

But these few examples will be sufficient to
account both for the slow pace at which the
knowledge of sea-animals has progressed, and
for the allurement which men of the highest at¬
tainments 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 repro¬
duction of these creatures, and in the chemical
and mechanical functions which they fulfil in
the great economy of our planet, we cannot
wonder at finding that books which treat of
them carry with them a certain charm of ro¬
mance, 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, “ 0, all ye works
of the Lord, and ye, too, spirits and souls of the
righteous, praise Him, and magnify Him for
ever ! ”

36

GLAUCUS ; OR,

1 have said, that there were excuses for the
old contempt of the study of Natural History.
I have said too, it may be hoped, enough to
show that contempt to be now ill-founded. But
still, there are those who regard it as a mere
amusement, and that as a somewhat effeminate
one ; and think that it can at best help to while
away a leisure hour harmlessly, and perhaps
usefully, as a substitute for coarser sports, or
for the reading of novels. Those, however, who
have followed it out, especially on the sea-shore,
know better. They can tell from experience,
that over and above its accessory charms of
pure sea-breezes, and wild rambles by cliff and
loch, the study itself has had a weighty moral
effect upon their hearts and spirits. There are
those who can well understand how the good
and wise John Ellis, amid all his philanthropic
labors for the good of the West Indies, while
he was spending his intellect and fortune in
introducing into our tropic settlements the bread¬
fruit, the mangosteen, and every plant and seed
which he hoped might be useful for medicine,
agriculture, and commerce, could yet feel him¬
self justified in devoting large portions of his
ever well-spent time to the fighting the bat-

THE WONDERS OF TIIE SHORE.

37

tie of the corallines against Parsons and the
rest, and even in measuring pens with Linne,
the prince of naturalists. There are those who
can sympathize 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 tri¬
umphs of the Peninsular war, could in his old age
show a rare sea-weed with as much triumph as his
well-earned medals, and talk over a tiny spore-
capsule with as much zest as the records of sieges
and battles. Why not ? That temper which
made him a good soldier may very well have
made him a good naturalist also. And certainly,
the best naturalist, as far as logical acumen, as
well as earnest research, is concerned, whom
England has ever seen, was the Devonshire
squire, Colonel George Montagu, of whom 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

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

science.

GLAUCUS ; OK,

OQ

aim and not his amusement, his would have been
one of the greatest names in the whole range of
British 80161100.” I question, nevertheless, wheth¬
er he would not have lost more than lie would
have gained bv a different training. It might
have made him a more learned systematizer :
but would it have quickened in him that “ see¬
ing 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 beivailing the vagueness of most naturalists.
“ about the identity of any animal Montagu
described . He was a forward-looking phi¬

losopher ; he spoke of every creature as if one
exceeding like it, yet different from if, would
be washed up by the waves next tide. Con¬
sequently his descriptions arc permanent.” Sci¬
entific men will recognize in this the highest
praise which can be bestowed, because it attrib¬
utes 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

39

herself: not merely with printed books about her.
Let no one think that this same natural history
is a pursuit fitted only for effeminate or pedantic-
men. We should say rather, that the qualifi¬
cations 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 we are 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, un¬
certain where he shall eat or rest ; ready to face
sun and rain, wind and frost, and to eat or drink
thankfully anything, however coarse or meagre ;
he should know how to swim for his life, to pull
an oar, sail a boat, and ride the first horse which
comes to hand ; and, finally, he should be a
thoroughly good shot, and a skilful fisherman :
and, if he go far abroad, be able on occasion to
fight for his life.

For his moral character, he must, like a
knight of old, be first of all gentle and courteous,
ready and able to ingratiate himself with the
poor, the ignorant, and the savage ; not only be¬
cause foreign travel will be often otherwise im-

40

GLAUCUS ; OR,

possible, but because he knows how much inval¬
uable 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. lie must be
of a reverent turn of mind also ; not rashly dis¬
crediting any reports, however vague and frag¬
mentary ; giving man credit always for some
germ of truth, and giving nature credit for an
inexhaustible fertility and variety, which will
keep him his life long always reverent, yet never
superstitious ; wondering at the commonest, but
not surprised by the most strange ; free from the
idols of size and sensuous loveliness ; able to see
grandeur in the minutest objects, beauty in the
most ungainly ; estimating each thing not carnal¬
ly, 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 ; hold¬
ing every phenomenon worth the noting down ;

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

41

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 in¬
ductive faculty; from haste and laziness, from
melancholy, testiness, pride, and all the pas¬
sions which make men see only what they
wish to see. Of solemn and scrupulous rever¬
ence for truth, of the habit of mind which re¬
gards 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
vainglory, we hardly need to speak ; for it is
the very essence of a naturalist’s faculty, the
very tenure of his existence : and without truth¬
fulness, 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

42

GLAUCUS ; OR.

advance, not himself and his own fame or
wealth, but knowledge and mankind. He
should have this great virtue ; and in spite of
many short-comings, (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 honorably in the midst of a self-seeking
and mammonite generation, inclined to value
everything by its money price, its private utility.
The spirit which gives freely, because it knows
that it has received freely ; which communicates
knowledge without hope of reward, without jeal¬
ousy 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 de¬
rive pleasure, and even build up great fortunes,
and change the very face of cities and lands, by
the practical use of some stray talisman which
the poor student has invented in his laboratory ;
— this is the spirit which is abroad among our
scientific men, to a greater degree than it ever
has been among any body of men, for many
a century past ; and might well be copied
by those who profess deeper purposes, and a
more exalted calling, than the discovery of a

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 43
¥

new zoophyte, or the classification of a moorland
crag.

And it is these qualities, however imperfectly
they may be realized in any individual instance,
which make our scientific men, as a class, the
wholesomest and pleasantest of companions
abroad, and at home the most blameless, simple,
and cheerful, in all domestic relations ; men for
the most part of manful heads, and yet of child¬
like 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 instru¬
ments than the scalpel and the microscope.

I have been sketching an ideal : but one
which I seriously recommend to the consid¬
eration of all parents ; for, though it be im¬
possible and absurd to wish that every young
man should grow up a naturalist by profession,
yet this age offers no more wholesome training,
both moral and intellectual, than that which is
given by instilling into the young an early taste
for out-door physical science. The education of
our children is now more than ever a puzzling
problem, if by education we mean the develop-

44

GLAUCUS ; OR,

ment of the whole humanity, not merely of some
arbitrarily chosen part of it. ITow 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 conceited sciolism, engendered by

hearing popular lectures on all manner of sub-

^ *

jects, which can only be really learnt by stern
methodic study ; how to give habits of enterprise,
patience, accurate observation, which the counting-
house or the library will never bestow ; above all,
how to develop the physical powers, without en¬
gendering brutality and coarseness, — are ques¬
tions 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 distin¬
guished by commercial success have had a train¬
ing the directly opposite to that which they are
giving to their sons. They are for the most part
men who have migrated from the country to the
town, and had in their youth all the advantages of
a sturdy and manful hill-side or sea-side training ;

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

45

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 f a good school,
doubtless, as far as it goes : but one which will
expand none but the lowest intellectual faculties ;
which will make them accurate accountants,
shrewd computers and competitors, but never the
originators of daring schemes, men able and will¬
ing to go forth to replenish the earth and subdue
it. And in the hours of relaxation, how much of
their time is thrown away, for want of anything
better, on frivolity, not to say on secret profliga¬
cy, 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

46

GLAUCUS ; OR,

misdirected ; craving to learn, yet not knowing
liow 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 ca¬
pricious self-will one mania after another, and
tossing it away* again for some new phantom ;
gorging the memory with facts which no one has
taught them to arrange, and the reason with prob¬
lems 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 wrell 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 out-door training to give

TIIE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

47

our youths is, as we have already said, more
than ever puzzling. The difficulty is felt, per¬
haps, less in Scotland than in England. The
Scotch climate compels hardiness ; the Scotch
bodily strength makes it easy ; and Scotland,
with her mountain-tours in summer, and her
frozen lochs in winter, her labyrinth of sea-shore,
and, above all, that priceless boon which Provi¬
dence has bestowed on her, in the contiguity of
her great cities to the loveliest scenery, and 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 spotting the ocean
firths beside his Manchester. Field sports, with
the invaluable training which they give, if not

}ret still

“ The reason firm,”

“ 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
we need say nothing here, that one cannot wonder
at any parents’ shrinking from allowing their
sons to meddle much with them. And yet the

48

GLAUCUS ; OR,

young man who has had no substitute for such
amusements will cut but a sorry figure in Aus¬
tralia, 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 out-door existence possible 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. We 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. We cannot help fancying that Milton made
a mistake in a certain celebrated passage ; and
that it was not “ sitting on a hill apart,” but
tramping four miles out and four miles in along a
turnpike-road, that his hapless spirits discoursed

“ Of fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,

And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.”

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

40

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 hedge¬
row, the records of past worlds in every pebble,
and boundless fertility upon the barren shore ;
and so, by teaching them to make full use of that
limited sphere in which they now are, make them
faithful in a few things, that they may be fit here¬
after to be rulers over much.

I may seem to exaggerate the advantages of
such studies ; but the question after all is one of
experience ; and I have had experience enough
and to spare, that what I say is true. I have
seen the young man of fierce passions, and un¬
controllable daring, expend healthily that energy
which threatened daily to plunge him into reck¬
lessness, if not into sin, upon hunting out and
collecting, through rock and bog, snow and tem¬
pest, every bird and egg of the neighboring
forest. I have seen the cultivated man, craving
for travel and for success in life, pent up in the
drudgery of London work, and yet keeping his
spirit calm, and perhaps his morals all the more
righteous, by spending over his microscope even-

4

50

GLAUCUS ; OK,

ings which would too probably have gradually
been wasted at the theatre. I have seen the
young London beauty, amid all the excitement
and temptation of luxury and flattery, with her
heart pure and her mind occupied in a boudoir
full of shells and fossils, flowers and sea-weeds,
and keeping herself unspotted from the world,
by considering the lilies of the field, how they
grow. And therefore it is that I hail with thank-
fulness every fresh book of Natural History, as a
fresh boon to the young, a fresh help to those
who have to educate them.

The greatest difficulty in the way of beginners
is (as in most things) how to “learn the art of
learning.” They go out, search, find less than
they expected, and give the subject up in dis¬
appointment. 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 dis¬
cover. Five-and-twenty years ago, during an
autumn’s work of dead-leaf-searching in the Dev¬
on woods for poor old Dr. Turton, while lie was
writing his book on British land-shells, the pres¬
ent writer learnt more of the art of observing

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

51

than he would have learnt in three years’ desul¬
tory hunting on his own account ; and he has
often regretted that no naturalist has established
shore-lectures at some watering-place, like those
up hill and down dale field-lectures which, in
pleasant bygone Cambridge days, Professor Sedg¬
wick used to give to young geologists, and Pro¬
fessor Henslow to young botanists.

This want, however, bids fair to be supplied
v at last. That most pious and most learned natu¬
ralist, Mr. Gosse, whose works will be so often
quoted in these pages, purposes, it is understood,
to establish this summer a regular shore-class,
probably at AVey mouth. And I advise any read¬
er whose fancy such a project pleases, to apply to
him for details of the scheme, either at his own
house, 58 Huntingdon Street, Barnsbury Park,
Islington, or at the Linnosan or Microscopic So¬
ciety.

In the mean while, to show something of what
such a class might be, let me put myself, in imagi¬
nation, in Mr. Gosse’s place, and do his work for
him for half an hour, though in a far more shal¬
low and clumsy way.

Leaving Weymouth to him, let me take you
to a shore where T am more at home, and for

52

GLAUCUS ; OK,

whose richness I can vouch, and choose our sea¬
son 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 July days of 1588, when the Spanish
Armada ventured slowly past Berry Head, with
Elizabeth’s gallant pack of Devon captains (for
the London fleet had not yet joined) following
fast in its wake, and dashing into the midst of
the vast line, undismayed by size and numbers,
while their kin and friends stood watching and
praying on the cliffs, spectators of Britain’s
Salamis. The white line of houses, too, on the
other side of the bay, is Brixham, famed as
the landing-place of William of Orange ; the
stone on the pier-head, which marks his first
footsteps on British ground, is sacred in the eyes

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 53

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 or
dark fiord, and would seem tame enough in the
eyes of a western Scot or Irishman, yet Torbay
surely has a soft beauty of its own. The rounded
hills slope gently to the sea, spotted with squares
of emerald grass, and rich red fallow fields,
and parks full of stately timber-trees. Long
lines of tall elms, just flushing green in the
spring hedges, run down to the very water’s
edge, their boughs unwarped by any blast ; and
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

54

GLAUCUS ; OK,

flowers of spring, and the old year linger smiling¬
ly to twine a garland for the new.

No wonder that such a spot as Torquay, with
its delicious Italian climate, and endless variety
of rich woodland, flowery lawn, fantastic rock-
cavern, and broad bright tide-sand, sheltered
from every wind of heaven except the soft south¬
east, should have become a favorite haunt, not
only for invalids, but for naturalists. Indeed, it
may well claim the honor of being the original
home of marine zoology and botany in England,
as the Frith of Forth, under the auspices of Sir
John Dalzell, has been for Scotland. For here
worked Montagu, Turton, and Mrs. Griffith, to
whose masculine 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
honored old age, that knowledge become popular
and general, which she pursued for many a year
unassisted and alone. And here too, now, Dr.
Battersby possesses a collection 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-

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

55

mouths the soft sandstones and hard conglomer¬
ates of the new red series slope down into the
tepid and shallow waves, affords an abundance
and variety of animal and vegetable life, un¬
equalled, 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 meeting with curiosities which
have escaped all observers, since the lynx eye of
Montagu espied them full fifty years ago.

Follow us, then, reader, in imagination, out of
the gay watering-place, with its London shops
and London equipages, along the broad road
beneath the sunny limestone cliff, tufted with
golden furze ; past the huge oaks and green
slopes of Tor Abbey ; and past the fantastic
rocks of Livermead, scooped by the waves into
a labyrinth of double and triple caves, like Hin¬
doo temples, upborne on pillars banded with

56

GLAUCUS'; OR,

yellow and white and red, a week’s study, in
form and color and chi aro-os euro, for any art¬
ist ; and a mile or so further along a pleasant
road, with landlocked glimpses of the bay, to
the broad sheet of sand which lies between the
village of Paignton and the sea, — sands trodden
a hundred times by Montagu and Turton, per¬
haps, by Dillwyn and Gaertner, and many another
pioneer of science. And once there, before we
look at anything else, come down straight to the
sea marge ; for yonder lies, just left by the retiring
tide, a mass of life such as you will seldom see
again. It is somewhat ugly, perhaps, at first sight ;
for ankle-deep are spread, for some ten yards long
by five broad, huge dirty shells, as large as the
hand, each with its loathly gray and black tongue
hanging out, a confused mass of slimy death. Let
us walk on to some cleaner heap, and leave these,
the great Lutraria elliptica, which have been
lying buried by thousands in the sandy mud, each
with the point of its long siphon above the surface,
sucking in and driving out again the salt water on
which it feeds, till last night’s ground-swell shifted
the sea bottom, and drove them up hither to per¬
ish helpless, but not useless, on the beach.

See, close by is another shell bed, quite as

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. Oi

large, but comely enough to please any eye.
What a variety of forms and colors 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 contra¬
dicting, as do several other forms, that some¬
what 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-gray scymitars ? What are the tapering
brown spires ? What the tufts of delicate yellow
plants, like squirrels’ tails, and lobsters’ horns,
and tamarisks, and fir-trees, and all other finely
cut animal and vegetable forms ? What are the
groups of gray bladders, with something like a
little bud at the tip ? What are the hundreds
of little pink-striped pears ? What those tiny
babies’ heads, covered with gray 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

58

GLAUCUS ; OK,

know as “ roaring buckies,” tliese we have seen ;
but what, 0 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 southwestern coasts, probably at the
vanishing of the same warmer ancient epoch,
which clothed the Lizard point with the Cornish
heath, and the Ivillarney mountains with Spanish
saxifrages, and other relics of a flora whose home
is now the Iberian peninsula, and the sunny
cliffs of the Riviera. Rare in every other shore,
even in the west, it abounds in Torbay 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, and every heavy winter’s tide brings
up an equal multitude, — a seeming waste of life,
which would be awful in our eyes, were not the
Divine Ruler, as His custom is, making this

50

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

destruction the means of fresh creation, by bury¬
ing them in the sands, as soon as washed on
shore, to fertilize the strata of some future

i

world. It is but a sliell-fish truly ; but the
great Cuvier thought it remarkable enough to
devote to its anatomy elaborate descriptions
and drawings, which have done more perhaps
than any others to illustrate the curious economy
of the whole class of bivalve, or double-shelled,
mollusca. If you wish to know more about it
than we can tell you, open Mr. Gosse’s last book,
the Aquarium, at p. 222.

“ Many persons are aware that the common
cockle can perform gymnastic feats of no mean
celebrity, but the evolutions of Signor Tuber-
culato are worth seeing. Some of the troupe I
had put into a. pan of sea-water; others I had
turned out into a dish dry, as knowing that an
occasional exposure to the air is a contingency
that they are not unused to. By and by, as we
were quietly reading, our attention was attracted
to the table where the dish was placed, by a
rattling uproar, as if flint-stones were rolling one
over the other about the dish. ‘ Q look at the
cockles ! ’ was the exclamation ; and they were
indeed displaying their agility, and their beauty

GO

GLAUCUS ; OK,

too, in fine style. The valves of the largest were
gaping to the extent of three quarters of an
inch ; but the intermediate space was filled up
by the spongy-looking, fleshy mantle, of a semi-
pellucid orange hue. At one end protruded the
siphons, two thick, short tubes, soldered, as it
were, into one, and enveloped on all sides in a
shaggy fringe of cirri , or tentacles. The circular
orifices of these tubes • — small holes, perfectly
round, with a white border — had a curious ap¬
pearance, as we looked at the heart-shaped end •
of the valves. The discharging orifices, however,
were but rarely visible, being usually closed, while
the others remained constantly open. But these
things were what we afterwards saw. For some
time we could look at nothing but the magnificent
foot, and the curious manner in which it was used.

“ The two lips of the mantle suddenly separate,
and, gaping widely all along the front, recede
nearly to the valves ; while at the same moment
a huge organ is thrust out, somewhat like a
tongue, nearly cylindrical, but a little flattened
and tapering to a point. Its surface is smooth,
and brilliantly glossy, and its color a fine rich
scarlet, approaching to orange ; but a better
idea of it than can be conveyed by any descrip-

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

G1

tion will be obtained by supposing it to be made
of polished cornelian.”

Hardly that, most amiable and amusing of
naturalists : it is too opaque for cornelian ; and
the true symbol is, as I said before, in form,
size, and color, one of those great red capsicums
which hang drying in every Covent- Garden
seedsman’s window. Yet is your simile better
than the guess of a certain Countess, who,
entering a room wherein a couple of Cardium
tuberculatum were waltzing about a plate, ex¬
claimed, “ 0 dear ! I always heard that my
pretty red coral came out of a fish, and here it
is all alive ! ”

“ This beautiful and versatile foot,” continues
Mr. Gosse, “ is suddenly thrust out sideways, to
the distance of four inches from the shell ; then,
its point being curved backwards, the animal
pushes it strongly against any opposing object,
by the resistance of which the whole animal,
shell and all, makes a considerable step forwards.
If the cockle were on its native sands, the leaps
thus made would doubtless be more precise in
their direction, and much more effective : but
cooped up with its fellows, in a deep dish, all
these Herculean efforts availed only to knock

C2

GLAUCUS ; OK,

the massive shells against the sides, or roll them
irregularly over each other.

“ It was curious to notice the extent to which
the interior of the cockle was revealed, when the
mouth gaped, and the foot was thrust out. By
the aid of a candle we could see the interior
surfaces of both valves, as it seemed, almost to
the very backs. I say, as it seemed, for so thin
is the mantle where it lines the shell, and so
closely does it adhere to it, that every character
of the valves, whether as regards color or ir¬
regularity of surface, was distinctly visible ; and
thus we were able to distinguish the species,
not only by their external marks, but by one
character drawn from the interior, — the ribs
in tuberculatum extending only half-way across
the valves, while in aculeatum they reach back

to the beaks . The former is much the

finer species ; the valves are more globose and
of a warmer color; those that I have seen are
even more spinous. The mantle is of a rich
deep orange, with elevated ribs, corresponding
to those of the valves, of a yellow hue. These
ribs of the mantle are visible in aculeatum also,
but in tuberculatum they are much more strongly
marked, both in form and color. The siphons

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

G3

display the same orange hue as the mantle-lips,
and have a finer appearance than in the other
species ; the interior of the orifices in both is
covered with a layer of white pearly substance,
almost luminous. In the foot of tuberculatum ,
which agrees, in the particulars already men¬
tioned, with that of its congener, I observed a
beautiful opalescent gleam when under water.”

UC. tuberculatum ,” continues Mr. Gosse, “is
far the finest species. The valves are more
globose and of a warmer color ; those that I have
are even more spinous.” Such may have been
the case in his specimens ; but it has occurred
to the writer now and then to dredge specimens
of G. aculeatum, which had escaped that rolling
on the sand fatal in old age to its delicate spines,
and which equalled in color, size, and perfect¬
ness, 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 tuber¬
culatum i, or developing from delicate, flat, brier-
prickles into long, straight thorns, as in aculeatum ,

64

GLAUCUS ; OR,

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, mak¬
ing his castle impregnable to the raveners of
the deep. For we can hardly doubt that these
prickles are meant as weapons of defence,
without which so savory a morsel as the mol-
lusk within (cooked and eaten largely on some
parts of our south coast) would be a staple ar¬
ticle of food for sea beasts of prey. And it is
noteworthy, first, that the defensive thorns, which
are permanent on the two thinner species, acu-
leatum and echinatum , disappear altogether on
the thicker one, tuberculatum , as old age gives
him a solid and heavy globose shell; and next,
that he too, while young and tender, and liable
therefore to be bored through by whelks and
such murderous univalves, does actually possess
the same brier-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 circum¬
stances demanding them,) prickles, in all three
species, are, as far as we can see, useless in Torbay,
where no seal or wolf-fish, ( Anarrhichas lupus,)

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

65

or other shell-crushing pairs of jaws, wander,
terrible to lobster and to cockle. Originally in¬
tended, as we suppose, to face the strong-toothed
monsters of the Mediterranean, these foreigners
have been left behind on shores where their
armor is not now needed : and yet centuries of
idleness and security have not been able to per¬
suade them to lay it by ; as it is written, “ They
continue this day as at the beginning ; Thou hast
given them a law which shall never be broken.”

Enough of Cardium tuberculatum. What are
the names of the other shells which you have
gathered, any Introduction to Conchology will
tell you ; and the Sea-side Book will give you
many a curious fact as to their habits. If you
wish to know more, you must consult that
new collection of true fairy tales, Dr. John¬
ston’s “ Lectures on Conchology.” But the lit¬
tle pink pears are rare, hundreds of them as
there happen to be here to-day. They are a
delicate sea-anemone,* whose beautiful disc you
may see well engraved in Gosse’s “ Naturalist in
Devon.” They adhere by thousands to the
under-side of loose stones among the sand, and
some colony of them has been uprooted by the
* Actinia angidcoma.

5

06

GLAUCUS ; OR,

pitiless roll of the ground-swell, and drifted in
here, sick and sad, but not so far gone but that
each, in a jar of salt-water, will expand again into
a delicate compound flower, whose “ snake-locked ”
arms are all marbled with pellucid grays and
browns, till they look like a living mist, hovering
above the pink-striped cylinder of the body.

There are a hundred more things to be talked
of here : but we must defer the examination of
them till our return ; for it wants an hour yet of
the dead low spring-tide ; and ere we go home,
we will spend a few minutes at least on the rocks
at Livermead, where awaits us a strong-backed
quarryman, with a strong-backed crowbar, as is to
be hoped, (for he snapped one right across there
yesterday, falling miserably on his back into a
pool thereby,) and we will verify Mr. Gosse’s
observation, that, —

“ When once we have begun to look with curi¬
osity on the strange things that ordinary people
pass over without notice, our wonder is continu¬
ally 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. G7

hour among the rocks, at low- water mark, or
walk, with an observant downcast eye, along the
beach after a gale, without finding some oddly
fashioned, suspicious-looking being, unlike any
form of life that we have seen before. The dark
concealed interior of the sea becomes thus in¬
vested with a fresh mystery ; its vast recesses
appear to be stored with all imaginable forms ;
and we are tempted to think there must be mul¬
titudes of living creatures whose very figure and
structure have never yet been suspected.

‘ 0 sea ! old sea ! who yet knows half
Of thy wonders or thy pride ! ’ ”

Gosse's Aquariam , 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 keep a sharp
look-out for a round gray 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 col¬
lectors, instead of studying the live animals
where Nature has put them, in which case they

08

GLAUCUS ; OR,

would have no time for word-inventing. And we
verily suspect that the names grow, like other
things ; at least, they get longer and longer and
more jaw-breaking every year.) The little
bivalve, however, finding itself left by the tide,
has wisely shut up its siphons, and, by means of
its foot and its edges, buried itself in a comfort¬
able 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 van¬
ished : 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 gray disc
pouting up through the sand. Touch it, and it is
gone down, quick as light. We must dig it out,
and carefully, for it is a delicate monster. At last,

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

G9

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
color. A slug has more artistic beauty about
him. Be it so. At home in the aquarium,
(where, alas ! he will live but for a day or two,
under the new irritation of light,) he will make a
very different figure. That is one of the rarest
of British sea-animals, Actinia chrysanthcllum ,
though really he is no Actinia ,* and his value
consists, not merely in his beauty, (though that
is not small,) but in his belonging to what the
long-word-makers call an “interosculant” group,
— a party of genera and species which connect
families scientifically far apart, filling up a fresh
link in the great chain, or rather the great net¬
work, of zoological classification. And here we
have a simple, and, as it were, crude form; of
which, if we dared to indulge in reveries, we might
say, that the 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
* Now “ Peachia,” of Mr. Gosse.

70

GLAUCUS ; OK,

whole family of Actinice, (sea-anemones,) and in
a quite opposite one the Holothurice , those strange
sea-cucumbers, with their mouth-fringe of feath¬
ery 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 experiment
and induction, as it is by a priori reason : but
that there has been, in the Creative Mind, as
it gave life to new species, a development of
the idea on which older species were created,
in order that every mesh of the great net might
gradually be supplied, and there should be no
gaps in the perfect variety of Nature’s forms.
This development is the only one of which we
can conceive, if we allow that a Mind presides
over the universe, and not a mere brute neces¬
sity, a Law (absurd misnomer) without a Law¬
giver ; and to it (strangely enough coinciding
here and there with the Platonic doctrine of Eter¬
nal 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.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

71

Let us speak freely a few words on this im¬
portant matter. Geology has disproved the old
popular belief that the universe was brought into
being as it now exists, by a single fiat. We
know that the work has been gradual ; that the
earth

“ In tracts of fluent heat began,

The seeming prey of cyclic storms,

The home of seeming random forms,

Till, at the last, arose the man.”

And we know, also, that these forms, seeming
random as they are, have appeared according to
a law, which, as far as we can judge, has been
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 ob¬
served, 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

72

GLAUCUS ; OK,

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
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 analyze 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

73

all the facts which have been observed ; and
there is, therefore, an almost infinite inductive
probability against it. As far as we know yet,
though all the dreams of the Transmutationists
are outdone by the transformations of many a
polype, yet the species remain as permanent and
strongly marked as in the highest mammal. Such
progress as experimental 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 ex¬
plained by, the simple old belief, which the Bible
sets before us, of a Living God : not a mere past
will, such as the Koran sets forth, creating once
and for all, and then leaving the universe, to use
Goethe’s simile, “ to spin round his finger ” ;
nor again, an “ all-pervading spirit,” words which
are mere contradictory jargon, concealing, from
those who utter them, blank Materialism : but
One who works in all things which have obeyed
Him to will and to do of Ilis good pleasure,
keeping His abysmal and self-perfect purpose,
yet altering the methods by which that purpose
is attained, from mon to mon, ay, from moment
to moment, for ever various, yet for ever the
same. This great and yet most blessed paradox

74

GLAUCUS ; OR,

of the Changeless God, who yet can say, “ It
repenteth me,” and, “ Behold, 1 work a new thing
on the earth,” is revealed no less by nature than
by Scripture ; the changeableness, not of caprice
or imperfection, but of an Infinite Maker and
“ Poietes,” drawing ever fresh forms out of the
inexhaustible treasury of the primeval mind ; and
yet never throwing away a conception to which
He has once given actual birth in time and space,
but (to compare reverently small things and
great) lovingly repeating it, reapplying it ; pro¬
ducing the same effects by endlessly different
methods ; or so delicately modifying the method
that, as by the turn of a hair, it shall produce
endlessly diverse effects ; looking back, as it
were, ever and anon over the great work of all
the ages, to retouch it, and fill up each chasm
in the scheme, which for some good purpose had
been left open in earlier worlds ; or leaving some
open (the forms, for instance, necessary to con¬
nect the bimana and the quadrumana) to be
filled up perhaps hereafter when the world needs
them ; the handiwork, in short, of a living and
loving Mind, perfect in His own eternity, but
stooping to work in time and space, and there
rejoicing Himself in the work of His own hands,

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

75

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.

We speak, of course, under correction ; for
this conclusion is emphatically matter of induc¬
tion, and must be verified or modified by ever-
fresli facts : but- we meet with many a Christian
passage in scientific books, which seems to us 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 wit¬
ness,” 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 infan¬
tile state of science, to put arbitrary limits of our
own to the revelation which He may have thought
good to make of Himself in nature. Nay, rather,
let us believe that, if our eyes were opened, we
should fulfil the requirement of Genius, to “ see
the universal in the particular,” by seeing God’s
whole likeness, His whole glory, reflected as in a

76

GLAUCUS ; OR,

mirror even in the meanest flower ; and that
nothing but the dulness of our own sinful souls
prevents them from seeing day and night in all
things, however small or trivial to human eclec¬
ticism, the Lord Jesus Christ himself fulfilling
his own saying, “My Father worketh hitherto,
and I work.”

And therefore, when we meet with such an
excellent passage as this : * —

“ Thus it is that Nature advances step by step,
gradually 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 favor a theory of ‘ development] which
would obliterate all idea of species, by suppos¬
ing that the more compound animal forms were
developments of their simple ancestors. For
such an hypothesis, Nature gives us no evidence :
but she gives us, through all her domains, the
most beautiful and diversified proofs of an ad¬
herence to a settled order, by which new com-
* Harvey’s Sea-side Book, p. 166.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

77

binations are continually brought out. In this
order, the lowest grades of being have certain
characters, above which they do not rise, but
propagate 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 organs peculiarly their own. Oth¬
ers again rise above these, and their structures
become 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.”

- When we read such a passage as this,

and confess, as we must, its truth, we cannot
help sighing over certain expressions in it, which
do unintentionally 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 prog¬
ress as shall seem good to Him, some here,
some there ; not binding Himself to begin at the
lowest, and end with the highest, but compen¬
sating and balancing the lower with the higher

78

GLAUCUS ; OR,

in each successive stage of our planet? This last
is what the Professor really means, we 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 spir¬
itual, from time and space into ever-present eter¬
nity. To us it seems (to sum up, in a few words,
what we have tried to say) that such development
and progress as have as yet been actually discov¬
ered in nature, have been proved, especially by
Professor Sedgwick and Mr. Hugh Miller, to bear
every trace of having been produced by succes¬
sive acts of thought and will in some personal
mind ; which, however boundlessly rich and pow¬
erful, is still the Archetype of the human mind;
and therefore (for to this we boldly confess we
have been all along tending) probably capable,
without violence to its properties, of becoming,
like 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE, 79

band, that the idea of the Chrysantliellum, and
its congeners Scolanthus and Chirodota, 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, 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 fin¬
ny 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 wriggling him¬
self 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 Corn¬
wall, of whom, as we walk on toward the rocks,
something should be said, or rather read ; for

80

GLAUCUS ; OK,

Mr. Chambers, in an often quoted passage from
liis Edinburgh Journal, which we must have the
pleasure of quoting once again, has told the story
better than we can tell it : —

“ But who is that little intelligent-looking man
in a faded naval uniform, who is so invariably to
be seen in a particular central seat in this
section ? That, gentle reader, is perhaps one of
the most interesting men who attend the British
Association. He is only a private in the mount¬
ed guard (preventive service) at an obscure part
of the Cornwall coast, with four shillings a day,
and a wife and nine children, most of whose
education he has himself to conduct. He never
tastes the luxuries which are so common in the
middle ranks of life, and even amongst a large
portion of the working-classes. He has to mend
with his own hands every sort of thing that can
break or wear in his house. Yet Mr. Peach is
a votary of Natural History ; not a student of
the science in books, for he cannot afford books ;
but an investigator by sea and shore, a collector of
zobphytes 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 Asso-

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

81

ciation with a few novelties of this kind, accom¬
panied by illustrative papers and drawings : thus,
under circumstances the very opposite of those
of such men as Lord Enniskillen, adding, in
like manner, to the general stock of knowledge.
On the present occasion he is unusually elated,
for he has made the discovery of a Holothuria
with twenty tentacula, a species of the echino-
dermata 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 Ilolothurias :
but it is a considerable thing to the F auna of
Britain, and a vast matter to a poor private of
the Cornwall mounted guard. And accordingly
he will go home in a few days, full of the glory
of his exhibition, and 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 complication of
duties, professional and domestic. But he has
still another subject of congratulation, for Dr.
Carpenter has kindly given him a microscope,
wherewith to observe the structure of his
favorite animals, an instrument for which he
has sighed for many years in vain. Honest

6

82

GLAUCUS ; OR,

Peach ! humble as is thy home, and simple thy
bearing, thou art an honor even to this assem¬
blage of nobles and doctors: nay, more, when
we consider everything, thou art an honor to
human nature itself ; for where is the heroism
like that of virtuous, intelligent, independent
poverty ? And such heroism is thine!” — Cham¬
bers's Edinb. Journ ., Nov. 23, 1844.

Mr. Peach is now, we are glad to say, reward¬
ed in part for his long labors in the cause of
science, by having been removed to a more
lucrative post on the north coast of England ;
the earnest, it is to be hoped, of still further
promotion.

But here we are at the old bank of boulders,
the ruins of an antique pier which the monks of
Tor Abbey built for their convenience, while
Torquay was but a knot of fishing huts within
a lonely limestone cove. To get to it, though,
we have passed many a hidden treasure ; for
every ledge of these flat New-red-sandstone-
rocks, if torn up with the crowbar, discloses in
its cracks and crannies nests of strangg forms
which shun the light of day ; beautiful Actiniae
fill the tiny caverns with living flowers ; great
Pliolades bore by hundreds in the softer strata ;

TIIE WONDERS OF TIIE SHORE.

83

and wherever a thin layer of muddy sand inter¬
venes between two slabs, long Annelid worms
of quaintest forms and colors have their hori¬
zontal burrows, among those of that curious and
rare radiate animal, the Spoonworm,* an eyeless
bag about an inch long, half bluish-gray, half
pink, with a strange scalloped and wrinkled pro¬
boscis of saffron color, 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 Laminarice, like
fan-palms, droop and wave gracefully in the
retiring ripples, a great boulder which will serve
our purpose. Its upper side is a whole forest of
sea-weeds, large and small ; and that forest, if
you examined it closely, as full of inhabitants
as those of the Amazon or the Gambia. To
“beat” that dense cover would be an endless
task ; but on the under side, where no sea-weeds
grow, we shall find full in view enough to occupy
us till the tide returns. For the slab, see, is
such a one as sea-beasts love to haunt. Its
weed-covered surface shows that the surge has

* Thalassema Neptuni (Forbes’s British Star-Fishes,

p. 259).

84

GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 de¬
cayed under it, destructive to animal life. We
can see dark crannies and caves beneath ; yet
too narrow to allow the surge to wash in, and
keep the surface clean. It will be a fine mena¬
gerie of Nereus, if we can but turn it.

Now, the crowbar is well under it ; heave, and
with a will ; and so, after five minutes’ tugging,
propping, slipping, and splashing, the boulder
gradually tips over, and we rush greedily upon
the spoil.

A muddy dripping surface it is, truly, full of
cracks and hollows, uninviting enough at first
sight : let us look it round leisurely, to see if
there are not materials enough there for an hour’s
lecture.

The first object which strikes the eye is prob¬
ably a group of milk-white slugs, from two to
six inches long, cuddling snugly together. 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

I

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 85

suspended till the return of tide: but once set¬
tled in a jar of salt water, each will protrude a
large chocolate-colored head, tipped with a ring
of ten feathery gills, looking very much like a
head of “ curled kale,” but of the loveliest white
and primrose ; in the centre whereof lies perdu
a mouth with sturdy teeth, — if indeed they, as
well as the whole inside of the worthy fellow,
have not been lately got rid of, and what you see
be not a mere bag, without intestine or other
organ: but only for the time being. For hear
it, worn-out epicures, and old Indians who be¬
moan your livers, this little Ilolothuria 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 Ilolothuria ! who possesses really that
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

8G

GLAUCUS ; OR,

Hyndmanni , named after Mr. Hyndmann of Bel¬
fast, his first discoverer : but he has many a stout
cousin round the Scotch coast, who knows the
antibilious panacea as well as he, and submits,
among the Northern fishermen, to the rather rude
and undeserved name of sea-puddings ; one of
which grows in Shetland to the enormous length
of three feet, rivalling there his huge congeners,
who display their exquisite plumes on every
tropic coral reef.

Next, what are those bright little buds, like
salmon-colored Banksia roses half expanded,
sitting closely on the stone ? Touch them ; the
soft part is retracted, and the orange flower of
flesh is transformed into a pale pink flower of
stone. That is the Madrepore, Caryophyllia
Smithii , one of our south coast rarities ; and see,
on the lip of the last one, which we have care¬
fully scooped off with the chisel, two little pink
towers of stone, delicately striated ; drop them
into this small bottle of sea-water, and from the
top of each tower issues every half second — what
shall we call it? — a hand or a net of finest hairs,
clutching at something invisible to our grosser
sense. That is the Pyrgoma , parasitic only (as
far as we know) on the lip of this same rare

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

87

Madrepore ; a little “ cirrhipod,” the cousin of
those tiny barnacles which roughen every rock,
and of those larger ones also who burrow in the
thick hide of the whale, and, borne about upon
his mighty sides, throw out their tiny casting-
nets, as this Pyrgoma does, to catch every passing
animalcule, and sweep them into the jaws con¬
cealed 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 cilia?, till, having
sown its wild oats, it settled down in life, built
itself a good stone house, and became a land-
owner, or rather a glebce adscrijytus, for ever and
a day. Mysterious destiny ! — yet not so myste¬
rious as that of the free medusoid young of every
polype and coral, which ends as a rooted tree of
horn or stone, and seems to the eye of sensuous
fancy to have literally degenerated into a vege¬
table. Of them you must read for yourselves in
Mr. Gosse’s book ; in the mean while he shall
tell you something of the beautiful Madrepores
themselves. His description,* by far the best
yet published, should be read in full : we must
content ourselves with extracts.

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

88

GLAUCUS ; OK,

“ Doubtless you are familiar with the stony
skeleton of our Madrepore, as it appears in
museums. It consists of a number of thin
calcareous plates standing up edgewise, and ar¬
ranged in a radiating manner round a low cen¬
tre. A little below the margin, their individu¬
ality 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 is a very pretty object, those who
are acquainted with it alone can form but a
very poor idea of the beauty of the living ani¬
mal. . . . Let it, after being tom from the rock,
recover its equanimity ; then you will see a
pellucid gelatinous flesh emerging from between
the plates, and little exquisitely formed and
colored tentacula, with white clubbed tips frin¬
ging 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
color, 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

89

expanded to an astonishing extent. The space
surrounding the lips is commonly fawn-color, or
rich chestnut-brown ; the star or vandyked circle
rich red, pale vermilion, and sometimes the most
brilliant emerald green, as brilliant as the gorget
of a humming-bird.”

And what does this exquisitely delicate crea¬
ture 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 ten¬
tacle, it adhered, and was drawn in with the
surrounding tentacles between the plates. With
a lens I saw the small mouth slowly open,- and
move over to that side, the lips gaping unsym-
metrically, 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, gradually closed upon the
insect, and then returned to its usual place in
the centre.”

Mr. Gosse next tried the fairy of the walking
mouth with a house-fly, who escaped only by

90

GLAUCUS ; OR,

hard fighting; and at last the gentle creature,
after swallowing and disgorging various large
pieces of shell-fish, found viands to its taste in
“ the lean of cooked meat, and portions of earth¬
worms,” filling up the intervals by a perpetual
dessert of microscopic animalcules, whirled into
that lovely avernus, its mouth, by the currents
of the delicate cilice which clothe every tentacle.
The fact is, that the Madrepore, like those glo¬
rious sea-anemones whose living flowers stud
every pool, is by profession a scavenger, and a
feeder on carrion ; and, being as useful as he is
beautiful, really comes under the rule which he
seems at first to break, that handsome is who
handsome does.

Another species of Madrepore * was discovered
on our Devon coast by Mr. Gosse, more gaudy,
though not so delicate in hue as our Caryo-
phyllia ; three of which are at this moment pout¬
ing out their conical orange mouths and pointed
golden tentacles in a vase on my table, at once
grumbling and 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
* Balanophyllia regia , Coast of Devon, p. 399.

TIIE WONDERS OF THE SnORE.

91

Lundy Island, in the mouth of the Bristol Chan¬
nel, or more properly from that curious “ Bat
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 thin¬
nest ivory, the largest not bigger than a silver
threepence, which contain in their centres a milk-
white crust of stone, pierced, as you see under
the magnifier, into a thousand cells, each with its
living architect within. Here are two sorts ; in
one the tubular cells radiate from the centre,
giving it the appearance of a tiny compound
flower, daisy or groundsel ; in the other they are
crossed with waving grooves, giving the whole
a peculiar fretted look, even more beautiful than
that of the former species. They are Tubulipora
patina and Tubulipora hispida; — and stay, —
break off that tiny rough red wart, and look at
its cells also under the magnifier : it is Cellepora
pumicosa ; and now, with the Madrepore you
hold in your hand, the principal, at least the
commonest, British types of those famed coral
insects, which in the tropics are the architects of
continents, and the conquerors of the ocean

92

GLAUCUS ; OR,

surge. All tlie world, since the publication of
Darwin’s delightful “Voyage of the Beagle,” and
of Williams’s “ Missionary Enterprises,” knows,
or ought to know, enough about them : for those
who do not, there are a few pages in the begin¬
ning of Dr. Landsborough’s “ British Zoophytes,”
well worth perusal.

There are a few other true cellepore corals
round the coast. The largest of all, Cervicornis,
may be dredged a few miles outside on the Ex¬
mouth bank, with a few more Tubulipores ; but
all tiny things, the lingering, and, as it were,
expiring remnants of that great coral-world,
which, through the abysmal depths of past
ages, formed here in Britain our limestone hills,
storing up for generations yet unborn the ma¬
terials of agriculture and architecture. Inex¬
pressibly interesting, even solemn, to those who
will think, is the sight of these 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 off Scilly and the west coast

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

93

of Ireland, possessor of a pedigree which dates,
perhaps, from ages before the day in which it
was said, “ Let us make man in our image, after
our likeness.” To think that the whole human
race, its joys and its sorrows, its virtues and its
sins, its aspirations and its failures, has been
rushing out of eternity and into eternity again,
as Arjoon in the Bhagavad Gita beheld the race
of men, issuing from Ivreeshna’s flaming mouth,
and swallowed up in it again, “ as the crowds of
insects swarm into the flame, as the homeless
streams leap down into the ocean bed,” in an
everlasting heart-pulse whose blood is living
souls. And all that while, and ages before that
mystery began, that humble coral, unnoticed on
the dark sea-floor, has been “ continuing as it
was at the beginning,” and fulfilling “ the law
which cannot be broken,” while races and dynas¬
ties 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

94

GLAUCUS ; OR,

man lias defiled by sin, which would at moments
crush the naturalist’s heart, and make his brain
swim with terror, were it not that he can see by
faith, through all the abysses and the ages, not
merely

“ Jlcinds,

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 in¬
structed, 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 chil¬
dren 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 con¬
gener,! five or six of which are adhering tightly
to the slab before us, a ball covered with delicate

* Amphidotus cordatus. f Echinus miliaris.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

95

spines of lilac and green, and stuck over (cunning
fellows !) with strips of dead sea-weed to serve as
improvised parasols ? One cannot say (though
Oken and the Okenists might) that in him we
have the first type of the human skull ; for the
resemblance, quaint as it is, is only sensuous and
accidental, (in the logical use of that term,) and
not homological, i. e. a lower manifestation of the
same idea. Yet how is one tempted to say, that
this was Nature’s first and lowest attempt at
that use of hollow globes of mineral for pro¬
tecting soft fleshy parts, which she afterwards
developed to such perfection in the skulls of
vertebrate animals. But even that conceit,
pretty as it sounds, will not hold good ; for
though Radiates similar to these were among’
the earliest tenants of the abyss, yet as early as
their time, perhaps even before them, had been
conceived and actualized, in the sharks, and in
Mr. Hugh Miller’s pets, the old red sandstone
fishes, that very true vertebrate skull and brain,
of which this is a mere mockery.* Here the
whole animal, with his extraordinary feeding-mill,
(for neither teeth nor jaws is a fit word for it,) is

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

96

GLAUCUS ; OR,

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, feed¬
ing, and breeding, doubt it not, merrily enough.
But this result has been attained at the expense
of a complication of structure, which has baffled
all human analysis and research into final causes.
As much concerning this most miraculous of
families as is needful to be known, and ten times
more than 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 con¬
viction that The Creative Word, so far from hav¬
ing commenced, as some fancy, with the simplest,
and, as it were, easiest forms of life, took delight,
as it were, in solving the most difficult and com¬
plicated problems first of all, with a certain
divine prodigality of wisdom and of power ; and
that before the mountains were brought forth, or
ever the earth and the world was made, lie 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

97

and the metaphysician know, has nothing to do
with the wonder,) whereof each separate joist,
girder, and pane grows continually without alter¬
ing the shape of the whole ; and you have con¬
ceived 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,
furnished with a shell capable of enduring fossil
for countless ages, that we may confess Him to
have been as great when first His spirit brooded
on the deep, as He is now, and will be through
all worlds to come.

But we must make haste ; for the tide is rising
fast, and our stone will be restored to its eleven
hours’ bath, long before we have talked over half
the wonders which it holds. Look though, ere
you retreat, at one or two more.

What is that little brown fellow whom you
have just taken off the rock to which he adhered
so stoutly by his sucking-foot ? A limpet ? Not
at all : he is of quite a different family and
structure ; but, on the whole, a limpet-like shell
would suit him well enough, so he had one given
him: nevertheless, owing to certain anatomical
peculiarities, he needed one aperture more than
a limpet ; so one, if you will examine, has been

7

08

GLAUCUS ; OR,

given him at tlie 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 necessary, namely, the repetition of
the same form, slightly modified, in totally differ¬
ent animals, sometimes as if to avoid waste, (for
why should not the same conception be used in
two different cases, if it will suit in both ?) and
sometimes, (more marvellous by far,) when an
organ fully developed and useful in one species,
appears in a cognate species, but feeble, useless,
and, as it were, abortive ; and gradually, in species
still farther removed, dies out altogether ; placed
there, it would seem, at first sight, merely to
keep up the family likeness. I am half jesting;
that cannot be the only reason, perhaps not the
reason at all; but the fact is one of the most
curious, and notorious also, in comparative anat¬
omy.

Look, again, at those sea-slugs. One, some
three inches long, of a bright lemon-yellow,
clouded with purple ; another of a dingy gray ; f

* Fissurella grceca.

t Doris tvberculcita and bilineata.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

99

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 gray 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 exact¬
ly like those which we saw just now in the white
Cucumaria . Yes ; here is another instance of
that same custom of repetition. The Cucumaria
is a low radiate animal, the sea-slug a far higher
mollusk ; and every organ within him is formed
on a different type ; as indeed are those seeming¬
ly identical gills, if you come to examine them
under the microscope, having to oxygenate fluids
of a very different and more complicated kind ;
and, moreover, the CucumaricHs gills were put
round his mouth ; the Doris's feathers round the
other extremity ; that gray Dolis’s, again, are
simple clubs, scattered over his whole back, and
in each of his nudibrancli congeners these same
gills take some new and fantastic form ; in Me-
libcea those clubs are covered with warts ; in
Scyllcea , with tufted bouquets ; in the beautiful

* Eolis papillosa.

100

GLAUCUS ; OR,

Antiopa * they are transparent bags ; and in
many other English species they take every con¬
ceivable form of leaf, tree, flower, and branch,
bedecked with every color of the rainbow, as
you may see them depicted in Messrs. Alder
and Hancock’s unrivalled Monograph on the
Nudibrancli Mollusca.

And now, worshipper of final causes and the
mere useful in Nature, answer but one ques¬
tion, — Why this prodigal variety? All these
Nudibranclis live in much the same way: why
would not the same mould have done for them
all ? And why, again, (for we must push the
argument a little further,) why have not all the
butterflies, at least all who feed on the same
plant, the same markings ? Of all unfathomable
triumphs of design, (we can only express our¬
selves thus, for honest induction, as Paley so well
teaches, allows us to ascribe such results only to
the design of some personal will and mind,) what
surpasses that by which the scales on a butterfly’s
wing are arranged to produce a certain pattern
of artistic beauty beyond all painter’s skill ?
What a waste of power, on any utilitarian theory
of nature ! And once more ; why are those
* Gosse’s “Naturalist in Devon,” p. 325.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 101

strange microscopic atomies, the Diatomacece and
Infusoria , which fill every stagnant pool, which
fringe every branch of sea-weed, which form
banks hundreds of miles long on the Arctic sea¬
floor, and the strata of whole moorlands, which
pervade in millions the mass of every iceberg, and
float aloft in countless swarms amid the clouds of
the volcanic dust, — why are their tiny shells of
flint as fantastically various in their quaint mathe¬
matical symmetry, as they are countless beyond
the wildest dreams of the Pantheist ? Mystery
inexplicable on all theories of evolution by neces¬
sary laws, as well as on the conceited notion
which, making man forsooth the centre of the
universe, dares to believe that variety of forms
has existed for countless ages in abysmal sea-
depths and untrodden forests, only that some
few individuals of the western races might, in
these latter days, at last discover and admire a
corner here and there of the boundless realms of
beauty. Inexplicable, truly, if man be the cen¬
tre 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

102

GLAUCUS ; OR,

eternal Spirit sports and makes melody.” Of all
the blessings which the study of nature brings
to the patient observer, let none, perhaps, be
classed higher than this ; — that the further he
enters into those fairy gardens of life and birth,
which Spenser saw and described in his great
poem, the more he learns the awful and yet most
comfortable truth, that they do not belong to him,
but to one greater, wiser, lovelier than he ; and
as he stands, silent with awe, amid the pomp of
nature’s ever-busy rest, hears, as of old, “ The
Word of the Lord God walking among the trees
of the garden in the cool of the day.”

One sight more, and we have done. We had
something to say, had time permitted, on the lu¬
dicrous element which appears here and there in
nature. There are animals, like monkeys and
crabs, which seem made to be laughed at ; by
those at least who possess that most indefinable
of faculties, the sense of the ridiculous. As
long as man possesses muscles especially formed
to enable him to laugh, we have no right to sup¬
pose (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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE,

103

(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 our part ; at least we will hope it is a reverent
one : but till we can find something corresponding
to what we conceive of the Divine Mind in any
class of phenomena, it is perhaps better not
to talk about them at all, but observe a stoic
“ epoche,” waiting for more light, and yet confess¬
ing that our own laughter is uncontrollable, and
therefore we hope not unworthy of us, at many a
strange creature and strange doing which we
meet, from the highest ape to the lowest polype.

But, in the mean while, there are animals in
which results so strange, fantastic, even seemingly
horrible, are produced, that fallen man may be
pardoned, if he shrinks from them in disgust.
That, at least, must be a consequence of our own
wrong state ; for everything is beautiful and
perfect in its place. It may be answered, “ Yes,
in its place ; but its place is not yours. You
had no business to look at it, and must pay
the penalty for intermeddling.” I doubt that
answer ; for surely, if man have liberty to do
anything, he has liberty to search out freely his
Heavenly Father’s works ; and yet every one

I

104

GLAUCUS ; OR,

seems to have his antipathic animal ; and I know
one bred from his childhood to zoology by land
and sea, and bold in asserting, and honest in
feeling, that all without exception is beautiful,
who yet cannot, after handling and petting
and admiring all day long every uncouth and
venomous beast, avoid a paroxysm of horror at
the sight of the common house-spider. At all
events, whether we were intruding or not, in
turning this stone, we must pay a fine for having
done so; for there lies an animal as foul and
monstrous to the eye as u hydra, gorgon, or
cliimcera 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 I know not, (though it lurks here under
every stone,) and should be glad to know. It
seems some very “ low ” Ascarid or Planarian
worm. You see it ? That black, shiny, knotted
lump among the gravel, small enough to be taken
up in a dessert-spoon. Look now, as it is raised
and its coils drawn out. Three feet — six — nine,
at least: with a capability of seemingly endless
expansion ; a slimy tape of living caoutchouc,
some eighth of an inch in diameter, a dark
chocolate-black, with paler longitudinal lines.

THE WONDERS OF TIIE SHORE.

105

Is it alive ? It hangs helpless and motionless, a
mere velvet string across the hand. Ask the
neighboring Annelids and the fry of the rock
fishes, or put it into a vase at home, and see.
It lies motionless, trailing itself among the
gravel ; you cannot tell where it begins or ends ;
it may be a dead strip of sea-weed, Himanthalia
loreci perhaps, or Chorda jilum ; 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 an¬
other instant, from one lip, a concave double
proboscis, just like a tapir’s, (another instance of
the repetition of forms,) has clasped him like a
finger ; and now begins the struggle : but in
vain. He is being “played” with such a fishing-
line as the skill of a Wilson or a Stoddart never
could invent ; a living line, with elasticity beyond
that of the most delicate fly-rod, which follows
every lunge, shortening and lengthening, slipping
and twining round every piece of gravel and
stem of sea-weed, with a tiring drag such as no
Highland wrist or step could ever bring to bear
on salmon or on trout. The victim is tired now ;
and slowly, and yet dexterously, his blind as-

106

GLAUCUS ; OK,

sailant is feeling and shifting along his side, till
he reaches one end of him ; and then the black
lips expand, and slowly and surely the curved
finger begins packing him end-foremost down into
the gullet, where he sinks, inch by inch, till the
swelling which marks his place is lost among the
coils, and he is probably macerated to a pulp
long before he has reached the opposite extrem¬
ity 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. 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 natu¬
ralists do humming-birds, with water. Let him
rest in peace ; it will cost you ten minutes’ hard
* Saxicava rugosci.

THE WONDERS OF TIIE SHORE.

107

work, and much dirt, to extract him : but if you
are fond of shells, secure one or two of those
beautitul pink and straw-colored scallops,* who
have gradually incorporated the layers of their
lower valve with the roughnesses of the stone,
destroying thereby the beautiful form which be¬
longs to their race, but not their delicate color.
There are a few more bivalves too, adhering to
the stone, and those rare ones, and two or three
delicate Mangelice and Ncisce are trailing their
graceful spires up and down in search of food.
That little bright red and yellow pea, too, touch
it, — the brilliant colored cloak is withdrawn,
and, instead, you have a beautifully ribbed pink
cowry, f our only European representative of
that grand tropical family. Cast one wondering
glance, too, at the forest of zoophytes and corals,
Leprolice and Flustrce , and those quaint blue stars,
set in brown jelly, which are no zoophytes, but
respectable mollusks, 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.

* Pecten pusio.

f Cyprcea Europcea.

X Botrylli.

108

GLAUCUS ; OR,

Now away, and as a specimen of the fertility
of the water-world, look at this rough list of
species,* 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 s(

* Mollusks.

Doris tuberculata.

- bilineata.

Eolis papillosa.
Pleurobranchus plu-
mula.

Neritina.

Cypraea.

Trochus, — 2 species.
Mangelia.

Triton.

Tropbon.

Nasa, — 2 species.
Ceritkium.

Sigaretus.

Fissurella.

Area lactea.

Pecten pusio.

Tapes pullastra.
Kellia suborbicula-
ris.

Sphsenia Binghami.
Saxicava rugosa.
Gastrochoena phola-
dia.

Pkolas parva.

a- weeds which

Anomiae, — 2 or 3 spe¬
cies.

Cyntkia, — 2 species.
Botryllus, do.
Sydinum ?

Annelids.

Phyllodoce, and other
Nereid worms.
Polynoe squamata.

Crustacea.

4 or 5 species.

Ecliinoderms.

Eckinius miliaris.
Asterias gibbosa.
Ophiocoma neglecta.
Cucumaria Hynd-
manni.

- communis.

Polypes.

Sertularia pumila.
- rugosa.

covers the upper

Sertularia fallax.

- filicula.

Plumularia falcata.

- setacea.

Laomedea geniculata.
Campanularia volubi-
lis.

Actinia mesembryan-
tkemum.

- clavata.

- anguicoma.

- crassicomis.

Tubulipora patina.

- hispida.

- serpens.

Crisia ebumea.
Cellepora pumicosa.
Lepraliae, — many spe¬
cies.

Membranipora pilosa.
Cellularia ciliata.

- scruposa.

- reptans.

Flustra membrana-
cea, &c.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 109

surface, we should probably obtain some twenty
minute species more.

A goodly catalogue this, surely, of the inhab¬
itants of three or four large stones ; and yet
how small a specimen of the multitudinous na¬
tions 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 en¬
dure. The crevices of the highest rocks, only
sprinkled with salt spray in spring-tides and high
gales, have their peculiar little univalves, their
crisp lichen-like sea-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 Algce 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 Laminarice (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

110

GLAUCUS ; OR,

to great) to those who, descending the Andes,
pass in a single day from the vegetation of the
Arctic zone to that of the Tropics. And here
and there, even at half-tide level, deep rock-
basins, shaded from the sun and always full of
water, keep up in a higher zone the vegetation
of a lower one, and afford in miniature an anal¬
ogy to those deep “ barrancos ” which split the
high table-land of Mexico, down whose awful
cliffs, swept by cool sea-breezes, the traveller
looks from among the plants and animals of the
temperate zone, and sees far below, dim through
their everlasting vapor-batli of rank hot steam,
the mighty forms and gorgeous colors of a tropic
forest.

“ I do not wonder,” says Mr. Gosse, in his
charming “Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devon¬
shire Coast,” * “ that when Southey had an op¬
portunity 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 Orien¬
tal romances. J ust listen to him : —

*P. 187.

TIIE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

Ill

“ ‘ It was a garden still beyond all price,

Even yet it was a place of paradise ;

• • • • •

And here were coral bowers,

And grots of madrepores,

And banks of sponge, as soft and fair to eye
As e’er was mossy bed
Whereon the wood-nymphs lie
With languid limbs in summer’s sultry hours.

Here, too, were living flowers,

Which, like a bud compacted,

Their purple cups contracted ;

And now in open blossom spread,

Stretched, like green anthers, many a seeking head.

And arborets of jointed stone were there,

And plants of fibres fine as silkworm’s thread;

Yea, beautiful as mermaid’s golden hair
Upon the waves dispread.

Others that, like the broad banana growing,

Raised their long wrinkled leaves of purple hue,

Like streamers wide outflowing.’ — Keliama, 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

112

GLAUCUS ; OR,

paint, drew not upon the resources of his prolific
fancy for imagery here, but was well content to
jot down the simple lineaments of nature as he
saw her in plain, homely England.

“ It is a beautiful and fascinating sight for
those who have never seen it before, to see the
little shrubberies of pink coralline — ‘ the arborets
of jointed stone ’ — that fringe those pretty pools.
It is a charming sight to see the crimson banana¬
like leaves of the Delesseria waving in their dark¬
est corners ; and the purple fibrous tufts of
Pohysiphonice 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 Dcisyci, and large leaves, cut
into fringes and furbelows, of rosy Phodymenice.
All these are lovely to behold ; but I think I
admire as much as any of them one of the com¬
monest of our marine plants, Chondrus crispus.
It occurs in the greatest profusion on this coast,
in every pool between tide-marks; and every¬
where, — except in those of the highest level,

THE WONDERS OF TIIE SHORE.

113

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 color. The
expanding fan-shaped fronds, cut into segments,
cut, and cut again, make fine bushy tufts in a
deep pool, and every segment of every frond
reflects a flush of the most lustrous azure, like
that of a tempered sword-blade.” — Gosse’s Dev¬
onshire Coast , pp. 187 - 189.

And the sea-bottom, also, has its zones, at
different depths, and its peculiar forms in pecu¬
liar 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 con¬
tracted 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 invested the old Greek
fable of Glaucus the fisherman, how he ate of
the herb which gave his fish strength to leap

8

114

GLAUCUS ; OR,

back into their native element, 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 Hel¬
lenic poets peopled their sunny bays and firths,
feeding his “ silent flocks ” far below on the green
Zostera beds, or basking with them on the sunny
ledges in the summer noon, or wandering in the
still bays on sultry nights amid the choir of Am-
phitrite 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 moun
tains 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 rain¬
bows,

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.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

115

So they went on in their joy, more white than the foam which
they scattered,

Laughing and singing and tossing and twining, while, eager,
the Tritons

Blinded with kisses their eyes, unreproved, and above them in
worship

Fluttered the terns, and the sea-gulls swept past them on
silvery pinions,

Echoing softly their laughter; around them the wantoning
dolphins

Sighed as they plunged, full of love ; and the great sea-horses
which bore them

Curved up their crests in their pride to the delicate arms of
their riders,

Pawing the spray into gems, till a fiery rainfall, unharming,

Sparkled and gleamed on the limbs of the maids, and the coils
of the mermen.

So they went on in their joy, bathed round with the fiery
coolness,

Needing nor sun nor moon, self-lighted, immortal: but others,

Pitiful, floated in silence apart ; on their knees lay the sea-
boys

Whelmed by the roll of the surge, swept down by the anger
of Nereus;

Hapless, whom never again upon quay or strand shall their
mothers

Welcome with garlands and vows to the temples; but, wearily
pining,

Gaze over island and main for the sails which return not;
they heedless

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

So they past by in their joy, like a dream, down the murmur¬
ing ripples.”

1 1 G

GLAUCUS ; OK,

Such a rhapsody may be somewhat out of
order, even in a popular scientific book ; and
yet one cannot help at moments envying the
old Greek imagination, which could inform the
soulless sea-world with a human life and beauty.
For after all, star-fishes and sea-anemones are
dull substitutes for Sirens and Tritons ; the
lamps of the sea-nymplis, those glorious phos¬
phorescent medusce 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
gray 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
Plioca ? 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 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 117

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
labors of the happy, busy day. No ; such
short glimpses of the water-world as our present
appliances afford us are full enough of pleasure ;
and we will not envy Glaucus ; we will not even
be over-anxious for the success of his only mod¬
ern imitator, the French naturalist who is report¬
ed to have just fitted himself with a water-proof
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. AVe will be content with dredging next
year as we dredged this ; and in the mean while
let Mr. Gosse tell us some of the pleasures of
that little-known amusement : —

“ The dredge is a strong bag with an iron
frame around the mouth, which is drawn over
the sea-bottom by a rope. The rudest form of
the instrument is that used for procuring oysters.
The bag is generally made of iron rings linked
together, and one of the longer sides of the frame
is turned up to make a scraping-lip.

118

GLAUCUS ; OR,

“ But the naturalists’ dredge is an improve¬
ment upon this form ; the oyster-dredge, with all
the care employed in heaving, will frequently
turn over in sinking, so that the unlipped side of
the frame which will not scrape is on the ground.
Hence we have each of the two long sides of the
mouth made into a scraping-lip, so that the in¬
strument cannot fall wrong. Instead of rings
our body is made of spun-yarn (a sort of small
rope) or fishing-line, netted with a small mesh ;
or, which is still better, of a raw hide, (such as
those which the tobacconists receive from South
America inclosing tobacco, the hides of the wild
cattle of the Pampas,) cut into thongs, and
netted in like manner. Sometimes the bae; is
made of coarse sackcloth, or of canvas, but the
former soon wears out, and the latter is not suf¬
ficiently pervious to water; an important point,
for if there be not a free current through the
bag, while on the bottom, it embraces nothing,
merely driving everything before it, and com¬
ing up empty. The hide-net is almost inde¬
structible.

“ To the two ends, or short sides of the frame,
which forms an oblong square, are attached by a
hinge two long triangles, which, meeting in front

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 119

at some distance from tlie mouth, are connected
by a swivel-joint. To this the dragging rope is
bent, which must be long enough to allow thrice
as much at least to be overboard as the perpen¬
dicular depth would require ; if you are dredging
in ten fathoms, you must use at least thirty
fathoms of line, or your dredge will make
long jumps over the ground instead of steadily
raking it. The inward end of the rope having
been made fast to one of the thwarts, the
dredge is hove to windward, and the boat is
put before the wind, or at least allowed a flow¬
ing sheet.

• • • • •

“ But before we ran down to our dredging-
ground, my master of the ceremonies proposed
that we should haul up a point or two, and have
a scrape on the Zostera beds that cover many
acres of shallow water in the bight of Preston
Valley. But let me introduce my man to you.
A clever fellow is Jone, and though only bred as
a fisherman, he is quite an amateur naturalist.
There is nobody else in Weymouth harbor that
knows anything about dredging ; (I have it from
his own lips, so you may rely upon it ;) but he is
familiar with the feel of almost every yard of

/

120

glaucus ; on,

bottom from Whitenose to Church-Hope, and
from St. Aldham’s Head to the Bill. He follows
dredging with the zest of a savant; and it is
amusing really to hear how he pours forth
the crackjaw, the sesquipedalian nomenclature.
‘ Now, Sir, if you do want a Gastrochcena , I can
just put down your dredge upon a lot of ’em ;
we ’ll bring up three and four in a stone.’ ‘ I ’m
in hopes we shall have a good Cribella or two off
this bank, if we don’t get choked up with them
’ere Ophiocomas .’ He tells me in confidence that
he has been sorely puzzled to find a name for his
boat, but has at length determined to appellate
her ‘The Turritella; just to astonish the fisher¬
men, you know, Sir,’ — with an accompanying
wink and chuckle, and a patronizing nudge in
my ribs. Jone is a proud man when he gets a
real savant alone in a boat ; and he talks with
delight of the feats which he has achieved in the
dredging line for Mr. Bowerbank, Mr. Hanley,
and Professor Forbes.

• • • • •

“ Well, here we are in the bight, just off the
mouth of Preston Valley, the only bit of pretty
scenery anywhere near. This, however, is a little
gem ; a verdant dell opening to the sea, through

THE WONDERS OF TIIE SHORE.

121

which, a streamlet runs, with the sides and bottom

covered with woods, a rare feature in this neigh-

#

borhood. We are over the Zostera : the beds of
dark green grass are waving in the heave of the
swell, and we can make out the long and nar¬
row blades by closely looking down beneath the
shadow of the boat. Here then is the place for
the keer-drag. Down it goes and sinks into the
long grass, while we slowly drag it for a couple
of hundred yards or so.

“ When disposed to try our luck, we hauled on
the rope till we got the mouth of the drag to the
top of the water ; a turn or hitch was then
taken round a belaying pin, with the two side
lines of the bridle, and the point of the net only
was then hauled on board, put into a pan of
water and untied. Here was congregated the
chief part of the prey taken, and hence the need
of having the meshes so small in this part. Out
swam in a moment a good many little fishes that
haunt the grass-bed ; as Pipe-fishes ( Syngnathns )
of several species, Gobies ( Gobiiis unipunctatus ,
&c., &c.) and bright blue Conners ( Lcibrus and
Crenildbrus). With these were two or three
active and charming Cuttles (Sepiola) ; and
clinging to the meshes of the net in various parts

122

GLAUCUS ; OR,

were several species of Nudibranch Mollusca,
creatures of remarkable elegance and beauty.

• • • • •

“ Meanwhile we put the boat before the wind,
and run along the inhospitable coast on our left.
We leave the pleasant vale behind, and skim
swiftly by the black rocks of Ratcliff Head, and
the distorted and confused strata of Goggin’s Ber-
row. We pass Osmington Mills, where a rather
ample sheet of water is poured in a foaming cas¬
cade over the low cliffs, and where those curious
circular blocks of grit-stone, flat on one side and
conical on the other, are imbedded with regu¬
larity on the sandy face of the precipice: and
leave on our quarter the rocks, where the
abundance of iron pyrites and sulphur has more
than once presented the strange phenomenon of
spontaneous fire ; a phenomenon distinctly re¬
membered still by the inhabitants of Weymouth,
who night after night used to gaze out with won¬
der on the burning cliffs.

“ At length we are under Whitenose, that bold
chalk cliff that is so prominent an object as the
eye roves along the coast line from Weymouth.
Here we turn the boat’s edge to the southward,
and throw the dredge overboard in fourteen

THE "WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

123

fathoms. And while I am enjoying with the
line in my hand, what a dredger particularly
likes t6 feel, the vibration produced by the
instrument as it rumbles and scrapes over a
moderately rough bottom, telling that it is doing
its work well, we will gaze with admiration on
this magnificent precipice of dazzling white that
rears its noble head behind us. It is the termi¬
nation of that range of chalk hills which, with
some few interruptions, intersect the kingdom
from the Yorkshire coast to Dorset : and stands
in simple majesty, the snowy whiteness of its vast
face unvaried, except by the slanting lines which
mark the dipping strata running across it, and
which look so fine and so regular, as if they had
been drawn by the pen of a geometrician.

• • • • •

“ But up with the dredge ; let us see our suc¬
cess. It feels pretty heavy as it mounts, and
here, as it breaks the surface, we can already
see some bright-liued and active creatures in its
capacious bag. A wide board, resting on two
thwarts, serves for a table, and on this — a few of
the more delicate things, that appear at a glance,
having been first taken out — the whole contents
are poured. The empty dredge is returned to the

124

GLAUCUS ; OR,

deep for another haul, while we set eagerly to
work with fingers and eyes on the heap before us.

“ What a pleasure it is to examine a tolerably
prolific dredge-haul ! I am not going to enu¬
merate all the things that we found; it would
make a pretty long list. Numbers of rough
stones, and of old worm-eaten shells, half a bro¬
ken bottle, and other strange matters, were there,
— every one, however rude, worthy of close ex¬
amination, because studded with elegant zoo¬
phytes, the tubes of serpulm and other annelidee,
bright-colored pellucid ascidians, graceful nudi-
branch molluscm, the spawn of fishes, and end¬
less other things. Brittle-stars, by scores, were
twining their long spiny arms, like lizard’s tails,
among the tangled mass, arrayed in the most
varied and most gorgeous hues of all varieties of
kaleidoscope patterns, (see plate IV.,) * and sand-
stars not a few. The latter are much more deli¬
cate in constitution than the former, being very
difficult to keep alive, and also much more brit¬
tle ; the former, notwithstanding their English
name, I have not found so particularly fragile.
Among other members of this wonderful class
of animals, we obtained, in the course of our

* Gosse’s “ Aquarium.”

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

125

day's work, several of that fine but common one,
the twelve-rayed sun-star ( Solaster papposa ), a
showy creature, dressed in rich scarlet livery,
some eight inches in diameter. Two or three
of a species usually counted rare also occurred,
the bird’s foot ( Palmipes membranaceus ), more
curious, and equally beautiful. (See plate III.)
It resembles a pentagonal piece of thin leather,
with the angles a little produced, and regularly
2iointed. The central part of this disc is scarlet,
and a double line of scarlet proceeds from this to
each angle, while the whole is margined by a nar¬
row band of the same gorgeous hue. The remain¬
der of the surface is of a pale yellow or cream
color, and covered, in the most elegant manner,
with tufts of minute spines, arranged in lines
which cross each other, lozenge-fashioned, near the
middle of the disc, and run parallel to each other,
at right angles to the margin, between the points.

“ Not less attractive was another star-fish, the
Eyed Cribella {Cribella oculata). It consists
of five finger-like rays, tapering to a blunt point,
and cleft nearly to the centre, the consistence
stiffly fleshy, or almost cartilaginous. The hue
of both disc and rays, or the superior surface, is
a fine rosy purple. (See plate III.)

12G

GLAUCUS ; OR,

“ All these are very attractive occupants of an
aquarium. They are active and restless, though
slow in movement, continually crawling about
the rocks, and round the sides of the tank, by a
gliding motion produced by the attachment and
shifting of hundreds of sucker feet, which are
protruded at will through minute pores in the
calcareous integument. Their showy colors are
exhibited to advantage on the dark rocks, around
the projections and angles of which they wind
their flexible bodies, now and then turning back
a ray, from which the pellucid suckers are seen
stretching and sprawling ; and as they mount the
glass, not only can their hues be admired, but
the exquisite structure of their spines, and the
mechanism of their suckers, can be studied at
leisure.

u Every haul of the dredge brought up
several univalve shells, tenanted, not by their
original constructors and proprietors, but by
their busy intruder, the soldier crab ( Pagurus ).
Several species of this curious creature occurred.
. . . I shall only just allude to the beautiful

cloak anemone ( Adamsict palliata ), and several
other species of this charming family. Long-
legged spider crabs, of the genera Stenorynchus,

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

127

Inachus, &c., were abundant, sprawling tlieir
slender limbs, like bristles, to an unconscionable
distance, tempting us to think that, if we had
legs like these, we might cover the ground in a
style that would put to shame the old giant-
slayer’s seven-league boots.

“ But, as I have said, time and space would
fail me if I were to attempt an enumeration of
all the objects of interest that were brought to
view in the course of a good day’s dredging.
Mollusca, both naked and shelled, both univalve
and bivalve, and crabs, prawns, and shrimps,
worms, sponges, sea-weeds, all presented claims
to notice, and all contributed representatives to
my stock, in the successive emptyings of the
dredge ; for we worked pretty nearly all the way
home. And when we came to bring on shore
the bottles, jars, pans, pails, and tubs, we found
them all well tenanted with strange creatures,
the greater part of which were despatched on
their way to London by the same evening mail
train.” — Gosse’s Aquarium, pp. 55, 58, 59, Go.

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

128

GLAUCUS ; OK,

a tolerable satisfaction. Go on board one of
these ; and while the trawl is down, spend a
pleasant hour or two in talking with the simple,
honest, sturdy fellows who work it, from whom
(if you are as fortunate as we have been for
many a year past) you may get many a moving
story of danger and sorrow, as well as many a
shrewd practical maxim, and often, too, a living
recognition of God, and the providence of God,
which will send you home, perhaps, a wiser and
more genial man. And when the trawl is hauled,
wait till the fish are counted out, and packed
away, and then kneel down and inspect (in a
pair of Mackintosh leggings, and your oldest
coat) the crawling heap of shells and zoophytes
which remains behind about the decks, and you
will find, if a landsman, enough to occupy you
for a week to come. Nay, even if it be too calm
for trawling, condescend to go out in a coble, 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.

We speak from experience ; for it was but the
other day that, in the north of Devon, we found

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

129

sermons, not indeed in stones, but in a creature
reputed among the most worthless of sea-vermin.

I had been lounging about all the morning on
the little pier, waiting, with the rest of the
village, for a trawling breeze which would not
come. Two o’clock was past, and still the red
mainsails of the skiffs hung motionless, and
their images quivered head downwards in the
glassy swell,

“As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.”

It was neap-tide, too, and therefore nothing could
be done among the rocks. So, in despair, finding
an old coast-guard friend starting for his lobster-
pots, I determined to save the old man’s arms, by
rowing him up the shore ; and then paddled home¬
ward again, under the high green northern wall,
five hundred feet of cliff furred to the water’s
edge with rich oak woods, against Avhose 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 ;

9

130

GLAUCUS ; OK,

the evening fires were lighted one by one ; the
soft murmur of the water-fall, and the pleasant
laugh of children, and the splash of homeward
oars, came clearer and clearer to the ear at every
stroke : and as we rowed on, arose the recollec¬
tion 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 labored 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 profitable, and yet left undone,
there seemed a sublime irony, most humbling to
man, in some of Nature’s processes, and in the
silent and unobtrusive perfection with which she
has been taught to anticipate, since the founda¬
tion 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-

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

131

covering its possibility. Created it? Alas for
the pride of human genius, and the autotheism
which would make man the measure of all things,
and the centre of the universe ! All the inval¬
uable laws and methods of sanatory reform at
best are but clumsy imitations of the unseen
wonders which every animalcule and leaf have
been working since the world’s foundation, with
this slight difference between them and us, that
they fulfil their appointed task, and we do not.

The sickly geranium which spreads its blanched
leaves against the cellar panes, and peers up, as
if imploringly, to the narrow slip of sunlight at
the top of the narrow alley, had it a voice, could
tell more truly than ever a doctor in the town,
why little Bessy sickened of the scarlatina, and
little Johnny of the hooping-cough, till the tod¬
dling wee things who used to pet and water it
were carried off each and all of them one by one
to the churchyard sleep, while the father and
mother sat at home, trying to supply by gin
that very vital energy which fresh air and pure
water, and the balmy breath of woods and
heaths, were made by God to give ; and how the
little geranium did its best, like a heaven-sent
angel, to right the wrong which man’s ignorance

132

GLAUCUS ; OR,

had begotten, and drank in, day by day, tlie
poisoned atmosphere, and formed it into fair
green leaves, and breathed into the children’s
faces from every pore, whenever they bent over
it, the life-giving oxygen for which their dulled
blood and festered lungs were craving in vain ;
fulfilling God’s will itself, though man would
not, too careless or too covetous to see, after six
thousand 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 wre
become very Heraclituses. Let us take the
other side of the matter with Democritus, try
to laugh man out of a little of his boastful
ignorance and self-satisfied clumsiness, and tell
him, that if the House of Commons would but
summon one of the little Paramecia from any
Thames sewer-mouth, to give his evidence before
their next Cholera Committee, sanatory blue-
books, invaluable as they are, would be super¬
seded for ever and a day, and Sir William
Molesworth would no longer have to confess,
as he did last year, that he knew of no means
of stopping the smells which were driving the

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 133

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 labor, had contrived,
with a sublime simplicity of economy which Mr.
Hume might have envied and admired afar off, to
make him do his work gratis, by giving him the
nuisances as his perquisites, and teaching him
how to eat them. Certainly, (without going the
length of the Caribs, who uphold Cannibalism be¬
cause, they say, it makes war cheap, and precludes
entirely the need of a commissariat,) this cardinal
virtue of cheapness ought to make Squinado an
interesting object in the eyes of the present
generation, especially as he was at that moment
a true sanatory martyr, having, like many of his
human fellow-workers, got into a fearful scrape

134

GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 sit¬
ting 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 pal¬
pable nuisance somewhere in the neighborhood ;
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 tangle (. Laminaria ),
three or four large pieces of stale thornback,
of most evil savor, and highly prejudicial to
the purity of the sea, and the health of the
neighboring herrings. Happy Squinado ! He
needed not to discover the limits of his author¬
ity, to consult any lengthy Nuisances’ Removal
Act, with its clauses, and counter-clauses, and
exceptions, and explanations of interpretations,
and interpretations of explanations. Nature,
who can afford to be arbitrary, because she
is perfect, and to give her servants irrespon¬
sible powers, because she has trained them to
their work, had bestowed on him and on his

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

135

forefathers, as general health inspectors, those
very summary powers of entrance and removal
in the watery realms, for which common sense,
public opinion, and private philanthropy are still
entreating vainly in the terrestrial realms ; so
finding a hole, in he went, and began to remove
the nuisance, without “ waiting twenty-four
hours,” “ laying an information,” “ serving a
notice,” or any other vain delay. The evil was
there, — and there it should not stay ; so, having
neither cart nor barrow, he just began putting it
into his stomach, and in the mean while set his
assistants to work likewise. For suppose not,
gentle reader, that Squinado went alone ; in his
train were more than a hundred thousand as
good as he, each in his office, and as cheaply
paid ; who needed no cumbrous baggage-train of
force-pumps, hose, chloride of lime packets, white¬
wash, 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 substi-

136

GLAUCUS ; OR,

tute, 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 few rational proposals of
old Fourier, that scavengers, chimney-sweeps,
and other workers in disgusting employments,
should be rewarded for their self-sacrifice in be¬
half of the public weal by some peculiar badge
of honor, or laurel crown. Not that his crown,
like those of the old Greek games, is a mere use¬
less badge ; on the contrary, his robe of state is
composed of his fellow-servants. His whole back
is covered with a little gray forest of branching
hairs, fine as the 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.*

* Coryhe ramosa.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 137

On that leg grows, amid another copse of the
gray polypes, a delicate straw-colored 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,*
each of which, too, protrudes its living flower ; on
another leg is a fresh species, like a little heather-
bush of whitest ivory, f and every needle leaf a
polype cell — let us stop before the imagination
grows dizzy with the contemplation of those
myriads of beautiful atomies. And what is their
use ? Each living flower, each polype mouth is
feeding fast, sweeping into itself, by the perpetual
currents caused by the delicate fringes upon its
rays, (so minute these last, that their motion
only betrays their presence,) each tiniest atom of
decaying matter in the surrounding water, to
convert it, by some wondrous alchemy, into fresh
cells and buds, and either build up a fresh branch
in their thousand-tenanted tree, or form an egg¬
cell, from whence, when ripe, may issue, not a
fixed zoophyte, but a free swimming animal.

* Campanularia Integra.

f Crisidia eburnea.

138

GLAUCUS ; OK,

And in the mean while, 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 reoxy¬
genate the impure water, and render it fit once
more to be breathed by the higher animals who
swim or creep around.

Mystery of mysteries ! Let us jest no more,
— Heaven forgive us if we have jested too much
on so simple a matter as that poor spider-crab,
taken out of the lobster-pots, and left to die at
the bottom of the boat, because his more aristo¬
cratic cousins of the blue and purple armor 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

139

this is the case with zoophytes, having found
water in which they were growing (unless, of
course, sea-weeds were present) to be peculiarly
ready to become foul : but it is difficult to say
whether this is owing to their deoxygenating the
water while alive, like other animals, or to the
fact that it is very rare to get a specimen of
zoophyte in which a large number of the polypes
have not been killed in the transit home, or at
least so far knocked about, that (in the Antliozoa,
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 grew in a
state fit to support animal life.

This fact, first advanced by Priestley and
Ingenliousz, and, though doubted by the great
Ellis, satisfactorily ascertained by Professor
Daubeny, Mr. Ward, Dr. Johnston, and Mr.
Warington, gives an answer to the question,
which I hope has ere now arisen in the minds
of some of my readers.

ITow is it possible to see these wonders at

140

GLAUCUS ; OR,

home ? Beautiful and instructive as they may
be, can they be meant for any but dwellers by
the sea-side? Nay more, even to them must not
the glories of the water-world be always more
momentary than those of the rainbow, a mere F ata
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 honor of the first accomplishment of this
as of a hundred other zoological triumphs. As
early as 1842, he proved to himself the vegetable
nature of the common pink coralline, which
fringes every rock-pool, by keeping it for eight
weeks in unchanged salt-water, without any
putrefaction ensuing. The ground, of course,
on which the proof rested in this case was, that

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 141

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 Warington communicated
to the Chemical Society the result of a year’s
experiments, “ On ' the Adjustment of the Re¬
lations between the Animal and Vegetable
Kingdoms, by which the vital Functions of both
are permanently maintained.” The law which
his experiments verified was the same as that on
which Mr. Ward, in 1842, founded his invaluable
proposal for increasing the purity of the air in
large towns, by planting trees, and cultivating
flowers in rooms, that the animal and vegetable
respirations might counterbalance each other ; the
animal’s blood being purified by the oxygen given
off by the plants, the plants fed by the carbonic
acid breathed out by the animals.

On the same principle, Mr. Warington first
kept for many months, in a vase of unchanged
water, two small gold-fish and a plant of Vallis- *
neria spiralis ; and two years afterwards began
a similar experiment with sea-water, weeds, and

142

GLAUCUS ; OR,

anemones, which were, at last, as successful as
the former ones. Mr. Gosse had, in the mean
while, with tolerable success, begun a similar
method, unaware of what Mr. Warington had
done ; and now the beautiful and curious exhib¬
ition 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
kingdoms.

To this subject Mr. Gosse’s last book, “ The
Aquarium,” is principally devoted, though it
contains, besides, sketches of coast scenery, in
his usual charming style, and descriptions of
rare sea-animals, with wise and 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 colored plates, which
are, as it were, sketches from the interior of
tanks, are well fitted to excite the desire of all
readers to possess such gorgeous living pictures,
if as nothing else, still as drawing-room ornaments,
• flower-gardens which never wither, fairy lakes
of perpetual calm which no storm blackens, —

ovt iv Oepei, ovt tv ontvpp.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

143

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 gorgeous coloring and the grace and delicacy
of form which these subaqueous landscapes ex¬
hibit.

As for coloring, — the only bit of color which
I can remember even faintly resembling them,
(for though Correggio’s Magdalene may rival
them in greens and blues, yet even he has no
such crimsons and purples,) is the Adoration of
the Shepherds, by that “ prince of colorists,”
Palma Veccliio, which hangs on the left-hand side
of Lord Ellesmere’s great gallery. But as for the
forms, — where shall wTe see their like ? Where,
amid miniature forests as fantastic as those of
the tropics, animals whose shapes outvie the
wildest dreams of the old German ghost-painters
which cover the walls of the galleries of Brussels
or Antwerp ? And yet the uncoutliest 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 liis study, or in the tank-house at the

144

GLAUCUS ; OR,

Zoological Gardens ; and as it may be seen
also by any one wlio will follow carefully the
directions given at the end of his book, stock
a glass vase with such common things as he
may find in an hour’s search at low tide,
and so have an opportunity of seeing how
truly Mr. Gosse says, in his valuable preface,
that —

“ The habits ” (and he might well have added,
the marvellous beauty) “ of animals will never
be thoroughly known till they are observed in
detail. Nor is it sufficient to mark them with
attention now and then ; they must be closely
watched, their various actions carefully noted,
their behavior under different circumstances,
and especially those movements which seem to
us mere vagaries, undirected by any suggestible
motive or cause, well examined. A rich fruit
of result, often new and curious and unexpected,
will, I am sure, reward any one who studies
living animals in this way. The most interest¬
ing 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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

145

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 classi¬
fication, and the finding out of names, and quar-
rellings 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
in these pedantries is that moral training to be
found, for which we have been lauding the study
of Natural History : but in healthful walks and
voyages out of doors, and in careful and patient
watching of the living animals and plants at
home, with an observation sharpened by practice,
and a temper calmed by the continual practice
of the naturalist’s first virtues, — patience and
perseverance.

Practical directions for forming an “ Aqua¬
rium ” may be found in Mr. Gosse’s book bear¬
ing that name, at pp. 101, 255, et seq. ; and

* Aquarium, p. 163.

10

14G

GLAUCUS 5 OR,

those who wish to carry out the notion thor¬
oughly cannot do better than buy his book, and
take their choice of the many different forms of
vase, with rockwork, fountains, and other pretty
devices which he describes.

But the many, even if they have Mr. Gosse’s
book, will be rather inclined to begin with a small
attempt ; especially as they are probably half
sceptical of the possibility of keeping sea-animals
inland without changing the water. A few
simple directions, therefore, will not come amiss
here. They shall be such as any one can put
into practice, who goes down to stay in a
lodging-house at the most cockney of watering-
places.

Buy at any glass-shop a cylindrical glass jar,
some six inches in diameter and ten high, which
will cost you from three to four shillings ; wash
it clean, and fill it with clean salt-water, dipped
out of any pool among the rocks, only looking
first to see that there is no dead fish or other
evil matter in the said pool, and that no stream
from the land runs into it. If you choose to
take the trouble to dip up the water over a boat’s
side, so much the better.

So much for your vase ; now to stock it.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

147

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 grow¬
ing sea-weed. Avoid the common and coarser
kinds (fuci) which cover the surface of 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 wTater mark ; the pink coralline, the dark
purple ragged dulse ( ffliodymenia ), the Carrageen
moss ( Chondrus ), and, above all, the commonest
of all, the delicate green Ulva, which you will
see growing everywhere in wrinkled fan-shaped
sheets, as thin as the finest silver-paper. The
smallest bits of stone are sufficient, provided the
sea- weeds have hold of them ; for they have no
real roots, but adhere by a small disc, deriving
no nourishment from the rock, but only from the
water. Take care, meanwhile, that there be as
little as possible on the stone beside the weed
itself. Especially scrape off any small sponges,
and see that no worms have made their twining
tubes of sand among the weed-stems ; if they
have, drag them out; for they will surely die,
and as surely spoil all by sulphuretted hydrogen,
blackness, and evil smells.

148

GLAUCUS ; OR,

Put your weeds into your tank, and settle tliem
at the bottom ; which last some say should be
covered with a layer of pebbles : but let the
beginner leave it as bare as possible ; for the
pebbles only tempt cross-grained annelids to
crawl under them, die, and spoil all by decaying :
whereas if the bottom of the vase is bare, you
can see a sickly or dead inhabitant at once, and
take him out (which you must do) instantly.
Let your weeds stand quietly in the vase a day
or two before you put in any live animals ; and
even then, do not put any in if the water does
not appear perfectly clear : but lift out the weeds,
and renew the water ere you replace them.

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

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 149

pewter spoon. Take care to tear tlie sucking
base as little as possible (though a small rent
they will darn for themselves in a few days,
easily enough), and drop them into a basket of
wet sea-weed ; when you get home, turn them
into a dish full of water and leave them for
the night, and go to look at them to-morrow.
What a change ! The dull lumps of jelly have
taken root and flowered during the night, and
your dish is filled from side to side with a
bouquet of chrysanthemums ; each has expanded
into a hundred-petalled flower, crimson, pink,
purple, or orange; touch one, and it shrinks
together like a sensitive plant, displaying at the
root of the petals a ring of brilliant turquoise
beads. That is the commonest of all the
Actinioe ( [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

150

GLAUCUS ; OR,

tlieir color is equally brilliant. One is a bril¬
liant bloocl-red ; another a delicate sea-blue,
striped with pink ; but most have the disc and
the innumerable arms striped and ringed with
various shades of gray and brown. Shall we
get them? By all means, if we can. Touch
one. Where is he now ? Gone ? Vanished into
air, or into stone ? Not quite. You see that
knot of sand and broken shell lying on the rock,
where your dahlia was one moment ago. Touch
it, and you will find it leathery and elastic. That
is all which remains of the live dahlia. Never
mind ; get your finger into the crack under him,
work him gently but firmly out, and take him
home, and he will be as happy and as gorgeous
as ever to-morrow.

Let your Actinke stand for a day or two in
the dish, and then, picking out the liveliest and
handsomest, detach them once more from their
hold, drop them into your vase, right them with
a bit of stick, so that the sucking base is
downwards, and leave them to themselves
thenceforth.

These two species ( Mesembrycinthemum and
Crassicornis ) are quite beautiful enough to give
a beginner amusement : but there are two others

THE WONDERS OF TIIE SHORE.

151

which, are not uncommon, and of such exceeding
loveliness, that it is worth while to take a little
trouble to get them. The one is Beilis , the sea-
daisy, of which there is an excellent description
and plates in Mr. Gosse’s “ Rambles in Devon,”
pp. 24 - 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-gray 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 da)'
or two of captivity, and well repay all the
trouble which it has cost.

The other is Dianthus ; which you may find
adhering to fresh oysters in any dredger or
trawler’s skiff, a lengthened mass of olive, pale
rose, or snow-white jelly. The rose and the
white are the more beautiful ; the very maiden
queens of all the beautiful tribe. If you find

152

GLAUCUS ; OR,

one, clear the shell on which it grows of every¬
thing else (you may leave the oyster inside if
you will), and watch it expand under water into
a furbelowed flower, furred with innumerable
delicate tentacula ; * and in the centre, a mouth
of the most brilliant orange ; altogether one of
the loveliest gems, in the opinion of him who
writes, with which it has pleased God to bedeck
his lower world.

But you will want more than these anemones,
both for your own amusement and for the
health of your tank. Microscopic animals will
breed, and will also die ; and you need for them
some such scavenger as our poor friend Squinado,
to whom you were introduced a few pages back.
Turn, then, a few stones which lie piled on each
other at extreme low-water mark, and five
minutes’ search will give you the very animal
you want, — a little crab, of a dingy russet above,
and on the underside 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

* See Gosse’s Aquarium, Plate Y. p. 192.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

153

and crannies, he carries with him such an
apparatus of combs and brushes as Isidor or
Floris never dreamed of; with which he sweeps
out of the sea-water at every moment shoals of
minute animalcules, and sucks them into his tiny
mouth. Mr. Gosse will tell you more of this
marvel, in his Aquarium, p. 48.

Next, your sea-weeds, if they thrive as they
ought to do, will sow their minute spores in
millions around them ; and these, as they vege¬
tate, 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 ( Ziziphinns ),
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

154

GLAUCUS ; OR,

nibble the green ulvce, but when the film of
young weed begins to form, you will see it
mown off every morning as fast as it grows, in
little semicircular sweeps, just as if a fairy’s
scythe had been at work during the night.

And a scythe has been at work ; none other
than the tongue of the little sliell-fish ; a descrip¬
tion 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 beautiful forms which they con¬
tain will prove to you sufficiently.

You have two more enemies to guard against ;
dust and heat. If the surface of the water be¬
comes clogged with dust, the communication be¬
tween 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 lono: frozen over, unless a hole be broken
in the ice to admit the air. You must guard
against this by occasional stirring of the sur-

*P. 34.

THE WONDERS OF TIIE SHORE.

155

face, (it should be done once a day, if possible,)
and by keeping on a cover. A piece of muslin
tied over will do ; but a better defence is a plate
of glass, raised on wire some half inch above
the edge, so as to admit the air. I am not
sure that a sheet of brown paper laid over
the vase is not the best of all, because that
by its shade also guards against the next evil,
which is heat. Against that you must guard
by putting a curtain of muslin or oiled paper
between the vase and the sun, if it be very
fierce, or simply (for simple expedients are best)
by laying a handkerchief over it till the heat is
past. But if you leave your vase in a sunny
window long enough to let the water get tepid,
all is over with your pets. Half an hour’s boil¬
ing may frustrate the care of weeks. And yet,
on the other hand, light you must have, and
you can hardly have too much. Some animals
certainly prefer shade, and hide in the darkest
crannies ; and for them, if your aquarium is
large enough, you must provide shade, by ar¬
ranging the bits of stone into piles and caverns.
But without light, your sea-weeds will neither
thrive, nor keep the water sweet. With plenty
of light you will see, to quote Mr. Gosse once

156

GLAUCUS ; OK,

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 pro¬
cess goes on uninterruptedly as long as the rays
of the sun are uninterrupted.

“ Now these globules consist of pure oxygen ,
given out by the plants under the stimulus of
light ; and to this oxygen the animals in the
tank owe their life. The difference between the
profusion of oxygen-bubbles produced on a sunny
day, and the paucity of those seen on a dark,
cloudy day, or in a northern aspect, is very
marked.” Choose, therefore, a south or east
window, but draw down the blind, or throw a
handkerchief over all if the heat become fierce.
The water should always feel cold to your hand,
let the temperature outside be what it may.

Next, you must make up for evaporation by
fresh water. A very little will suffice, as often as
in summer you find the water in your vase sink
below its original level, and prevent the water
from getting too salt. For the salts, remember,
do not evaporate with the water, and if you left

*P. 259.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

157

the vase in the sun for a few weeks, it would
become a mere brine-pan.

But how will you move your treasures up to
town ?

The simplest plan which I have found success¬
ful is an earthen jar. You may buy them with
a cover which screws on with two iron clasps. If
you do not find such, a piece of oilskin tied over
the mouth is enough. But do not fill the jar full
of water ; leave about a quarter of the contents
in empty air, which the water may absorb, and so
keep itself fresh. And any pieces of stone, or
oysters, which you send up, hang by a string from
the mouth, that they may not hurt tender animals
by rolling about the bottom. With these simple
precautions, anything which you are likely to find
will well endure forty-eight hours of travel.

What if the water fails after all ?

Then Mr. Gosse’s artificial sea-water will form
a perfect substitute. You may buy the requisite
salts (for there are more salts than “ salt ” in sea¬
water) from any chemist to whom Mr. Gosse has
intrusted his discovery, and, according to his di¬
rections, make sea-water for yourself.*

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

158

GLAUCUS ; OR,

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 “ won¬
ders 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 flavor), and Anacharis
alsinastrum , that magical weed which, lately
introduced from Canada among timber, has
multiplied, self-sown, to so prodigious 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 : — these (in themselves,
from the transparency of their circulation, in¬
teresting microscopic objects) for oxygen-breed¬
ing vegetables ; and for animals, the pickings of

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

150

any pond. A minnow or two ; an eft ; some of
those caddis-baits (walking tubes of straw, sticks,
and shells) and water-crickets, which you may
find under any stone ; a few of the delicate pond-
snails (unless they devour your Vallisneria too
rapidly) ; water-beetles, of activity inconceivable ;
and that wondrous bug, the Notonecta, who lies
on his back all day, rowing about his boat¬
shaped body, with one long pair of oars, in search
of animalcules, and, the moment the lights are
out, turns head over heels, rights himself, and,
opening a pair of handsome wings, starts to fly
about the dark room in company with his friend
the water-beetle, and (I suspect) catch flies, and
then slips back demurely into the water with
the first streak of dawn ; — these animals, their
habits, their miraculous transformations, as the
caddis-baits appear at the top of the water as
alder-flies and sedge-flies (. Phryganece ) and the
water-crickets as duns and drakes (j Ephemera)
of the most delicate beauty, might give many an
hour’s quiet amusement to an invalid, laid on a
sofa, or imprisoned in a sick-room, and debarred
from reading, unless by some such means, any
page of that great green book outside, whose
pen is the finger of God, whose covers are the

1G0

GLAUCUS ; OR,

lire kingdoms and the star kingdoms, and its
leaves the lieatlier-bells, and the polypes of the
sea, and the gnats above the summer stream.

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 ? Not that this list will contain
all the best; but simply the best of which the
writer knows ; let, therefore, none feel aggrieved,
if, as it may chance, opening these pages, they
find their books omitted.

First and foremost, certainly, come Mr. Gosse’s
books. There is a playful and genial spirit in
them, a brilliant power of word-painting, com¬
bined with deep and earnest religious feeling,
which makes them as morally valuable as they
are intellectually interesting. Since White’s
“ History of Selborne,” few or no writers on
Natural History, save Mr. Gosse and poor Mr.
E. Forbes, have had the power of bringing out
the human side of science, and giving to seem¬
ingly dry disquisitions and animals of the lowest
type, by little touches of pathos and humor,
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

THE WONDERS OF TIIE SHORE,

1G1

this respect, and authors who should be in every
boy’s library : but they are rather anecdotists
than systematic or scientific inquirers ; while
Mr. Gosse, in his “ Naturalist on the Shores of
Devon,” his “ Tour in Jamaica,” and his “ Cana¬
dian Naturalist,” has done for those three places
what White did for Selborne, with all the
improved appliances of a science which has
widened and deepened tenfold since White’s
time.

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 has been com¬
pressed into so small a space, and yet told so
gracefully, simply, without a taint of pedantry or
cumbrousness, — an excellence which is the sure
and only mark of a perfect mastery of the
subject.

Two little “ Popular ” Histories, one of Brit¬
ish Zoophytes, the other of British Sea-weeds, by

11

162

GLAUCUS ; OK,

Dr. Landsborough (lately dead of cholera, at
Saltcoats, the scene of his energetic and pious
ministry), are very excellent ; and are furnished,
too, with well-drawn and colored plates, for the
comfort of those to whom a scientific nomencla¬
ture (as liable as any other human thing to be
faulty and obscure) conveys but a vague concep¬
tion of the objects. These may serve well for
the beginner, as introductions to Professor Har¬
vey’s large work on the British Algce, and to the
new edition of Professor Johnston’s invaluable
“ British Zoophytes.”

For general Zoology the best books for begin¬
ners are, perhaps, as an introduction to compara¬
tive anatomy, Professor Bymer Jones’s “ Animal
Kingdom ” ; 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 mar¬
vellously cheap rate. For microscopic animal¬
cules, Miss Agnes Catlow’s “Drops of Water”
will teach the young more than they will ever
remember, and serve as a good introduction to
those teeming abysses of the unseen world, which
must be afterwards traversed under the guidance
of Hassall and Ehrenberg.

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

1G3

For Ornithology, there is no book, after all,
like dear old Bewick, passe though he may be in
a scientific point of view. There is a good little
British Ornithology, too, published in Sir W.
Jardine’s “ Naturalist’s Library,” and another by
Mr. Gosse. And Mr. Knox’s “ Ornithological
Rambles in Sussex,” with Mr. St. John’s “ High¬
land Sports ” and “ Tour in Sutherlandshire,”
are the monographs of naturalists, gentlemen,
and sportsmen, which remind one at every page
(and what higher praise can one give ?) of
White’s “ History of Selborne.” These last,
with Mr. Gosse’s “ Canadian Naturalist,” and
his little book, “ The Ocean,” not forgetting Dar¬
win’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 Anstey’s Intro¬
duction is excellent ; while, as a specimen of
the way in which a single district may be thor¬
oughly 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 u Old Red
Sandstone ” ?

164

GLAUCUS ; OR,

For this last reason, I especially recommend to
the young the Key. 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 the British Isles. But, indeed,
all Mr. Johns’s books are good, (as they are hound
to be, considering his most accurate and varied
knowledge,) especially his “Flowers of the Field,”
the best cheap introduction to systematic botany
which has as yet appeared. Trained, and all but
self-trained, like Mr. Hugh Miller, in a remote
and narrow field of observation, Mr. Johns has
developed himself into one of our most acute
and persevering botanists, and has added many a
new treasure to the Flora of these isles ; and one
person, at least, owes him a deep debt of gratitude
for first lessons in scientific accuracy and patience,
— lessons taught, not dully and dryly at the book
and desk, but livingly and genially, in 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.”

And so I end this little book, hoping, even
praying, that it may encourage a few more

THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

165

laborers to go forth into a vineyard, which those
who have toiled in it know to be full of ever-
fresh health, and wonder, and simple joy, and
the presence and the glory of Him whose name
is Love.

THE END.

♦.

& L ^ o/o