KrJft ft , flCcjr ' \ • xlflTSijj&L'jf f ti # ,t T’-viC 'a/ HffilM j vV £ T.fSS ; Jj IflCnHr i/ff V"+ . juj jHlU 4 <>v » - . /■' f! ’ - / ; v / v tfg6Zo*/Z , . Library of the University of Toronto GLAUCUS ; OR, THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE, PRINTED BY R. CLAY, LONDON, FOR MACMILLAN AND CO. CAMBRIDGE. SLontton: bell and daldy, i86, fleet street. fflubltn: WILLIAM ROBERTSON. ©U(nburQf): EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS. (ffilaSQOtD : JAMES MACLEHOSE. ©XforU : J. H. & JAS. PARKER. OR, WONDERS OE THE SHORE. BY CHARLES KINGSLEY, F.S.A. AUTHOR OF “WESTWARD HO !” “ HYPATIA,” ETC THIRD EDITION, CORRECTED AND ENLARGED. WITH AN APPENDIX CONTAINING COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE OBJECTS MENTIONED IN THE WORK, BY G. B. SOWERBY, F.L.S. Cambribgc : MACMILLAN AND CO. AND 23, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON. 1858. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from University of Toronto https://archive.org/details/glaucusorwonders00king_3 DEDICATION. My dear Miss Grenfell, I cannot forego the pleasure of dedicating this little book to you ; except¬ ing of course the opening exhortation (need¬ less enough in your case) to those who have not yet discovered the value of Natural History. Accept it as a memorial of pleasant hours spent by us already, and as an earnest, I trust, of pleasant hours to be spent hereafter, (perhaps, too, beyond this life in the nobler world to come,) in examining together the works of our Father in heaven. Your grateful and faithful brother-in-law, C. KINGSLEY. Bideeokd, April 24, 1855. The basis of this little booh roas an Article which appeared in the North British Review for November , 1854. Beyond the shadow of the ship I watch’d the water snakes : They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they rear’d, the elfish light Eell off in hoary flakes. * O happy living things ! no tongue Their beauty might declare : A spring of love gush’d from my heart, And I bless’d them unaware. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. GLAUCUS; OR, THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. You arc going down, perhaps, by railway, to pass your usual six weeks at some watering-place along the coast, and as you roll along think more than once, and that not over cheerfully, of what you shall do when you get there. You are half-tired, half-ashamed, of making one more in the “ ignoble army of idlers,” who saunter about the cliffs, and sands, and quays ; to whom every wharf is but a u wharf of Lethe,” by which they rot “ dull as the oozy weed.” You foreknow your doom by sad experience. A great deal of dressing, a lounge in the club-room, a stare out of the window with the telescope, an attempt to take a bad sketch, a walk up one parade and down another, interminable reading of the silliest of novels, over which you fall asleep on a bench in the sun, and probably have B 2 GLAUCUS ; OR, 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 innocent 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 fri¬ volity ; 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 Eor idle hands to do but does it not seem to you, that there must surely be many a thing worth looking at earnestly, and thinking over earnestly, in a world like this, about the making of the least part whereof God has em¬ ployed ages and ages, further back than wisdom THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 3 can guess or imagination picture, and upholds that least part every moment by laws and forces so com¬ plex and so wonderful, that science, when it tries to fathom them, can only learn how little it can learn? And does it not seem to you that six weeks’ rest, free from the cares of town business, and the whirl¬ wind of town pleasure, could not be better spent than in examining those wonders a little, instead of wandering up and down like the many, still wrapt up each in their little world of vanity and self- interest, unconscious of what and where they really are, as they gaze lazily around at earth and sea and sky, and have “No speculation in those eyes Which they do glare withal ? ” Why not, then, try to discover a few of the Won¬ ders of the Shore ? For wonders there are there around you at every step, stranger than ever opium- eater dreamed, and yet to be seen at no greater expense than a very little time and trouble. Perhaps you smile in answer, at the notion of becoming a “ Naturalist and yet you cannot deny that there must be a fascination in the study of natural history, though what it is is as yet unknown to you. Your daughters, perhaps, have b 2 4 GLAUCUS ; OB, 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 Pern-book that they buy), till the Pteridomania seems to you somewhat of a bore : and yet you cannot deny that they find an enjoyment in it, and are more active, more cheerful, more self-forgetful over it, than they would have been over novels and gossip, crochet and Berlin-wool. At least you will confess that the abomination of “ Fancy-work” — that standing cloak for dreamy idleness (not to mention the injury which it does to poor starving needlewomen) — has all but vanished from your drawing-room since the “Lady-ferns” and “Venus’s hair” appeared; and that you could not help your¬ self looking now and then at the said “ Venus’s hair,” and agreeing that nature’s real beauties were somewhat superior to the ghastly woollen caricatures which they had superseded. You cannot deny, I say, that there is a fasci¬ nation in this same Natural History. Tor do not you, the London merchant, recollect how but last summer your douce and portly head-clerk was seized by two keepers in the act of wandering in THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. D Epping Forest at dead of night, with a dark lan¬ tern, a jar of strange sweet compound, and innu¬ merable 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 “ use¬ less” moths, to draw out of his warm bed, twenty miles down the Eastern Counties’ Railway, and into the damp forest like a deer-stealer, a sober white- headed Tim Linkinwater like him, your very best man of business, given to the reading of Scotch political economy, and gifted with peculiarly clear notions on the currency question ? It is puzzling, truly. I shall be very glad if these pages help you somewhat toward solving the puzzle. We shall agree at least that the study of Natural History has become now-a-days an honourable one. A Cromarty stonemason is now perhaps the most 6 GLAUCUS ; OR important man in the City of Edinburgh, by dint of a work on fossil fishes ; and the successful in¬ vestigator of the minutest animals takes place un¬ questioned among men of genius, and, like the philosopher of old Greece, is considered, by virtue of his science, fit company for dukes and princes. Nay, the study is now more than honourable ; it is (what to many readers will be a far higher recom¬ mendation) even fashionable. Every well-educated person is eager to know something at least of the wonderful organic forms which surround him in every sunbeam and every pebble ; and books of Natural History are finding their way more and more into drawing-rooms and school-rooms, and ex¬ citing greater thirst for a knowledge which, even twenty years ago, was considered superfluous for all but the professional student. What a change from the temper of two gene¬ rations since, when the naturalist was looked on as a harmless enthusiast, who went “ buff-liuntinff,” 7 o o 7 simply because he had not spirit to follow a fox ! There are those alive who can recollect an amiable man being literally bullied out of the New Forest, because he dared to make a collection (at this moment, we believe, in some unknown abyss of that great Avernus, the British Museum) of fossil shells THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. t from those very Hordwell Cliffs, for exploring which there is now established a society of subscribers and correspondents. They can remember, too, when, on the first appearance of Bewick’s “ British Birds,” the excellent sportsman who brought it down to the Forest, was asked, Why on earth he had brought a book about “ cock sparrows ? ” and had to justify himself again and again, simply by lending the book to his brother sportsmen, to con¬ vince them that there were rather more than a dozen sorts of birds (as they then held) indigenous to Hampshire. But the book, perhaps, which turned the tide in favour of Natural History, among; the higher classes at least, in the south of England, was White’s “ History of Selborne.” A Hampshire gentleman and sportsman, whom everybody knew, had taken the trouble to write a book about the birds and the weeds in his own parish, and the every-day things which went on under his eyes, and every one else’s. And all gentlemen, from the Weald of Kent to the Yale of Blackmore, shrugged their shoulders mysteriously, and said, “ Poor fel¬ low!” till they opened the book itself, and disco¬ vered to their surprise that it read like any novel. And then came a burst of confused, but honest admiration ; from the young squire’s “ Bless me ! 8 GLAUCUS ; OR, who would have thought that there were so many wonderful things to he seen in one’s own park!” to the old squire’s more morally valuable “ Bless me ! why I have seen that and that a hundred times, and never thought till now how wonderful they were ! ” There were great excuses, though, of old, for the contempt in which the naturalist was held ; great excuses for the pitying tone of banter with which the Spectator talks of “the ingenious” Don Sal- tero (as no doubt the Neapolitan gentlemen talked of Ferrante Imperato the apothecary, and his mu¬ seum) ; great excuses for Voltaire, when he classes the collection of butterflies among the other “ bigar- rures de l’esprit humain.” For, in the last gene¬ ration, the needs of the world were different. It had no time for butterflies and fossils. While Buonaparte was hovering on the Boulogne coast, the pursuits and the education which were needed were such as would raise up men to fight him ; so the coarse, fierce, hard-handed training of our grand¬ fathers came when it was wanted, and did the work which was required of it, else we had not been here now. Let us be thankful that we have had leisure for science ; and show now in war that our science has at least not unmanned us. THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 9 Moreover, Natural History, if not fifty years ago, certainly a hundred years ago, was hardly worthy of men of practical common sense. After, indeed, Linne, by his invention of generic and specific names, had made classification possible, and by his own enormous labours had shown how much could be done when once a method was established, the science has grown rapidly enough. But before him little or nothing had been put into form definite enough to allure those who (as the many always will) prefer to profit by others’ discoveries, than to discover for themselves ; and Natural History was attractive only to a few earnest seekers, who found too much trouble in disencumbering their own minds of the dreams of bygone generations (whe¬ ther facts, like cockatrices, basilisks, and krakens, the breeding of bees out 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 Aristotelism and Neo -platonism), to try to make a science popular, which as yet was not even a science at all. Honour to them, nevertheless. Honour to Bay and his illustrious contemporaries in Holland and France. Honour to Seba and Aldrovandus ; to Pomet, with his “ Historie of Drugges even to the ingenious 10 glaucus ; cm, Don Saltero, and his tavern -museum in Cheyne Walk. Where all was chaos, every man was useful who could contribute a single spot of organized standing ground in the shape of a fact or a speci¬ men. But it is a question whether Natural History would have ever attained its present honours, had not Geology arisen, to connect every other branch of Natural History with problems as vast and awful as they are captivating to the imagination. Nay, the very opposition with which Geology met was of as great benefit to the sister sciences as to itself. Bor, when questions belonging to the most sacred hereditary beliefs of Christendom were supposed to he affected by the verification of a fossil shell, or the proving that the Maestricht “ homo diluvii testis ” was, after all, a monstrous eft, it became necessary to work upon Conchology, Botany, and Comparative Anatomy, with a care and a reverence, a caution and a severe induction, which had been never before applied to them ; and thus gradually, in the last half century, the whole choir of cosmical sciences have acquired a soundness, severity, and fulness, which render them, as mere intellectual exercises, as valuable to a manly mind as Mathe¬ matics and Metaphysics. But how very lately have they attained that firm THE WONDERS OP THE SHORE. 11 and honourable standing ground ! It is a question, whether, even twenty years ago, Geology, as it then stood, was worth troubling one’s head about, so little had been really proved. And heavy and uphill was the work, even within the last fifteen years, of those who steadfastly set themselves to the task of proving and of asserting at all risks, that the Maker of the coal seam and' the diluvial cave could not be a “ Deus quidam deceptor,” and that the facts which the rock and the silt revealed were sacred, not to be warped* or trifled with for the sake of any cowardly and hasty notion that they contradicted His other messages. When a few more years are past, Buckland and Sedgwick, Lyell and Jamieson, and the group of brave men who accompanied and followed them, will be looked back to as moral benefactors of their race ; and almost as martyrs, also, when it is remembered how much misunderstanding, obloquy, and plausible folly, they had to endure from well-meaning fanatics like Fairholme or Granville Penn, and the respectable mob at their heels, who tried (as is the fashion in such cases) to make a hollow compromise between fact and the Bible, by twisting facts just enough to make them fit the fancied meaning of the Bihle, and the Bible just enough to make it fit the fancied 12 GLAUCUS ; OR, meaning of the facts. But there were a few who would have no compromise ; who laboured on with a noble recklessness, determined to speak the thing which they had seen, and neither more nor less, sure that God could take better care than they of His own everlasting truth ; and now they have conquered ; the facts which were twenty years ago denounced as contrary to Revelation, are at last accepted not merely as consonant with, but as corroborative thereof ; and sound practical geolo¬ gists — like Hugh Miller, in his “ Footprints of the Creator,” and Professor Sedgwick, in the invaluable notes to his “ Discourse on the Studies of Cam¬ bridge ” — are wielding in defence of Christianity the very science which was faithlessly and cowardly expected to subvert it. But if you seek, reader, rather for pleasure than for wisdom, you can find it in such studies, pure and undefiled. Happy, truly, is the naturalist. He has no time for melancholy dreams. The earth becomes to him transparent ; everywhere he sees significances, har¬ monies, laws, chains of cause and effect endlessly interlinked, which draw him out of the narrow sphere of self-interest and self-pleasing, into a pure and wholesome region of solemn joy and wonder. He THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 13 goes up some Snowdon valley ; to him it is a solemn spot (though unnoticed by his companions), where the stag’s -horn clubmoss ceases to straggle across the turf, and the tufted alpine clubmoss takes its place ; for he is now in a new world ; a region whose climate is eternally influenced by some fresh law (after which he vainly guesses with a sigh at his own ignorance) which renders life impossible to one species, possible to another. And it is a still more solemn thought to him, that it was not always so ; that aeons and ages hack, that rock which he passed a thousand feet below was fringed, not as now with fern, and blue bugle, and white bramble- flowers, hut perhaps with the alp-rose and the “ gemsen-kraut ” of Mont Blanc, at least with Alpine Saxifrages which have now retreated fifteen hundred feet up the mountain side, and with the blue Snow-Gentian, and the Canadian Ledum, which have all hut vanished out of the British Isles. And what is it which tells him that strange story ? Yon smooth and rounded surface of rock, polished, remark, across the strata, and against the grain ; and furrowed here and there, as if by iron talons, with long parallel scratches. It was the crawling of a glacier which polished that rock-fate ; the stones fallen from Snowdon peak into the half- 14 GLAUCUS ; OE, liquid lake of ice above, which ploughed those fur¬ rows. iEons and aeons ago, before the time when Adam first — “ Embraced his Eve in happy hour, And every bird in Eden burst In carol, every bud in flower,” those marks were there ; the records of the “ Age of ice slight, truly ; to be effaced by the next farmer who needs to build a wall ; but unmistake- able, boundless in significance, like Crusoe’s one savage footprint on the sea-shore : and the natu¬ ralist acknowledges the finger-mark of God, and wonders, and worships. Happy, especially, is the sportsman who is also a naturalist : for as he roves in pursuit of his game, over hills or up the beds of streams where no one but a sportsman ever thinks of going, he will be certain to see things noteworthy, which the mere naturalist would never find, simply because he could never guess that they were there to be found. I do not speak merely of the rare birds which may be shot, the curious facts as to the habits of fish which 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 THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 15 all weathers, and often dependent for success on his knowledge of “ what the sky is going to do,” has opportunities for becoming a meteorologist which no one beside but a sailor possesses; and one has often longed for a scientific gamekeeper or hunts¬ man, who, by discovering a law for the mysterious and seemingly capricious phenomena of “ scent,” might perhaps throw light on a hundred dark pas¬ sages of hygrometry. The fisherman, too, — what an inexhaustible treasury of wonders lies at his feet, in the subaqueous world of the commonest mountain burn ! All the laws which mould a world are there busy, if he but knew it, fattening his trout for him, and making them rise to the fly, by strange electric influences, at one hour rather than at another. Many a good geognostic lesson too, both as to the nature of a country’s rocks, and as to the laws by which strata are deposited, may an observing man learn as he wades up the bed of a trout-stream ; not to mention the strange forms and habits of the tribes of water-insects. Moreover, no good fisher¬ man 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,” 16 GLAUCUS ; OR, who will not “ Come when you do call for them.” What to do then ? You are sitting, perhaps, in your coracle, upon some mountain tarn, waiting for a wind, and waiting in vain. “ Keine luft an keine seite, Todes-stille furchterlich as Gothe has it — “ Und der schiffer sieht bekiimmert Glatte flaclie rings umher.” You paddle to the shore on the side whence the wind ought to come, if it had any spirit in it ; tie the coracle to a stone, light your cigar, lie down on your back upon the grass, grumble, and finally fall asleep. In the meanwhile, probably, the breeze has come on, and there has been half- an -hour’s lively fishing curl ; and you wake just in time to see the last ripple of it sneaking off at the other side of the lake, leaving all as dead-calm as before. Now how much better, instead of falling asleep, to have walked quietly round the lake side, and asked of your own brains and of nature the ques¬ tion, “ IIow did this lake come here ? What does it mean ? ” It is a hole in the earth. True, hut how was the hole made ? There must have been huge THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 17 forces at work to form such a chasm. Probably the mountain was actually opened from within by an earthquake ; and when the strata fell together again, the portion at either end of the chasm, being perhaps crushed together with greater force, re¬ mained higher than the centre, and so the water lodged between them. Perhaps it was formed thus. You will at least agree that its formation must have been a grand sight enough, and one during which a spectator would have had some difficulty in keeping his footing. And when you learn that this convulsion probably took place at the bottom of an ocean, hundreds of thousands of years ago, you have at least a few thoughts over which to ruminate, which will make you at once too busy to grumble, and ashamed to grumble. Yet, after all, I hardly think the lake was formed in this way, and suspect that it may have been dry for ages after it emerged from the primeval waves, and Snowdonia was a palm-fringed island in a tropic sea. Let us look the place over more carefully. You see the lake is nearly circular ; on the side where we stand, the pebbly beach is not six feet above the water, and slopes away steeply into the valley behind us, while before us it shelves gra- c 18 GLAUCUS ; OR, dually into the lake : forty yards out, as you knoW, there is not ten feet water ; and then a steep bank, the edge whereof we and the big trout know well, sinks suddenly to unknown depths. On the op¬ posite side, that vast flat-topped wall of rock towers up shoreless into the sky, seven hundred feet per¬ pendicular ; the deepest water of all we know is at its very foot. Right and left, two shoulders of down slope into the lake. Now turn round and look down the gorge. Remark that this pebble bank on which we stand reaches some fifty yards down¬ ward : you see the loose stones peeping out every¬ where. We may fairly suppose that we stand on a dam of loose stones, a hundred feet deep. But why loose stones ? — and if so, what matter ? and what wonder ? There are rocks cropping out everywhere down the hill-side. Because if you will take up one of these stones and crack it across, you will see that it is not of the same stuff as those said rocks. Step into the next field and see. That rock is the common Snowdon slate, which we see everywhere. The two shoulders of down, right and left, are slate too ; you can see that at a glance. But the stones of the pebble bank are a close-grained, yellow- spotted rock. They are Syenite ; and (you may believe me or THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 19 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 he wrong, there is good spinning with a brass minnow round the angles of the rocks. "Mow see. Between the cliff-foot and the sloping- down is a crack, ending in a gully ; the nearer side is of slate, and the further side, the cliff itself, is — why, the whole cliff is composed of the very same stone as the pebble ridge ! Now, my good friend, how did those pebbles get three hundred yards across the lake ? Hundreds of tons, some of them three feet long : who carried them across ? The old Cymry were not likely to amuse themselves by making such a breakwater up here in No -man’s -land, two thousand feet above the sea : but somebody, or something, must have car¬ ried them ; for stones do not fly, nor swim either. Shot out of a volcano ? As you seem deter¬ mined to have a prodigy, it may as well be a sufficiently huge one. c 2 20 GLAUCUS ; OR, Well — these stones lie altogether ; and a volcano would have hardly made so compact a shot, not being in the habit of using E ley’s wire cartridges. Our next hope of a solution lies in John Jones, who carried up the coracle. Hail him, and ask him what is on the top of that cliff ... So ? “ Plainshe and pogshe, and another Llyn.” Very good. Now, does it not strike you that this whole cliff has a remarkably smooth and plastered look, like a hare’s run up an earthbank ? And do you 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 ? Syen¬ ite 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 some¬ thing (giants perhaps) has been scrambling up or down on a very large scale, and so rubbed off every orner which was inclined to come away, till the solid core of the rock was bared. And may not those mysterious giants have had a hand in carrying the stones across the lake ? . . . Really I am not altogether jesting. Think awhile what agent could possibly have produced either one, or both of these effects ? There is but one ; and that, if you have been an THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 21 Alpine traveller — much more if you have been a Chamois hunter — you have seen many a time (whe¬ ther 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 gla¬ cier has crawled down from that neve, polishing the face of the rock in its descent : but the snow, having no large and deep outlet, has not slid down in a sufficient stream to reach the vale below, and form a glacier of the first order ; and has therefore stopped short on the other side of the lake, as a glacier of the second order, which ends in an ice cliff hanging high 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 Glacier de Trelaporte, which comes down from the Aiguille de Charm oz. O 99 GLAUCTJS ; OR, This explains our pebble-ridge. The stones which the glacier rubbed off the cliff beneath it, it carried forward, slowly but surely, till they saw the light again in the face of the ice-cliff, and dropped out of it under the melting of the summer sun, to form a huge dam across the ravine ; till, the “ Ice- age” past, a more genial climate succeeded, and neve and glacier melted away : but the “ moraine” of stones did not, and 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 — “ How did the stones e-et O across the lake ?” Now, reader, we have had no abstruse science here, no long words, not even a microscope or a book : and yet we, as two plain sportsmen, have gone back, or been led back by fact and common sense, into the most awful and sublime depths, into an epos of the destruction and re-creation of a former world. This is but a single instance ; I might give hun¬ dreds. This one, nevertheless, may have some effect in awakening you to the boundless world of wonders which is all around you, and make you ask yourself seriously, “ What branch of Natural His- THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 23 tory shall I begin to investigate, if it be but for a few weeks, this summer?” To which I answer, Try “ the Wonders of the Shore.” There are along every sea-beach more strange things to be seen, and those to be seen easily, than in any other field of observation which you will find in these islands. And on the shore only will you have the enjoyment of finding new species, of adding your mite to the treasures of science. For not only the English ferns, but the natural history of all our land species, are now well-nigh exhausted. Our home botanists and ornithologists, are spending their time now, perforce, in verifying a few obscure species, and bemoaning themselves, like Alexander, that there are no more worlds left to con¬ quer. For the geologist, indeed and the entomologist, especially in the remoter districts, much remains to be done, but only at a heavy outlay of time, labour, and study ; and the dilettante (and it is for dilet¬ tanti, 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 enjoy- 24 GLAUCUS ; OR, There is a mysterious delight in the discovery of a new species, akin to that of seeino- for the first time in their native O haunts, plants or animals of which one has till then only read. Some, surely, who read these pages, have experienced that latter delight ; and, though they might find it hard to define whence the plea¬ sure arose, know well that it was a solid pleasure, the memory of which they would not give up for hard cash. Some, surely, can recollect at their first sight of the Alpine Soldanella, the Rhododendron, or the black Orchis, growing upon the edge of the eternal snow, a thrill of emotion, not unmixed with awe ; a sense that they were, as it were, brought face to face with the creatures of another world ; that nature was independent of them, not merely they of her ; that trees were not merely made to build their houses, or herbs to feed their cattle, as they looked on those wild gardens amid the wreaths of the untrodden snow, which had lifted their gay flowers to the sun year after year since the found¬ ation 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 ments of natural history THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 25 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 Holler-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 sum¬ mer snowstorm between us and the black cliffs of the Blieinstein, while the broad Rhine beneath flashed blood-red in the blaze of the lightning and the fires of the Mausenthurm — a lurid Acheron above which seemed to hover ten thousand unburied ghosts ; and last, but not least, on the lip of the vast Mosel-kopf crater — -just above the point where the weight of the fiery lake has burst the side of the great slag-cup, and rushed forth between two cliff’s of clink-stone across the downs, in a clanging stream of fire, damming up rivulets, and blasting its path through forests, far awray 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, 26 GLAUCUS ; OE, Hundsruck and Taunus, Siebengebirge and Ar¬ dennes, and all the crater peaks around ; and which was — smile not, reader — our first yellow foxglove. But what is even this to the delight of finding a new species ? — of rescuing (as it seems to you) one more thought of the divine mind from Hela, and the realms of the unknown, unclassified, un¬ comprehended ? As it seems to you : though in reality it only seems so, in a world wherein not a sparrow falls to the ground unnoticed by our Father who is in heaven. The truth is, the pleasure of finding new species is too great ; it is morally dangerous ; for it brings with it the temptation to look on the thing found as your own possession, all but your own creation ; to pride yourself on it, as if God had not known it for ages since ; even to squabble jealously for the light 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 somethino; new this summer along the coast to which you are going. There is no reason why you THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 27 should not be as successful as a friend of mine, who, with a very slight smattering of science, and very desultory research, obtained last winter from the Torbay shores three entirely new species, beside several rare animals which had escaped all naturalists since the lynx-eye of Colonel Montagu discerned them forty years ago. And do not despise the creatures because they are minute. No doubt we should both of us prefer helping Rajah Brooke to discover monstrous apes in the tropical forests of Borneo, or stumbling with Hooker upon herds of gigantic Ammon sheep amid the rhododendron thickets of the Himalaya : hut it cannot he ; and “ he is a fool,” says old Hesiod, “ who knows not how much better half is than the whole.” Let us be content with what is within our reach. And doubt not that in these tiny creatures are mysteries more than we shall ever fathom. The zoophytes and microscopic animalcules which people every shore and every drop of water, have been now raised to a rank in the human mind, more important, perhaps, than even those gigantic mon¬ sters, whose models fill the lake at the New Crystal Palace. The research which has been bestowed, for the last century, upon these once unnoticed atomies, has well repaid itself ; for from no branch 28 GLAUCUS ; OR, of physical science has more been learnt of the scientia scientiarum, the priceless art of learning ; no branch of science has more utterly confounded the wisdom of the wise, shattered to pieces systems and theories, and the idolatry of arbitrary names, and taught man to be silent while his Maker speaks, than this apparent pedantry of zoophytology, in which our old distinctions of “ animal,” “ vege¬ table,” and “ mineral,” are trembling in the balance, seemingly 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 objects in pro¬ portion to the number of feet or inches which they occupy in space. No branch, moreover, has been more humbling to the boasted rapidity and omni¬ potence of the human reason, and taught those who have eyes to see, and hearts to understand, how weak and wayward, staggering and slow, are the steps of our fallen race (rapid and triumphant enough in that broad road of theories which leads to intellectual destruction) whensoever they tread the narrow path of true science, which leads (if I may be allowed to transfer our Lord’s great parable from moral to intellectual matters) to Life ; to the THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 29 living and permanent knowledge of living things ; and of the laws of their existence. Humbling, truly, to one who, in this summer of 1854, the centenary year of British zoophytology, looks hack to the summer of 1754, when good Mr. Ellis, the wise and benevolent West Indian merchant, read before the Boyal Society his paper proving the animal nature of corals, and followed it up the year after by that “ Essay toward a Natural History of the Corallines, and other like marine productions of the British Coasts,” which forms the groundwork of all our knowledge on the subject to this day. The chapter in Dr. G. Johnston’s British Zoophytes, p. 407, or the excellent little resume thereof in Dr. Landsborough’s book on the same subject, is really a saddening one, as one sees how loth were not merely dreamers like Marsieji 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 30 GLAUCUS ; OR, more startling and prodigious than the dreams which men had hastily substituted for it ; more strange than Ovid’s old story that the* coral was soft under the sea, and hardened by exposure to air ; than Marsigli’s notion, that the coral-polypes were its flowers ; than Dr. Parsons’ contemptuous denial, that these complicated forms could he “ the operations of little, poor, helpless, jelly-like animals, and not the work of more sure vegetation ; ” than Baker the microscopist’s detailed theory of their being produced by the crystallization of the mineral salts in the sea- water, just as he had seen “ the particles of mercury and copper in aquafortis assume tree-like forms, or curious delineations of mosses and minute shrubs on slates and stones, owing to the shooting of salts intermixed with min¬ eral particles : ” — one smiles at it now : yet these men were no less sensible than we of the year 1854 ; and if we know better, it is only because other men, and those few and far between, have laboured amid disbelief, ridicule, and error ; needing again and again to retrace their steps, and to unlearn more than they learnt, seeming to go backwards when they were really progressing most : and now we have entered into their labours, and find them, as I have just said, more wondrous than all the poetic THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 31 dreams of a Bonnet or a Darwin. For who, after all, to take a few broad instances (not to enlarge on the great root-wonder of a number of distinct individuals connected by a common life, and form¬ ing a seeming plant invariable in each species), would have dreamed of the “ bizarreries” which these very zoophytes present in their classification ? You go down to any shore after a gale of wind, and pick up a few delicate little sea-ferns. You have two in your hand, which probably look to you, even under a good pocket magnifier, identical or nearly so.* But you are told to your surprise, that how¬ ever like the dead horny polypidoms which you hold may be, the two species of animal which have formed them are at least as far apart in the scale of creation as a quadruped is from a fish. You see in some Musselburgh dredger’s boat the phosphorescent sea-pen (unknown in England), a living feather, of the look and consistency of a cock’s comb ; or the still stranger sea-rush ( Virgularia mirabilis), a spine 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 * Sertularia operculata and Gemellaria loriculata ; or any of the small Sertidarice, compared with Crisice and Cellularice, are very good examples. 32 GLAUCUS ; OR, great stony Venus’s fan which hangs in seamen’s cottages, brought home from the West Indies. And ere you have done wondering, you hear that all three are congeners of the ugly, shapeless, white “ dead man’s hand,” which you may pick up after a storm on any shore. You have a beautiful ma¬ drepore or brain-stone on your mantel -piece, brought home from some Pacific coral-reef. You are to believe that it has no more to do with the beautiful tubular corals among which it was growing, than a bird has with a worm ; and that its first cousins are the soft, slimy sea- anemones which you see expand¬ ing 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 sub¬ marine world whereof Spenser sang — “ Oh, wliat 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 whicli won in th’ azure sky. Tor much more eath to tell the stars on high, THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 33 Albe they endless seem in estimation, Than to recount the sea’s posterity ; So fertile be the flouds in generation, So huge their numbers, and so numberless their nation.” But these few examples will be sufficient to account both for the slow pace at which the know¬ ledge of sea-animals has progressed, and for the allurement which men of the highest attainments have found, and still find in it. And when to this we add the marvels which meet us at every step in the anatomy and the reproduction of these creatures, and in the chemical and mechanical functions which they fulfil in the great economy of our planet, we cannot wonder at finding that books whieh treat of them carry with them a certain charm of romance, and feed the play of fancy, and that love of the marvellous which is inherent in man, at the same time that they lead the reader to more solemn and lofty trains of thought, which can find their full satisfaction only in self-forgetful worship, and that hymn of praise which goes up ever from land and sea, as well as from saints and martyrs and the heavenly host, “ Oh, all 3m works of the Lord, and ye, too, spirits and soids of the righteous, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever ! ” I have said, that there were excuses for the old D 34 GLAUCUS ; OR, contempt of the study of Natural History. I have said too, it may be hoped, enough to show that contempt to he 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 expe¬ rience, that over and above its accessory charms of pure sea-breezes, and wild rambles by cliff and loch, the study itself has had a weighty moral effect upon their hearts and spirits. There are those who can well understand how the good and wise John Ellis, amid all his philanthropic labours for the good of the West Indies, while he was spending his intellect and fortune in introducing into our tropic settle¬ ments the bread-fruit, the mangosteen, and every plant and seed which he hoped might he useful for medicine, agriculture, and commerce, could yet feel himself justified in devoting large portions of his ever well-spent time to the fighting the battle of the corallines against Parsons and the rest, and even in measuring pens with Linne, the prince of naturalists. There are those who can sympathise THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 35 with the gallant old Scotch officer mentioned by some writer on sea-weeds, who, desperately wounded in the breach at Badajos, and a sharer in all the toils and triumphs of the Peninsular war, could in his old age show a rare sea- weed with as much triumph as his well-earned medals, and talk over a tiny spore-capsule with as much zest as the records of sieges and battles. Why not? That temper which made him a good soldier may very well have made him a good naturalist also. The greatest living English geologist, Sir Roderick Murchison, is also an old Peninsular officer. I doubt that with him, too, the experiences of war may have helped to fit him for the studies of peace. Certainly, the best naturalist, as far as logical acumen, as well as earnest research, 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 aim and not his amusement, his would have been one of the * “ British Star-fishes.” This delightful writer, and eager investigator, has just died, in the prime of life, from disease con¬ tracted (it is said) during a scientific journey in Asia Minor : one more martyr to the knight-errantry of science. D 2 36 glaucus ; on, greatest names in the whole range of British science.” I question, nevertheless, whether he would not have lost more than he would have gained by a different training. It might have made him a more learned systematizer ; but would it have quickened in him that “ seeing eye” of the true soldier and sportsman, which makes Montagu’s descriptions indelible word -pictures, instinct with life and truth ? “ There is no question,” says Mr. E. Forbes, after bewailing the vagueness of most naturalists, “ about the identity of any animal Montagu described. . . . lie was a forward-look- ing philosopher ; he spoke of every creature as if one exceeding like it, yet different from it, would be washed up by the waves next tide. Con¬ sequently his descriptions are permanent.” Scien¬ tific men will recognise in this the highest praise which can be bestowed, because it attributes to him that highest faculty — The Art of Seeing : but the study and the book would not have given that. It is God’s gift, wheresoever educated : but its true school-room is the camp and the ocean, the prairie and the forest ; active, self-helping life, which can grapple with Nature herself : not merely with printed books about her. Let no one think that this same natural history is a pursuit fitted only for THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 37 effeminate or pedantic men. We should say rather, that the qualifications required for a perfect natur¬ alist 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, uncertain where he shall eat or rest ; ready to face sun and rain, wind and frost, and to eat or drink thankfully anything, however coarse or meagre ; he should know how to swim for his life, to pull an oar, sail a boat, and ride the first horse which comes to hand ; and, finally, he should be a thoroughly good shot, and a skilful fisherman ; and, if he go far abroad, be able on occasion to fight for his life. For his moral character, he must, like a knight of old, be first of all gentle and courteous, ready and able to ingratiate himself with the poor, the ignorant, and the savage ; not only because foreign travel will be often otherwise impossible, but be¬ cause he knows how much invaluable local information can be only obtained from fishermen, miners, hunt¬ ers, and tillers of the soil. Next, he should be brave and enterprising, and withal patient and un¬ daunted ; not merely in travel, but in investigation; 38 GLAUCUS ; OR, knowing (as Lord Bacon might have put it) that the kingdom of Nature, like the kingdom of Heaven, must he taken by violence, and that only to those who knock long and earnestly does the great mother open the doors of her sanctuary. He must he of a reverent turn of mind also ; not rashly discredit¬ ing any reports, however vague and fragmentary ; giving man credit always for some germ of truth, and giving nature credit for an inexhaustible fer¬ tility and variety, which will keep him his life long always reverent, yet never superstitions ; wondering at the commonest, hut not surprised by the most strange ; free from the idols of size and sensuous loveliness ; able to see grandeur in the minutest objects, beauty in the most ungainly ; estimating each thing not carnally, as the vulgar do, by its size or its pleasantness to the senses, but spiritually, by the amount of Divine thought revealed to him therein ; holding every phenomenon worth the noting down ; believing that every pebble holds a treasure, every bud a revelation ; making it a point of conscience to pass over nothing through laziness or hastiness, lest the vision once offered and despised should be withdrawn ; and looking at every object as if he were never to behold it again. Moreover, he must keep himself free from all those perturbations of mind which not only weaken THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 39 energy, but darken and confuse the inductive faculty ; from haste and laziness, from melancholy, testiness, pride, and all the passions which make men see only what they wish to see. Of solemn and scrupulous reverence for truth ; of the habit of mind which regards each fact and discovery not as our own possession, but as the possession of its Creator, independent of us, our tastes, our needs, or our vain-glory, we hardly need to speak ; for it is the very essence of a naturalist’s faculty — the very tenure of his existence : and without truthfulness, science would be as impossible now as chivalry would have been of old. And last, but not least, the perfect naturalist should have in him the very essence of true chivalry, namely, self-devotion ; the desire to advance, not himself and his own fame or wealth, but knowledge and mankind. lie should have this great virtue ; and in spite of many shortcomings, (for what man is ihere wrho liveth and sinneth not ?) naturalists as a class have it to a degree which makes them stand out most honourably in the midst of a self-seeking and mammonite generation, inclined to value every¬ thing by its money price, its private utility. The spirit which gives freely, because it knows that it has received freely ; which communicates know¬ ledge without hope of reward, without jealousy and 40 glaucus ; on, mean rivalry, to fellow-students and to the world ; which is content to delve and toil comparatively unknown, that from its obscure and seemingly worthless results others may derive pleasure, and even build up great fortunes, and change the very face of cities and lands, by the practical use of some stray talisman which the poor student has invented in his laboratory ; — this is the spirit which is abroad among our scientific men, to a greater degree than it ever has been among any body of men, for many a century past ; and might well be copied by those who profess deeper purposes and a more exalted calling, than the discovery of a new zoophyte, or the classification of a moorland crag;. And it is these qualities, however imperfectly they may be realized in any individual instance, which make our scientific men, as a class, the wholesomest and pleasantest of companions abroad, and at home the most blameless, simple, and cheerful, in all domestic relations ; men for the most part of man¬ ful heads, and yet of childlike hearts, who have turned to quiet study, in these late piping times of peace, an intellectual health and courage which might have made them, in more fierce and troublous times, capable of doing good service with very different instruments than the scalpel and the microscope. THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 41 I have been sketching; an ideal : but one which I seriously recommend to the consideration of all parents ; for, though it be impossible and absurd to wish that every young man should grow up a natur¬ alist by profession, yet this age offers no more wholesome training, both moral and intellectual, than that which is given by instilling into the young an early taste for outdoor physical science. The education of our children is now more than ever a puzzling problem, if by education we mean the development of the whole humanity, not merely of some arbitrarily chosen part of it. How to feed the imagination with wholesome food, and teach it to despise French novels, and that sugared slough of sentimental poetry, in comparison with which the old fairy-tales and ballads were manful and rational ; how to counteract the tendency to shallow and con¬ ceited sciolism, engendered by hearing popular lectures on all manner of subjects, which can only be really learnt by stern methodic study ; how to give habits of enterprise, patience, accurate observ¬ ation, which the counting-house or the library will never bestow ; above all, how to develop the phy¬ sical powers, without engendering brutality and coarseness, — are questions becoming daily more and more puzzling, while they need daily more and 42 GLAUCUS ; OR, more to be solved, in an age of enterprise, travel, and emigration, like the present. For the truth must be told, that the great majority of men who are now distinguished by commercial success, have had a training the directly opposite to that which they are giving to their sons. They are for the most part men who have migrated from the country to the town, and had in their youth all the advan¬ tages of a sturdy and manful hill-side or sea-side training; men whose bodies were developed, and their lungs fed on pure breezes, long before they brought to work in the city the bodily and mental strength which they had gained by loch and moor. But it is not so with their sons. Their business habits are learnt in the counting-house ; a good school, doubtless, as far as it goes : but one which will expand none but the lowest intellectual faculties; which will make them accurate accountants, shrewd computers and competitors, but never the originators of daring schemes, men able and willing to go forth to replenish the earth and subdue it. And in the hours of relaxation, how much of their time is thrown away, for want of anything better, on fri¬ volity, not to say on secret profligacy, parents know too well ; and often shut their eyes in very despair \ to evils which they know not how to cure. A THE WONDERS OF TIDE SHORE. 43 frightful majority of our middle-class young' men are growing up effeminate, empty of all knowledge but what tends directly to the making of a fortune ; . or rather, to speak correctly, to the keeping up the fortunes which their fathers have made for them ; while of the minority, who are indeed thinkers and readers, how many women as well as men have we seen wearying their souls with study undirected, often misdirected ; craving to learn, yet not know¬ ing how or what to learn ; cultivating, with un - wholesome energy, the head at the expense of the body and the heart ; catching up with the most capricious self-will one mania after another, and tossing it away again for some new phantom ; gorg¬ ing the memory with facts which no one has taught them to arrange, and the reason with problems which they have no method for solving ; till they fret themselves 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 44 GLAUCUS ; OR, intellect nor the moral sense ; and those physical science will give, as nothing else can give it. • Moreover, to revert to another point which we touched just now, man has a body as well as a mind ; and with the vast majority there will be no mens sana unless there he a corpus sanum for it to inhabit. And what outdoor training to give our youths, is, as we have already said, more than ever puzzling. This difficulty is felt, perhaps, less in Scotland than in England. The Scotch climate compels hardiness ; the Scotch bodily strength makes it easy ; and Scotland, with her mountain- tours in summer, and her frozen lochs in winter, her labyrinth of sea-shore, and, above all, that priceless boon which Providence has bestowed on her, in the contiguity of her great cities to the loveliest scenery, and 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 Is¬ lands sporting the ocean firths beside his Man¬ chester. Field sports, with the invaluable training which they give, if not “ The reason firm,” yet still “ The temperate will, Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill,” THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 45 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 young man who has had no substitute for such amusements, will cut but a sorry figure in Australia, Canada, or India ; and if he stays at home, will spend many a pound in doctors’ bills, which could have been better employed elsewhere. “ Taking a walk,” — as one would take a pill or a draught — seems likely soon to become the only form of outdoor existence pos¬ sible for us of the British Isles. But a walk without an object, unless in the most lovely and novel of scenery, is a poor exercise ; and as a recreation, utterly nil. 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 mis- 46 GLAUCUS ; OR, take in a certain celebrated passage ; and that it was not “ sitting on a hill apart,” hut tramping four miles out and four miles in along a turnpike-road, that his hapless spirits discoursed “ Of fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.” Seriously, if we wish rural walks to do our children any good, we must give them a love for rural sights, an object in every walk ; we must teach them — and we can teach them — to find wonder in every insect, sublimity in every hedgerow, the records of past worlds in every pebble, and boundless fertility upon the barren shore ; and so, by teaching them to make full use of that limited sphere in which they now are, make them faithful in a few things, that they may be fit hereafter to be rulers over much. I may seem to exaggerate the advantages of such studies ; but the question after all is one of expe¬ rience : and I have had experience enough and to spare that what I say is true. I have seen the young man of fierce passions, and uncontrollable daring, expend healthily that energy which threat¬ ened daily to plunge him into recklessness, if not into sin, upon hunting out and collecting, through rock and bog, snow and tempest, every bird and egg TITE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 47 of the neighbouring forest. I have seen the cultivated man, craving for travel and for success in life, pent up in the drudgery of London work, and yet keep¬ ing his spirit calm, and perhaps his morals all the more righteous, by spending over his microscope evenings which would too probably have gradually been wasted at the theatre. I have seen the young London beauty, amid all the excitement and tempt¬ ation 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 her¬ self unspotted from the world, by considering the lilies of the field, how they grow And therefore it is that I hail with thankfulness every fresh hook of Natural History, as a fresh boon to the young, a fresh help to those who have to educate them. The greatest difficulty in the way of beginners is (as in most things) how “ to learn the art of learn¬ ing.” They go out, search, find less than they expected, and give the subject up in disappointment. It is good to begin, therefore, if possible, by playing the part of “ jackal ” to some practised naturalist, who will show the tyro where to look, what to look for, and, moreover, what it is that he has found ; often no easy matter to discover. Five-and-twenty years ago, during an autumn’s work of dead-leaf- 48 GLAUCUS ; OR, searching in the Devon woods for poor old Dr. Turton, while he was writing his hook on British land-shells, the present writer learnt more of the art of observing; than he would have learnt in three years’ desultory hunting on his own account ; and he has often regretted that no naturalist has estab- lislied 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 at last. That pious and learned naturalist, Mr. Gosse, whose works will be so often quoted in these pages, has now established summer shore-classes. Tenby is his post for this summer ; and I advise any reader 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 Linnsean or Microscopic Society. In the meanwhile, to show something of what such a class might be, let me put myself, in ima¬ gination, in Mr. Gosse’s place, and do his work for him for half-an-liour, though in a far more shallow way. THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 49 Leaving Weymouth to him, let me take you to a shore where I am more at home, and for whose richness I can vouch, and choose our season and our da}' to start forth, on some glorious morning of one of our Italian springs, to see what last night’s east¬ erly 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 ven¬ tured slowly past Perry Head, with Elizabeth’s gallant pack of Devon captains (for the London fleet had not yet joined) following fast in its wake, and dashing into the midst of the vast line, undis¬ mayed by size and numbers, while their kin and friends stood watching and praying on the cliffs, spectators of Britain’s Salamis. The white line of houses, too, on the other side of the bay, is Brix- ham, famed as the landing-place of William of Orange ; the stone on the pier-head, which marks E 50 GLAUCUS ; OR, his first footsteps on British ground, is sacred in the eyes of all true English Whigs ; and close by stands the castle of the settler of Newfoundland, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Raleigh’s half-brother, most learned of all Elizabeth’s admirals in life, most pious and heroic in death. And as for scenery, though it can boast of neither mountain peak 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 tail elms, just flushing green in the spring hedges, run down to the very water’s edge, their houghs unwarped by any blast ; here and there apple orchards are just bursting into flower in the soft sunshine, and narrow strips of water-meadow line the glens, where the red cattle are already lounging knee-deep in richest grass, within ten yards of the rocky pebble beach. The shore is silent now, the tide far out : but six hours hence it will he 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 he, but see the flowers of autumn meet the flowers of spring, THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 51 and the old year linger smilingly to twine a garland for the new. No wonder that such a spot as Torquay, with its delicious Italian climate, and endless variety of rich woodland, flowery lawn, fantastic rock-cavern, and broad bright tide-sand, sheltered from every wind of heaven except the soft south-east, should have become a favourite haunt, not only for invalids, but for naturalists. Indeed, it may well claim the honour of being the original home of marine zoology and botany in England, as the Frith of Forth, under the auspices of Sir J. G. Daly ell, has been for Scotland. For here worked Montagu, Turton, and Mrs. Griffith, to whose extraordinary powers of research English marine botany almost owes its existence, and who still survives, at an age long beyond the natural term of man, to see, in her cheerful and honoured old age, that knowledge become popular and general, which she pursued for many a year unassisted and alone. And here too, now, Dr. Batter shy 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-mouths the soft sandstones and hard con¬ glomerates of the new red series slope down into the e 2 52 GLAUCUS ; OR, tepid and shallow waves, affords an abundance and variety of animal and vegetable life, unequalled, perhaps, in any other part of Great Britain. It cannot boast, certainly, of those strange deep-sea forms which Messrs. Alder, Goodsir, and Laskey dredge among the lochs of the western Highlands, and the sub-marine mountain glens of the Zetland sea; hut it has its own varieties, its own ever-ffesh 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 Hindoo temples, upborne on pillars banded with yellow and white and red, a week’s study, in form and colour and chiaro-oscuro, for any artist ; and a mile or so further along a pleasant road, with land¬ locked glimpses of the bay, to the broad sheet of THE "WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 53 sand which lies between the village of Paignton and the sea — sands trodden a hundred times by Montagu and Turton, perhaps, by Dillwyn and Gaertner, and many another pioneer of science. And once there, before we look at anything else, come down straight to the sea marge; for yonder lies, just left by the retiring tide, a mass of life such as you will seldom see again. It is somewhat ugly, perhaps, at first sight ; for ankledeep are spread, for some ten yards long by five broad, huge dirty shells, as large as the hand, each with its loathly grey 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 perish helpless, but not useless, on the beach. See, close by is another shell bed, quite as large, but comely enough to please any eye. What a variety of forms and colours are there, amid the purple and olive wreaths of wrack, and bladder- weed, and tangle, (oar-weed, as they call it in the south,) and the delicate green ribbons of the Zostera, (the 54 GLAUCUS ; OR, only English flowering plant which grows beneath the sea,) surely contradicting, as do several other forms, that somewhat hasty assertion of Mr. Buskin, 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 fasti¬ dious fancy. What are they all ? What are the long white razors ? What are the delicate green - grey scimitars ? What are the tapering brown spires ? What the tufts of delicate yellow plants, like squirrels’ tails, and lobsters’ horns, and tama¬ risks, and fir-trees, and all other finely cut animal and vegetable forms ? What are the groups of grey bladders, with something like a little bud at the tip ? What are the hundreds of little pink -striked pears ? What those tiny babies’ heads, covered with grey prickles instead of hair ? The great red star-fisli, which Ulster children call “ the bad man’s hands ; ” and the great whelks, which the youth of Mussel¬ burgh know as roaring buckies, these we have seen; but what, oh what, are the red capsicums ? — Yes, what are the red capsicums? and why are they poking, snapping, starting, crawling, tumbling wildly over each other, rattling about the huge mahogany cockles, as big as a man’s two fists, out of which they are protruded ? Mark them well, for you 55 THE "WONDERS OF THE SHORE. will perhaps never see them again. They are a Mediterranean species, or rather three species, left behind upon these extreme south-western coasts, probably at the vanishing of that warmer ancient epoch, which clothed the Lizard point with the Cornish heath, and the Killarney mountains with Spanish saxifrages, and other relics of a flora whose home is now the Iberian peninsula, and the sunny cliffs of the Riviera. Rare 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 onlv. You will see tens of thousands of them in K) every cove for miles this day, and every heavy win¬ ter’s tide brings up an equal multitude, — a seeming waste of life, which would he awful in our eyes, were not the Divine Ruler, as His custom is, making this destruction the means of fresh creation, by burying them in the sands, as soon as washed on shore, to fertilize the strata of some future world. It is hut a shell-fish truly ; but the great Cuvier thought it remarkable enough to devote to its anatomy elaborate descriptions and drawings, which have done more perhaps than any others to illustrate the curious economy of the whole class of bivalve, or double-shelled, mollusca. If you wish to know 56 GLAUCUS ; OR, more about it than we can tell you, open Mr. Gosse’s 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 Tuberculato are worth seeing. Some of the troupe I had put into a pan of sea-water ; others I had turned out into a dry dish, as knowing that an occasional exposure to the air is a contigency 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. ‘ Oh, look at the cockles ! ’ was the exclamation ; and they were in¬ deed displaying their agility, and their beauty too, in fine style. The valves of the largest were gaping to the extent of three quarters of an inch ; hut the intermediate space was filled up by the spongy looking, fleshy mantle, of a semipellucid 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 appearance, as we looked at the heart-shaped end of the valves. The discharging orifices, however, were THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 57 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 hut the magnificent foot, and the curious manner in which it was used. u 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 colour a fine rich scarlet, approaching to orange ; but a better idea of it than can be conveyed by any description, will be obtained by supposing it to be made of polished cornelian.” Hardly that, most amiable and amusing naturalist: it is too opaque for cornelian ; and the true symbol is, as I said before, in form, size and colour, 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, exclaimed, “ Oh dear ! I always heard that my pretty red coral came out of a fish, and here it is all alive ! ” 58 GLAUCUS ; OR, tc 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 re¬ sistance 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 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 colour or irregularity of surface, was dis¬ tinctly 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 WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 59 the valves, while in aculeatum they reach back to the beaks.” “ C. tuberculatum ,” continues Mr. Gosse, “ is far the finest species. The valves are more globose and of a warmer colour ; those that I have seen are even more spinous.” Such may have been the case in his specimens ; but it has occurred to me now and then to dredge specimens of C. aculeatum , which had escaped that rolling on the sand fatal in old age to its delicate spines, and which equalled in colour, size, and perfectness, the noble one figured in poor dear old Dr. Turton’s “ British Bivalves.” Besides, aculeatum is a far thinner and more delicate shell. And a third species, C. echinatum, with curves more graceful and continuous, is to he found now and then with the two former, in which each point, instead of degenerating into a knot, as in tuberculatum , or developing from delicate, flat, briar-prickles, into long, straight thorns, as in acu¬ leatum, is close-set to its fellow, and curved at the point transversely to the shell, the whole being thus horrid with hundreds of strong tenterhooks, making his castle impregnable to the raveners of the deep. For we can hardly doubt that these prickles are meant as weapons of defence, without which so savoury a morsel as the mollusc within (cooked and 60 GLAUCUS ; OR, eaten largely on some parts of our south coast) would be a staple article of food for sea-beasts of prey. And it is noteworthy, first, that the defensive thorns which are permanent on the two thinner species, aculeatum and echinatum, disappear alto¬ gether on the thicker one, tuberculatum , as old age gives him a solid and heavy globose shell ; and next, that he too, while young and tender, and liable therefore to be bored through by whelks and such murderous univalves, does actually possess the same briar-prickles, which his thinner cousins keep throughout life. Nevertheless, (and this is a curious fact, which makes, like most other facts, pretty strongly against the transmutation of species, and the production of organs by circumstances 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,) or other shell-crushing pairs of jaws wander, terrible to lobster and to cockle. Originally intended, as we suppose, to face the strong-toothed monsters of the Mediterranean, these foreigners have been left behind on shores where their armour is not now needed ; and yet centuries of idleness and security have not been able to persuade them to lay it by ; as it is written, “ They continue this day as at the THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 61 beginning ; Thou bast 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. Johnston’s “ Lectures on Con¬ chology.” But the little pink pears are rare, hun¬ dreds 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 “ Natu¬ ralist 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 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 greys 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 * Actinia anguicoma. 62 GLAUCUS; OK, till our return ; for it wants an hour yet of the dead low spring-tide ; and ere we go home, we will spend a few7 minutes at least on the rocks at Liver- mead, where awaits us a strong -backed quarryman, with a strong -hacked 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 cu¬ riosity on the strange things that ordinary people pass over without notice, our wonder is continually excited by the variety of phase, and often by the uncouthness of form, under which some of the meaner creatures are presented to us. And this is very specially the case with the inhabitants of the sea. We can scarcely poke or pry for an hour among the rocks, at low-water mark, or walk, with an observant downcast eye, along the beach after a gale, without finding some oddly-fashioned, sus- picious -looking being, unlike any form of life that we have seen before. The dark concealed interior of the sea becomes thus invested with a fresh mys¬ tery ; its vast recesses appear to be stored with all imaginable forms ; and we are tempted to think there must be multitudes of living creatures whose very figure and structure have never yet been suspected. THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 63 “ ‘ O sea ! old sea! who yet knows half Of thy wonders or thy pride ! ’ ” Gosse’s Aquarium, pp. 226, 227. But first, as after descending the gap in the sea¬ wall we walk along the ribbed floor of bard yellow sand, be so kind as to keep a sharp look-out for a round grey disc, about as big as a penny-piece, peeping out on the surface. No ; that is not it, that little lump : open it, and you will find within one of the common little Venus gallina . — (They have given it some new name now, and no thanks to them : they are always changing the names, those closet collectors, instead of studying the live animals where Nature has put them, in which case they would have no time for word-inventing. 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 comfortable bath of cool wet sand, till the sea shall come back, and make it safe to crawl and lounge about on the surface, smoking* the sea- water instead of tobacco. Neither is that lump what we seek. Touch it, and out poke a pair of astonished and inquiring horns and a 64 GLAUCUS ; OR, little sharp muzzle : it is a long-armed crab, who saw us coming, and wisely shovelled himself into the sand by means of his nether-end. Neither is that ; though it might be the hole down which what we seek has vanished : but that burrow contains one of the long white razors which you saw cast on shore at Paignton. The boys close by are boring for them with iron rods armed with a screw, and taking them in to sell in Torquay market, as excellent food. But there is one, at last ! — a grey disc pouting up through the sand. Touch it, and it is gone down, quick as light. We must dig it out, and carefully, for it is a delicate monster. At last, after ten minutes’ careful work, we have brought up, from a foot depth or more — what ? A thick, dirty, slimy worm, without head or tail, form or colour. A slug has more artistic beauty about him. Be it so. At home in the aquarium, (where, alas ! he will live but for a day or two, under the new irritation of light,) he will make a very different figure. That is one of the rarest of British sea-animals, Actinia chrysanthellum, 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’’ * Now “ Peacliia,” of Mr. Gosse. THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 65 group, — a party of genera and species which connect families scientifically far apart, filling up a fresh link in the great chain, or rather the great network, of zoological classification. And here we have a simple, and, as it wrere, 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 liolothurians, and then went on to perfect the idea contained in it in twro ' different directions ; dividing it into two different families, and making on its model, by adding new organs, and taking away old ones, in one direction the whole family of Actiniae (sea- anemones), and in a quite opposite one the IIolo- thurice , those strange sea-cucumbers, with their mouth-fringe of feathery gills, of which you shall see some anon. Not (understand well) that there has been any “ transmutation” or “ development of species,” (of individuals, as it ought honestly to be called, if the notion is intended to represent a supposed fact,) — a theory as unsupported by experiment and induction, as it is by d, priori reason : but that there lias 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 gra- F GG GLAUCUS ; OR, dually be supplied, and there should he no gaps in the perfect variety of Nature’s forms. This de¬ velopment is the only one of which we can conceive, if we allow that a Mind presides over the universe, and not a mere brute necessity, a Law (absurd mis¬ nomer) without a Lawgiver ; and to it (strangely enough coinciding here and there with the- Platonic doctrine of Eternal Ideas existing in the Divine Mind) all fresh inductive discovery seems to point more and more ; and especially Professor Owen's invaluable tracts on the Homology of the Vertebrate Skeleton. Let us speak freely a few words on this important matter. Geology has disproved the old popular belief that the universe was brought into being as it now exists, by a single fiat. \Yre know that the work has been gradual ; that the earth “Tn 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 WONDERS OF TIIE SHORE. 07 the highest mammal, “ the roof and crown of things,” one of the latest in the series. AVc have no more right, let it he observed, to say that man, the highest, appeared last, than that the lowest appeared first. Both may have been the case ; but there is utterly no proof of either ; and as we know that species of animals lower than those which already existed appeared again and again during the various eras, so it is quite possible that they may be appearing now, and may appear hereafter : and that for every extinct Dodo or Moa, a new species may be created, to keep up the equilibrium of the whole. This is but a surmise : but it may be wise, perhaps, just now, to confess boldly, even to insist on, its 2)ossibility, 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, con¬ trary 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. 68 GLAUCUS ; OR, Wliat the Transmutationists really mean, if they would express themselves clearly, or carefully analyse their own notions, is a physical and actual change, not of species, hut of individuals, of already existing living beings created according to one idea, into other living beings created according to another idea. And of this, in spite of the apparent change of species in the marvellous metamorphoses of lower animals, Nature has as yet given us no instance among all the facts which have been observed ; and there is, therefore, an almost infinite inductive pro¬ bability against it. As far as we know yet, though all the dreams of the Transmutationists are outdone by the transformations of many a polype, yet the species remain as permanent and strongly marked as in the highest mammal. Such progress as experi¬ mental science actually shows us, is quite awful and beautiful enough to keep us our lives long in wonder ; but it is one which perfectly agrees with, and may be perfectly explained by, the simple old belief which the Bible sets before us, of a Living 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, TILE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 69 concealing, from those who utter them, blank Materialism : hut One who works in all things which have obeyed Him to will and to do of his good pleasure, keeping His abysmal and self-perfect pur¬ pose, yet altering the methods by which that purpose is attained, from reon to reon, ay, from moment to moment, for ever various, yet for ever the same. This great and yet most blessed paradox of the Changeless God, who yet can say, “ It repenteth me,” and “Behold, I work a new thing on the earth,” is revealed no less by nature than by Scripture ; the changeableness, not of caprice or imperfection, but of an Infinite Maker and “ Poietes,” drawing ever fresh forms out of the inexhaustible treasury of the primeval mind ; and yet never throwing away a con¬ ception 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 ; producing the same effects by endlessly different methods ; or so delicately modifying the method that, as by the turn of a hair, it shall produce endlessly diverse effects ; looking back, as it were, ever and anon over the great work of all the ages, to retouch it, and fill up each chasm in the scheme, which for some good purpose had been left open in earlier worlds; or leaving some open (the forms, for 70 GLAUCUS ; OR, instance, necessary to connect tlie bimana and the quadrumana) to he filled np perhaps hereafter when the world needs them ; the handiwork, in short, of a living and loving Mind, perfect in His own eternity, hut stooping to work in time and space, and there rejoicing himself in the work of His own hands, and in His eternal Sabbaths ceasing in rest in¬ effable, that He may look on that which He hath made, and behold it is very good. We speak, of course, under correction ; for this conclusion is emphatically matter of induction, and must be verified or modified by ever-fresh 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, u not to have left Himself without witness,” in nature itself, that He is the God of grace. Why speak of the God of nature and the God of grace as two antithetical terms ? The Bible never, in a single instance, makes the distinction ; and surely, if God be (as He is) the Eternal and Unchangeable One, and if (as we all confess) the universe bears the impress of His signet, we have no right, in the present infantile state of science, to put arbitrary limits of our own to the revelation which He may have thought good to make of Him- 71 THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. self in nature. Nay, rather, let us believe that, if our eyes were opened, we should fulfil the require¬ ment of Genius, to u see the universal in the particular,” by seeing God’s whole likeness, His whole glory, reflected as in a mirror even in the meanest flower ; and that nothing hut the dulness of our own sinful souls prevents them from seeing day and night in all things, however small or trivial to human eclecticism, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself fulfilling His own saying, “ My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” 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 favour a theory of ‘ development ,’ which would obliterate all idea of species, by supposing that the more compound animal forms were developments of their simple ancestors. For such an hypothesis, Nature gives us no evidence: * Harvey’s Sea-side Book, p. 166. 72 GLAUCUS; OK, but she gives us, through all her domains, the most beautiful and diversified proofs of an adherence to a settled order, by which new combinations are continually brought out. In this order, the lowest grades of being have certain characters, above which they do not rise, but propagate beings as simple as themselves. Above them arc 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. Others again rise above these, and their structures become more gradually compound ; till, at last, it may be said that the simpler animals represent, as in a glass, the scattered organs of the higher races.” - 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 uninten¬ tionally coincide with the very theory which Professor Harvey denies. Is this progress supposed to take place in time and space ? — or in the mind of a Being above time and space, who afterwards reduces to act and fact, in time and space, just so much and no more of that progress as shall seem good to Him, some here, some there ; not binding Ilimself to begin at the lowest, and end with the THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 73 highest, hut compensating and balancing the lower with the higher 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 spiritual, from time and space into ever-present eternity. To us it seems (to sum up, in a few words, what we have tried to say) that such development and pro¬ gress as have as yet been actually discovered in nature, have been proved, especially by Professor Sedgwick and Mr. Hugh Miller, to bear every trace of having been produced by successive acts of thought and will in some personal mind ; which, however boundlessly rich and powerful, is still the Archetype of the human mind; and therefore (for to this we boldly confess we have been all along- tending) probably capable, without violence to its properties, of becoming, like the human mind, in¬ carnate. 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, 74 GLAUCUS ; OB, therefore, on the one hand, that the idea of the Chrjsanthellinn, and its congeners Scolanthus and Chirodota and the lately-discovered Edwardsia Yestita of the Menai Straits, 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 finny tribes. And it is equally possible that all our dream (though right in many another case, as in that of the shark just quoted) is here altogether wrong, and that these Chrysanthella are merely meant to fill up, for the sake of logical perfection, the space between the rooted Polypes and the free Echinoderms. Pe this as it may, there is another, and more human, source of interest about this quaint animal who is wriggling himself clean in the glass jar of salt water ; for he is one of the many curiosities which has been added to our fauna by that humble hero Mr. Charles Peach, the self-taught naturalist, of whom, as we Tvalk on toward the rocks, something should be said, or rather read ; for Mr. Chambers, in an often-quoted THE "WONDERS OF THE SHORE, 75 passage from liis Edinburgh J oumal, 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 mounted guard (pre¬ ventive service) at an obscure part of the Cornwall coast, with four shillings a-day, and a wife and nine children, most of whose education he has himself to conduct. He never tastes the luxuries which are so common in the middle ranks of life, and even amongst a large portion of the working-classes. He has to mend with his own hands every sort of thing that can break or wear in his house. Yet Mr. Peach is a votary of Natural History ; not a student of the science in books, for he cannot afford books ; but an investigator by sea and shore, a collector of zoophytes and echinodermata — strange creatures, many of which are as yet hardly known to man. These he collects, preserves, and describes ; and every year does he come up to the British Association with a few novelties of this kind, accom¬ panied by illustrative papers and drawings : thus, 76 GLAUCUS ; OR, 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 echinodcrmata which Professor Eorbes, in his book on Star-Fishes, has said was never yet observed in the British seas. It may he of small moment to you, who, mayhap, know nothing of Ilolotliurias : hut it is a consider¬ able thing to the Fauna of Britain, and a vast matter to a poor private of the Cornwall mounted guard. And accordingly he will go home in a few days, full of the glory of his exhibition, and strung anew by the kind notice taken of him by the mas¬ ters of the science to similar inquiries, difficult as it may be to prosecute them, under such a compli¬ cation of duties, professional and domestic. Honest Peach ! humble as is thy home, and simple thy bearing, thou art an honour even to this assemblage of nobles and doctors : nay, more, when we con¬ sider everything, thou art an honour to human nature itself ; for where is the heroism like that of virtuous, intelligent, independent poverty ? And such heroism is thine ! ” — Chambers's Edin. Journ., Nov. 23, 1844. THE WONDERS OF TIIE SHORE, 77 Mr. Peach is now, we are glad to say, rewarded in part for his long labours in the cause of science, by having been removed to a more lucrative post on the north coast of Scotland ; the earnest, it is to be hoped, of still further promotion. But here we are at the old bank of boulders, the ruins of an antique pier which the monks of Tor Abbey built for their convenience, while Torquay was but a knot of fishing huts within a lonely lime¬ stone cove. To get to it, though, we have passed many a hidden treasure ; for every ledge of these flat New-red-sandstone-rocks, if torn up with the crowbar, discloses in its cracks and crannies nests of strange forms which shun the light of day ; beau¬ tiful Actinia) fill the tiny caverns with living flowers ; great Pholades bore by hundreds in the softer strata ; and wherever a thin layer of muddy sand intervenes between two slabs, long Annelid worms of quaintest forms and colours have their horizontal burrows, among those of that curious and rare radiate animal, the Spoonworm,* an eyeless bag about an inch long, half bluish grey, half pink, with a strange scalloped and wrinkled proboscis of saffron colour, which serves, in some mysterious way, soft as it is, to collect food, and clear its dark passage through the rock. * Thalassema neptnni , (Forbes’ British Star-Fishes, p. 259.) 78 GLAUCUS ; OR, See, at tlic extreme low-water mark, where the broad olive fronds of the Laminaria), 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. Tor the slab, see, is such a one as sea-beasts love to haunt. Its weed- covered surface shows that the surge has not shifted it for years past. It lies on other boulders clear of sand and mud, so that there is no fear of dead sea¬ weed having lodged and decayed under it, destructive to animal life. We can see dark crannies and caves beneath ; yet too narrow to allow the surge to wash in, and keep the surface clean. It will be a fine menagerie of Ncreus, if we can but turn it. Now, the crowbar is well under it ; heave, and with a will ; and so, after five minutes’ tugging, propping, slipping, and splashing, the boulder gra¬ dually tips over, and we rush greedily upon the spoil. A muddy dripping surface it is, truly, full of THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 79 cracks and hollows, uninviting enough at first sight : let us look it round leisurely, to see if there are not materials enough there for an hour’s lecture. The first object which strikes the eye is probably a group of milk-white slugs, from two to six inches long, cuddling snugly together. You try to pull them off, and find that they give you some trouble, such a firm hold have the delicate white sucking arms, which fringe each of their five edges. You- see at the head nothing but a yellow dimple ; for eating and breathing are suspended till the return of tide ; but once settled in a jar of salt-water, each will protrude a large chocolate-coloured head, tipped with a ring of ten feathery gills, looking very much like a head of “ curled kale,” but of the loveliest white and primrose ; in the centre whereof lies perdu a mouth with sturdy teeth — if indeed they, as well as the whole inside of the 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. Forbear it, worn-out epicures, and old Indians who bemoan your livers, this little Holothuria knows a secret which, if he could tell it, you would be glad to buy of him for thousands sterling. To him blue pill and muriatic acid are superfluous, and travels to so GLAUCUS ; OR, German Brunnen a waste of time. Happy IIolo- thuria ! who possesses really that secret of ever¬ lasting youth, which ancient fahle 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 faiscint maigre for a month or so, grow a fresh set, and then eat away as merrily as ever. His name, if you wish to consult so triumphant a hygeist, is Cucumaria Hyndmanni, named after Mr. Hynd- mann of Belfast, 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 crows in Shetland to the enormous length of three feet, rivalling there his huge congeners, who display their exquisite plumes on every tropic coral reef. Next, what are those bright little buds, like salmon-coloured Banksia roses half expanded, sit¬ ting 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 THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 81 one, which we have carefully scooped off with the chisel, two little pink towers of stone, delicately striated ; drop them into this small bottle of sea¬ water, and from the top of each tower issues every half-second — what shall we call it ? — a hand or a net of finest hairs, clutchino* at somethin o* invisible to our grosser sense. That is the Pyrgoma, para¬ sitic only (as far as we know) on the lip of this same rare Madrepore ; a little “ cirrhipod,” the cousin of those tiny barnacles which roughen every rock, 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 ani¬ malcule, and sweep them into the jaws concealed within its shell. And this creature, rooted to one spot through life and death, was in its infancy a free swimming animal, hovering from place to place upon delicate ciline, till, having sown its wild oats, it set¬ tled down in life, built itself a good stone house, and became a landowner, or rather a glehoe ad- scriptus, for ever and a day. Mysterious destiny ! — yet not so mysterious as that of the free medusoid young of every polype and coral, which ends as a rooted tree of horn or stone, and seems to the eye of sensuous fancy to have literally degenerated into G 82 GliAUCUS ; OR, a vegetable. Of tliem you must read for your¬ selves in Mr. Gosse’s book ; in tlie meanwhile he shall tell you something of the beautiful Madrepores themselves. His description,* hy far the best yet published, should be read in full ; we must content ourselves with extracts. “ Doubtless you are familiar with the stony ske¬ leton of our Madrepore, as it appears in museums. It consists of a number of thin calcareous plates standing up edgewise, and arranged in a radiating manner round a low centre. A little below the margin, their individuality is lost in the deposition of rough calcareous matter. . . . The general form is more or less cylindrical, commonly wider at the top than just above the bottom. . . . This is but the skeleton ; and though it is a very pretty object, those who are acquainted with it alone, can form but a very poor idea of the beauty of the living animal. . . . Let it, after being torn from the rock, recover its equanimity ; then you will see a pellucid gelatinous flesh emerging from between the plates, and little exquisitely formed and coloured tentacula, with white clubbed tips flinging the sides of the cup -shaped cavity in the centre, across which stretches the oval disc marked with a * A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, p. 110. THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 83 star of some rich and brilliant colour, surrounding o 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 pro¬ truded and expanded to an astonishing extent. The space surrounding the lips is commonly fawn colour, or rich cliestnut-brown ; the star or vandyked circle rich red, pale vermilion, and sometimes the most brilliant emerald green, as brilliant as the gorget of a humming-bird.” And what does this exquisitely delicate creature do with its pretty mouth ? Alas for fact ! It sips no honey-dew, or fruits from paradise. — “ I put a minute spider, as large as a pin’s head, into the water, pushing it down to the coral. The instant it touched the tip of a tentacle, it adhered, and was drawn in with the surrounding tentacles between the plates. With a lens I saw the small mouth slowly open, and move over to that side, the lips gaping unsymmetrically, while with a movement as imperceptible as that of the hour hand of a watch, the tiny prey was carried along be¬ tween 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 g2 84 GLAUCUS ; OR, insect, and then returned to its usual place in the centre.” Mr. Gosse next tried the fairy of the walking mouth with a house-fly, who escaped only by hard fighting; and at last the gentle creature, after swal¬ lowing and disgorging various large pieces of shell¬ fish, found viands to its taste in “ the lean of cooked meat, and portions of earthworms,” filling up the intervals by a perpetual dessert of microscopic ani¬ malcules, whirled into that lovely avernus, its mouth, by the currents of the delicate cilise which clothe every tentacle. The fact is, that the Madrepore, like those glorious sea-anemones whose living flowers stud every pool, is by profession a scavenger, and a feeder on carrion ; and being as useful as he is beautiful, really comes under the rule which he seems at first to break, that handsome is who hand¬ some does. Another species of Madrepore* was discovered on our Devon coast by Mr. Gosse, more gaudy, though not so delicate in hue as our Caryophyllia ; three of which are at this moment pouting out their conical orange mouths and pointed golden tentacles in a vase on my table, at once grumbling and en¬ treating for something to eat. Mr. Gosse’s locality, * Balanophyttia regia , Coast of Devon, p. 399. THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 85 for this and numberless other curiosities, is Ilfra¬ combe, on the north coast of Devon. These last specimens came from Lundy Island, in the mouth of the Bristol Channel, or more properly from that curious “ Bat Island” to the south of it, where still lingers the black long-tailed English rat, exter¬ minated everywhere else by his sturdier brown cousin of the Hanoverian dynasty. Look, now, at these tiny saucers of the thinnest ivory, the largest not bigger than a silver three¬ pence, which contain in their centres a milk-white crust of stone, pierced, as you see under the mag¬ nifier, into a thousand cells, each with its living architect within. Here are two sorts : in one the tubular cells radiate from the centre, giving it the appearance of a tiny compound flower, daisy or groundsel ; in the other they are crossed with wav¬ ing 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 Cellepova pumicosa ; and now, with the Madre¬ pore, 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 86 GLAUCUS ; OR, continents, and the conquerors of the ocean surge. All the world, since the publication of Darwin’s delightful “ Voyage of the Beagle,” and of Wil¬ liams’s “ Missionary Enterprises,” knows, or ought to know, enough about them : for those who do not, there are a few pages in the beginning of Dr. Landsborough’s “ British Zoophytes,” well worth perusal. There are a few other true cellepore corals round the coast. The largest of all, Cervicornis, may be dredged a few miles outside on the Exmouth bank, with a few more Tubulipores : but all tiny things, the lingering, and, as it were, expiring rem¬ nants of that great coral-world, which, through the abysmal depths of past ages, formed here in Britain our limestone hills, storing up for generations yet unborn the materials of agriculture and architecture. Inexpressibly interesting, even solemn, to those who will think, is the sight of those puny parasites, which, as it were, connect the ages and the 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 of Ireland, possessor THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 87 of a pedigree with dates, perhaps, from ages before the day in which it was said, “ Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” To think that the whole human race, its joys and its sorrows, its vir¬ tues and its sins, its aspirations and its failures, has been rushing out of eternity and into eternity again, as Arjoon in the Bhagavad Gita beheld the race of men, issuing from Kreeshna’s flaming mouth, and swallowed up in it again, “ as the crowds of insects swarm into the flame, as the homeless streams leap down into the ocean bed,” in an everlasting heart- pulse whose blood is living souls. And all that wliile, and ages before that mystery began, that humble coral, unnoticed on the dark sea-floor, has been “ continuing as it was at the beginning,” and fulfilling “ the law which cannot be broken,” while races and dynasties and generations have been “ Playing such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As make the angels weep.” Yes ; it is this vision of the awful permanence and perfection of the natural world, beside the wild flux and confusion, the mad struggles, the despairing cries of that world of spirits which man has defiled by sin, which would at moments crush the natu¬ ralist’s heart, and make his brain swim with terror. 88 GLAUCUS ; OR, were it not that he can see by faith, through all the abysses and the ages, not merely “ Hands, From out the darkness, shaping man but above them a living loving countenance, human and yet divine ; and can hear a voice which said at first, “ Let us make man in our image and hath said since then, and says for ever and for ever, “ Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world.” But now, friend, who listenest, perhaps instructed, and at least amused — if, as Professor Harvey well says, the simpler animals represent, as in a glass, the scattered organs of the higher races, which of your organs is represented by that “ sca’d man’s head,” which the Devon children more gracefully, yet with less adherence to plain likeness, call “ mermaid’s head,” * which we picked up just now on Paignton Sands ? Or which, again, by its more beautiful little congener, t five or six of which are adhering tightly to the slab before us, a hall covered with delicate spines of lilac and green, and stuck over (cunning fellows !) with strips of dead sea¬ weed to serve as improvised parasols ? One cannot * Amphidotus cordatus. t Echinus miliaris. THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 89 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 attempf at that use of hollow globes of mineral for protecting soft fleshy parts, which she afterwards developed to such perfection in the skulls of vertebrate animals ! But even that conceit, pretty as it sounds, will not hold good ; for though Radiates similar to these were among the earliest tenants of the abyss, yet as early as their time, perhaps even before them, had been conceived and actualized, in the sharks, and in Mr. Hugh Miller’s pets the old red sandstone fishes, that very true vertebrate skull and brain, of which this is a mere mockery.* Here the wdiole animal, with his extraordinary feeding mill, (for neither teeth nor jaws is a fit word for it,) is en¬ closed 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 * See Professor Sedgwick’s last edition of the Discourses on the Studies of Cambridge. 90 GLAUCUS ; OR, perpetual imprisonment, of walking, feeding, and breeding, doubt it not, merrily enough. But this result has been attained at the expense of a compli¬ cation of structure, which has baffled all human analysis and research into final causes. As much concerning this most miraculous of families as is needful to be known, and ten times more than is comprehended, may be read in Professor Harvey’s Sea-Side Book, pp. 142 — 148, — pages from which you will probably arise with a dizzy sense of the infinity of nature, and a conviction that the Creative Word, so far from having commenced, as some fancy, with the simplest, and, as it were, easiest forms of life, took delight, if I may so speak, in solving the most difficult and complicated problems first of all, with a certain divine prodigality of wisdom and of power ; and that before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world was made, He was God from everlasting, the same yes¬ terday, to-day, and for ever. Conceive a Crystal Palace, (for mere difference in size, as both the naturalist and the metaphysician know, has nothing to do with the wonder,) whereof each separate joist, girder, and pane grows continually without altering the shape of the whole ; and you have conceived only one of the miracles embodied in that little sea- THE "WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 91 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 he through all worlds to come. But we must make haste ; for the tide is rising fast, and our stone will he 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 otf 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 given him at the top of his shell.* This is one instance among a thousand of the way in which a scientific knowledge of objects must not obey, but run counter to, the impressions of sense ; and of a custom in nature which makes this caution so necessary, namely, the repetition of the same * Fissurella grceca. 92 glaucus; on, form, slightly modified, in totally different animals, sometimes as if to avoid waste, (for why should not the same conception be used in two different cases, if it will suit in both ?) and sometimes, (more mar¬ vellous by far,) when an organ fully developed and useful in one species, appears in a cognate species but feeble, useless, and, as it were, abortive ; and gradually, in species still farther removed, dies out altogether ; placed there, it would seem, at first sight, merely to keep up the family likeness. I am half jesting ; that cannot be the only reason, perhaps not the reason at all ; but the fact is one of the most curious, and notorious also, in comparative anatomy. Look, again, at those sea-slugs. One, some three inches long, of a bright lemon-yellow, clouded with purple ; another of a dingy grey ; * another exquisite little creature of a pearly French white, t furred all over the back with what seem arms, but are really gills, of ringed white and grey and black. Put that yellow one into water, and from his head, above the eyes, arise two serrated horns v while from the after part of his back springs a circular Prince-of-Wales’s-feather of gills, — they are almost exactly like those which we saw just now in the white Cucumaria. Yes ; here is another * Doris iulcrculata and lilineata. t Eolis papillosu. THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 93 instance of that same custom of repetition. The Cucumaria is a low radiate animal — the sea-slim O a far higher mollusc ; and every organ within him is formed on a different type ; as indeed are those seemingly identical gills, if yon come to examine them under the microscope, having to oxygenate fluids of a very different and more complicated kind ; and, moreover, the Cucumaria & gills were put round his mouth ; the Doris’s feathers round the other extremity ; that grey Eoliss, again, are simple clubs, scattered over his whole back, and in each of his nudibranch congeners these same gills take some new and fantastic form ; in Meliboea those clubs are covered with warts ; in Scyllcea , with tufted bou¬ quets; in the beautiful Antiopa* they are trans¬ parent bags ; and in many other English species they take every conceivable form of leaf, tree, flower, and branch, bedecked with every colour of the rainbow, as you may see them depicted in Messrs. Alder and Hancock’s unrivalled Monogra Ph on the Nudibranch Mollusca. And now, worshipper of final causes and the mere useful in Nature, answer but one question, — Why this prodigal variety ? All these Nudibranchs live in much the same way : why would not the same * Gosse’s “ Naturalist in Devon,” p. 325. 94 GLAUCUS ; OR, mould have done for them all ? And why, again, (for we must push the argument a little further,) why have not all the butterflies, at least all who feed on the same plant, the same markings ? Of all unfathomable triumphs of design, (we can only express ourselves thus, for honest induction, as Paley so well teaches, allows us to ascribe such results only to the design of some personal will and mind,) what surpasses that by which the scales on a butterfly’s wing are arranged to produce a certain pattern of artistic beauty beyond all painter’s skill ? What a waste of power, on any utilitarian theory of nature ! And once more, why are those strange microscopic atomies, the 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 mathematical symmetry, as they are countless beyond the wildest dreams of the Pantheist ? Mys¬ tery inexplicable on all theories of evolution by necessary laws, as well as on the conceited notion which, making man forsooth the centre of the uni- THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 95 verse, dares to believe that this variety of forms has existed for countless ages in abysmal sea-depths and untrodden forests, only that some few individuals of the western races might, in these latter days, at last discover and admire a corner here and there of the boundless realms of beauty. Inexplicable, truly, if man be the centre and the object of their existence ; explicable enough to him who believes that God has created all things for Himself, and rejoices in His own handiwork, and that the material universe is, as the wise man says, “ A platform whereon His eternal Spirit sports and makes melody.” Of all the blessings which the study of nature brings to the patient observer, let none, perhaps, be classed higher than this ; — that the further he enters into those fairy gardens of life and birth, which Spenser saw and described in his great poem, the more he learns the awful and yet most comfortable truth, that they do not belong to him, but to one greater, wiser, lovelier than he ; and as he stands, silent with awe, amid the pomp of nature’s ever-busy rest, hears, as of old, “ The Word of the Lord God walking among the trees of the garden in the cool of the day.” One sight more, and we have done. We had something to say, had time permitted, on the ludicrous element which appears here and there in. 96 GLAUCUS ; OR, nature. There are animals, like monkeys and crabs, which seem made to be laughed at; by those at least who possess that most indefinable of faculties, the sense of the ridiculous. As long as man pos¬ sesses muscles especially formed to enable him to laugh, we have no right to suppose (with some) that laughter is an accident of our fallen nature ; or to find (with others) the primary cause of the ridiculous in the perception of unfitness or disharmony. And yet we shrink (whether rightly or wrongly, we can hardly tell) from attributing a sense of the ludicrous to the Creator of these forms. It may be a weak¬ ness on our part ; at least we will hope it is a reverent one : but till we can find something cor¬ responding 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 meanwhile, there are animals in which results so strange, fantastic, even seemingly horrible, are produced, that fallen man may be pardoned, if he shrinks from them in disgust. TILE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 97 That, at least, must be a consequence of our own wrong state ; for everything is beautiful and perfect in its place. It may be answered, “ Yes, in its place ; but its place is not yours. You had no business to look at it, and must pay the penalty for intermeddling.” I doubt that answer; for surely, if man have liberty to do anything, he has liberty to search out freely his heavenly Father’s works ; and yet every one seems to have his antipathic animal ; and I know one bred from his childhood to zoology by land and sea, and bold in asserting, and honest in feeling, that all without exception is beau¬ tiful, who yet cannot, after handling and petting and admiring all day long every uncouth and venomous beast, avoid a paroxysm of horror at the sight of the common house-spider. At all events, whether we were intruding or not, in turning this stone, we must pay a fine for having done so ; for there lies an animal as foul and monstrous to the eye as “ hydra, gorgon, or chimsera dire,” and yet so won- drously fitted to its work, that we must needs endure for our own instruction to handle and to look at it. Its name, if you wish for it, is Nemertes; probably N. Borlasii ; a worm of very “ low ” organization, though well fitted enough for its own work. You see it? That black, shiny, knotted lump among H 98 GLAUCUS; OB, the gravel, small enough to he 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 capa¬ bility of seemingly endless expansion ; a slimy tape of living; caoutchouc, some eighth of an inch in diameter, a dark chocolate-black, with paler lon¬ gitudinal lines. Is it alive ? It hangs, helpless and motionless, a mere velvet string across the hand. Ask the neighbouring Annelids and the fry of the rock fishes, or put it into a vase at home, and see. It lies motionless, trailing itself among the gravel ; you cannot tell where it begins or ends ; it may be a dead strip of sea-weed ,Himanthalia lorea, perhaps, or Chorda filum ; or even a tarred string. So thinks the little fish who plays over and over it, till he touches at last what is too surely a head. In an instant a bell-shaped sucker mouth has fastened to his side. In another instant, from one lip, a concave double proboscis, just like a tapir’s, (another instance of the repetition of forms,) has clasped him like a finger ; and now begins the struggle : but in vain. He is being “ played ” with such a fishing-line as the skill of a Wilson or a Stoddart never could invent ; a living line, with elasticity beyond that of the most delicate fly-rod, which follows every lunge, shortening and lengthening, slipping and twining THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 99 round every piece of gravel and stem of sea-weed, with a tiring drag such as no Highland wrist or step could ever bring to bear on salmon or on trout. The victim is tired now ; and slowly, and yet dexterously, his blind assailant is feeling- and shifting; along- his side, till he reaches one end of him ; and then the black lips expand, and slowly and surely the curved finger begins packing him end-foremost down into the gullet, where he sinks, inch by inch, till the swelling which marks his place is lost among the coils, and he is probably macerated to a pulp long- before he has reached the opposite extremity of his cave of doom. Once safe down, the black murderer slowly contracts again into a knotted heap, and lies, like a boa with a stag inside him, motionless and blest. 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 scan¬ dalized at having the soft mouths of his siphons so rudely touched, and taking your finger for some * Saxicava ruejosa. H 2 100 GLAUCUS ; OR, bothering Annelid, who wants to nibble him, is defending himself ; shooting you, as naturalists do humming-birds, with water. Let him rest in peace ; it will cost you ten minutes’ hard work, and much dirt, to extract him ; but if you are fond of shells, secure one or two of those beautiful pink and straw- coloured scallops,* who have gradually incorporated the layers of their lower valve with the roughnesses of the stone, destroying thereby the beautiful form which belongs to their race, but not their delicate colour. There are a few more bivalves too, adhering to the stone, and those rare ones, and two or three delicate Mangelice and JVcisce are trailing their graceful spires up and down in search of food. That little bright red and yellow pea, too, touch it — the brilliant coloured cloak is withdrawn, and, instead, you have a 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, Lepralice and Flustrae , and those quaint blue stars, set in brown jelly, which are no zoophytes, but respectable molluscs, each with his well-formed mouth and intestines, J hut combined in a peculiar form of Communism, of which all one can say is, that one * Peeten pusio. -}- Cyprcca European. J Botrylli. THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 101 hopes they like it; and that, at all events, they agree Letter than the heroes and heroines of Mr. Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance. Now away, and as a specimen of the fertility of the water-world, look at this rough list of species,* the greater part of which are on this very stone, and all of which you might obtain in an hour, would the rude title wait for zoologists : and remember that the number of individuals of each species of polype * Molluscs. Doris tuberculata. - Bilineata. Eolis papillosa. Pleurobranchus plu- mula. Neritina. Cyprsea. Troclius, — 2 species. Mangeiia. Triton. Trophon. Nasa, — 2 species. Cerithium. Sigaretus. Fissurella. Area lactea. Pecten pusio. Tapes pullastra. Kellia suborbicularis. Sphaenia Binghami. Saxicava rugosa. Gastrochoena phola- dia. Pholas parva. Anomise, — 2 or 3 spe¬ cies. Cynthia, — 2 species. Botryllus, do. Sydinum? Annelids. Phyllodoce, and other Nereid worms. Polynoe squamata. Crustacea. 4 or 5 species. Echinoderms. Echinus miliaris. Asterias gibbosa. Ophiocoma neglecta. Cucumaria Hynd- manni. • - oommunis. Polypes. Sertularia pumila. - rugosa. Sertularia fallax. - filicula. Plumularia falcata. - setacea. Laomedea geniculata. Campanularia volubi- lis. Actinia mesembryan- themum. - clavata. - anguicoma. - crassicornis. Tubulipbra patina. • - hispida. - serpens. Crisia eburnea. Cellepora pumicosa. Lepraliae, — many spe_ cies. Membranipora pilosa. Cellularia ciliata. - scruposa. ■ - reptans. Flustra membrana- cea, & c. 102 GLAUCUS; OR, must be counted by tens of thousands; and also, that, by searching the forest of sea-weeds which covers the upper surface, we should probably obtain some twenty minute species more. A goodly catalogue this, surely, of the inhabitants of three or four large stones ; and yet how small a specimen of the multitudinous nations of the sea ! From the bare rocks above high-water mark, down to abysses deeper than ever plummet sounded, is life, everywhere life ; fauna after fauna, and flora after flora, arranged in zones, according to the amount of light and warmth which each species requires, and to the amount of pressure which they are able to endure. The crevices of the highest rocks, only sprinkled with salt spray in spring-tides and high gales, have their peculiar little univalves, their crisp lichen-like sea- 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 Algae furnishes food for yet other species who graze on its watery meadows ; and beneath all, only uncovered at low spring- tide, the zone of the Laminarias (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 103 THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. compare ourselves (likening small things to great) to those who, descending the Andes, pass in a single day from the vegetation of the Arctic zone to that of the Tropics. And here and there, even at half-tide level, deep rock-basins, shaded from the sun and always full of water, keep up in a higher zone the vegetation of a lower one, and afford iu miniature an analogy to those deep “ barrancos ” which split the high table-land of Mexico, down whose awful cliffs, swept by cool sea-breezes, the traveller looks from among the plants and animals of the temperate zone, and sees far below, dim through their everlasting vapour-bath of rank hot steam, the mighty forms and gorgeous colours of a tropic forest. “ I do not wonder,” says Mr. Gosse, in his charming “ Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast,” * “ that when Southey had an opportunity of seeing some of those beautiful quiet basins hol¬ lowed in the living rock, and stocked with elegant plants and animals, having all the charm of novelty to his eye, they should have moved his poetic fancy, and found more than one place in the gorgeous imagery of his Oriental romances. Just listen to him : * P. 187. 104 GLAUCUS ; OR, “ ‘ It was a garden still beyond all price, Even yet it was a place of paradise ; * * * # And here were coral bowers, And grots of madrepores, And banks of sponge, as soft and fair to eye As e’er was mossy bed Whereon the wood-nymphs lie With languid limbs in summer’s sultry hours. Here, too, were living flowers, Which, like a bud compacted, Their purple cups contracted ; And now in open blossom spread, Stretch’d, like green anthers, many a seeking head. And arborets of jointed stone were there, And plants of fibres fine as silkworm’s thread ; Yea, beautiful as mermaid’s golden hair Upon the waves dispread. Others that, like the broad banana growing, [Raised their long wrinkled leaves of purple hue, Like streamers wide outflowing.’ — KeJiama, 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 depict¬ ing the gorgeous scenes of Eastern mythology — scenes the wildest and most extravagant that imagi- nation could paint — drew not upon the resources of THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 105 his prolific fancy for imagery here, hut 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 shrub¬ beries of pink coralline — ‘ the arborets of jointed stone ’ — that fringe those pretty pools. It is a charming sight to see the crimson banana-like leaves of the Delesseria waving in their darkest corners ; and the purple fibrous tufts of Polysi- phonice 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 hol¬ lows at the highest level, while, at the lowest, wave tiny forests of the feathery Ptilota and Dasya , and large leaves, cut into fringes and furbelows, of rosy Phodymenice. All these are lovely to behold ; but I think I admire as much as any of them, ope of the commonest of our marine plants, Chondrus crispus. It occurs in the greatest profusion on this coast, in every pool between tide-marks ; and every¬ where — except in those of the highest level, where constant exposure to light dwarfs the plant, and turns it of a dull umber-brown tint — it is elegant 106 GLAUCUS ; OR, in form and brilliant in colour. The expanding fan-shaped fronds, cut into segments, cut, and cut again, make fine bushy tufts in a deep pool, and every segment of every frond reflects a flush of the most lustrous azure, like that of a tempered sword- blade.” — Gosse's Devonshire Coast, pp. 187 — 189. And the sea bottom, also, has its zones, at dif¬ ferent depths, and its peculiar forms in peculiar spots, affected by the currents and the nature of the ground, the riches of which have to be seen, alas ! rather by the imagination than the eye ; for such spoonfuls of the treasure as the dredge brings up to us, come too often rolled and battered, torn from their sites and contracted by fear, mere hints to us of what the populous reality below is like. 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, eating of the herb which gave his fish strength to leap back into their native element, he was seized on the spot with a strange longing to follow them under the waves, and became for ever a companion of the fair semi¬ human forms with which the Hellenic poets peopled THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 107 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 sum¬ mer noon, or wandering in the still hays on sultry nights amid the choir of Ampliitrite and her sea- nymplis, “ Joining the bliss of the gods, as they waken the coves with their laughter,” Iii nightly revels, whereof one has sung, — “ So they came up iu 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 rainbows, Crimson and azure and emerald, were broken in star-showers, lighting Far in the wine-dark depths of the crystal, the gardens of Nereus, Coral and sea-fan and tangle, the blooms and the palms of the ocean. So they went on in their joy, more white than the foam which they scattered, Laughing and singing and tossing and twining, while eager, the Tritons Blinded with kisses their eyes, unreproved, and above them in worship Fluttered the terns, and the sea-gulls swept past them on silvery pinions, Echoing softly their laughter; around them the wantoning dolphins 108 GLAUCUS ; OR, 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, on the murmuring ripple.” Such a rhapsody may be somewhat out of order, even in a popular scientific hook ; and yet one can¬ not help at moments envying the old Greek imagi¬ nation, which could inform the soulless sea- world with a human life and beauty. For, after all, star¬ fishes and ) ; each capsule contained about a hundred eggs. The capsules opened on the 16th of May, per¬ mitting the escape of rotiferous fry (fig. 2, c, d, e ), not in the slightest degree resembling the parent, but presenting minute nautilus-shaped transparent shells. These shells rather hang on than cover the bodies, which have a pair of lobes, around which vibrate minute cilia in such a manner as 31 APPENDIX TO “ GLAUCUS.” to give them an appearance of rotatory motion. Under a lens they may be seen moving about very actively in various positions, hut always with the look of being moved by rapidly turning wheels. We should have been glad to witness the next step towards assuming their ultimate form, but were disappointed, as the embryos died. Fig. 2,/, is the tongue of a Nassa, from a photograph by Dr. Kingsley. PLATE IX. EcniNODERMATA. ANNELIDA. Cu CUMAEIA IIyNDMANNI. PL IX. ( Glaucus , p. 70.) I have figured in another work this species of sea-cucumber under the title of Pentacta Pentactes, by which name it is called by some aquarians. Mr. Kingsley, however, maintains that it is the true Hyndmanni , and I have a strong suspicion 32 APPENDIX TO “ GLAUCUS.” that the two supposed species may be identical. The retractile suckers, arranged in five double rows along the animal’s body, by means of which it creeps along, are analogous to the suckers of Echinus shown at Plate VII. The creature is very active, coiling itself prettily among weeds and stones in an aquarium, and freely putting out its beautiful coronet of branched tentacles. These sur¬ round the mouth, bending and waving towards it. Sabella. PI. IX. The beautiful expanded fan protruded from the tube is composed of plume-like stems, with a double row of hairs. These compose the breathing apparatus of the animal. The tube is not a shell, like that of Scrpulae, but is formed of a mucous substance of a greenish chocolate colour. After figuring the specimen at Mr. Lloyd’s, I saw the magnificent group of Sabella voluticornis in the Zoological Gardens aquarium. In most of these the fans were rolled round in one or two coils. APPENDIX TO GLAUCUS. 33 >> Among them were some less coiled, white speci¬ mens, resembling the one I have figured : but as the fans of my specimen were only slightly spiral, I do not dare to identify it as S. voliiti- cornis. CoR ALLIN A OFFICINALIS. PL IX. ( Glaums , p. ] 37.) Behind the Sabella is the little stony plant, or pink coralline, mentioned at page 137 as formerly believed to bo a coral, but now proved to be of a vegetable nature. PLATE X. Annelida. Moll use a. Serpula contortuplicata. PL 'K.Jig. 1. {Glaucus, p. 121.) Serpula: are always among the most beautiful objects in an aquarium ; their twisted tubes are picturesquely knotted and coiled about shells, stones, and any other submarine bodies. They c 34 APPENDIX TO “ GLAUCUS.” arc of a shelly texture, and, like shells of Mollusca, grow by the addition of successive layers of matter on their inner edges, forming lines on the outside, called “ lines of growth.” When full-grown, the aperture is expanded slightly, and, in some in¬ stances, several of these expansions occur at inter¬ vals in the upper part of the tube, seeming to tell of successive intended endings of the struc¬ ture. The inhabitant of this tube is an annulose worm without a distinct head, whose body is furnished along the sides ivitli pairs of papillae, in which are set bundles of bristles of very elaborate structure, by means of which it slowly pushes out its fan. It has another apparatus, well described by Mr. Gosse, for suddenly with¬ drawing when alarmed. The fan-like expansions are gills, and are beautifully feathered ; when undisturbed these are nearly always exhibited, but it is astonishing1 how slight an alarm causes an instantaneous retreat. From this extreme sen¬ sitiveness to the mere flitting of a shadow, it is difficult to avoid the belief of Serpulce being APPENDIX TO “ GLAUCUS.” 35 furnished with organs of vision ; none, however, have as yet been discovered. The funnel-shaped object protruding from between the fans is used as a stopper. When the fans are suddenly con¬ tracted and withdrawn into the tube, this stopper is drawn in last, and shuts the animal comfortably within its quarters. Sometimes the stopper is thrown away and a new one grows up in its place ; at other times the whole worm, fans and all, jerks itself out of the tube ; but then it is — to die. Hinnites Pusio. PL IS. jig. 1. ( Glaucus , p. 101.) The ground on which Serpula is figured is a small corner of a block of scoria in the possession of Mr. Cuming, which, having been long sub¬ merged, is covered with these pretty bivalve shells, with several species of Serpula, numerous acorn Barnacles, Terebratulie, &c., forming a splendid group of eight or ten inches diameter. The Hinnites are first cousins to the Scallops or Pectens, spoken of in the text (p. 121); but c 2 36 APPENDIX TO GLAUCUS, u instead of being active, as scallops generally are, become, when very young, fixed to submarine substances, and live a sedentary life ever afterwards, conforming in their subsequent growth to the inequalities of their site. Doris repanda. PL X. ( Glaucus , pp. 92, 93.) At the left corner, under the block with Serpulse, is a white slug belonging to the order of Nudi- brnnchs, or Naked-gilled Mollusca. The species is chosen for no other reason but for its suitable size in my limited plate. The white, tuberculated mantle covers nearly the entire animal, whose creeping disk or foot is seen protruding at the end. The mantle has three perforations ; two in front for the pair of tentacles, and one at the back for a circular bunch of feather-like gills. The embryos of Nudibranchs differ only specifically from those of Xassa and other Mollusca. APPENDIX TO “ GLAUCUS.” ^ 37 Eolis pellucida. PI. X. fig. 2. (Glaucus, pp. 92, 93.) In this genus of Naked-gilled Mollusca, the gills are arranged along the back in the form of hunches of club-shaped papillae. Each papilla is beautifully coloured by a central streak of pink, , tipped with blue. Eissubella Gb^eca. PI. X. jig. 5. (Glaucus, p. 91.) As the “ Key-hole Limpet,” when compared with true Limpets, presents an example of very dissimilar animals provided with similar shells, there are also instances in which very similar Mollusca have very different shells, or are without them, while others are possessed of them. Thus, one common garden-slug has, under its mantle, on the fore part of its body a rudimentary shell, with very little form ; another has none at all; and another, not so common, but still found in some gardens (the Testa cello), has an 38 APPENDIX TO “ GLAUCUS.” ear-shaped, obliquely conical shell at the hinder part of its foot. A garden-snail, indeed, is but a slug provided with a large spiral shell, within which it can retreat. Pholas papya. Pl.lL.fig. 4. (Glaucus, p. 77.) This species receives its name from its com¬ paratively small size. The specimen is drawn from a block of Red Sandstone in the possession of H. Cuming, Esq., which is perforated by specimens not only of this, but of the following species. The tubes, like those of other bivalve mollusca, are for entrance and exit of fluids bearing nourish¬ ment to the animal. Their orifices are guarded from any too coarse substances by a network of cilia, which are better seen in the larger species, P. Dactylus. The smaller disk appearing in the centre of the hiatus between the shelly valves low down is the foot, passing through the mantle. This would enable the animal to obtain a purchase on the side of its stony cell, so as to move as far APPENDIX TO “ GLAUCUS.” 39 as its very limited dimensions allow ; and the hole being circular, it might even turn round. But in the next species the hole is so closely fitted to the shell that not even that little privilege would he permitted. Naturalists have not yet arrived at any satisfactory conclusion as to the manner in which these boring molluscs find their way into the stones which they inhabit. «/ Piioladidea papyracea. PI. X. fig. 3. This Pholas differs from the preceding and others of its family in several particulars : first, the tubes terminate in a fringed disk ; secondly, there is a curious cup-shaped process at the end of the valves ; and thirdly, the valves, when adult, have no hiatus in front, but are enclosed by a slender continuation of the shell, the valves meeting in the middle. 40 APPENDIX TO “ GLAUCUS.” PLATE XI. Pisces. Crustacea. Syngnathus lumbriciformis. PL XI. jig. 1. ( Glaucus , p. 120.) A specimen of this pretty little Pipe-fish being in Mr. Lloyd’s collection, I am glad to present a figure of him from the life, although, as Mr. Gosse observes, it is not very easy to get a fair view ol him in the tank. All his beauties cannot be seen at one time. Now, you may catch a glimpse of his prettily marbled cheek ; then, while parts of his body are enveloped in a mist of uniform dulness, others may be seen exhibiting beautiful series of black and white specks symmetrically arranged. The dorsal fin is generally laid down so close on the back as to be hardly perceptible, but at other times it appears expanded, gracefully waving to assist a vertical motion. The fish is very fond of twining about among sea-weeds, frequently laying hold of the APPENDIX TO “ GLAUCUS.” 41 upper stems with his prehensile tail while his body waves to and fro in free undulations. Altogether it is a very different creature from what might be expected from seeing the dead-stick-like dried specimens of Pipe-fish in museums. Pagubus Bebniiakdus. PI. XI. fig. 2. (Glaucus, p. 141.) Our little friend the Soldier Crab, or Hermit , as he is variously styled, is now content with the empty shell of a periwinkle. By-and-bye, when grown larger, he will require more ample accommo¬ dation, and will then drag his heavy house about with him, in search of some small whelk-shell wherein to hide his unprotected tail. But he will be very careful to ascertain, before quitting his present shell, by feeling within the cavity of the new one, whether it is quite suitable and quite at his service. The partially developed condition of the hinder parts of a Hermit crab, their unpro¬ tected state, and the consequent necessity for an 42 APPENDIX TO “ GLAUCUS.” artificial covering, are circumstances so abnormal as to have the appearance of accident. Yet they seem so constant in the various species of Paguridce that they cannot be placed in that category ; but must be reckoned among the mysteries of nature. PLATE XII. Actinioidia. Echinodeemata. Peachia hastata. PL XII .fig. 1. (Chrysantl tellci, Glaucus, pp. 64-74.) Mr. Gosse has described this from specimens sent to him by Mr. Kingsley. It is interesting chiefly as presenting characters which go to fill up a space in the system between sea-anemones on one hand, and sea-cucumbers on the other. Instead of having a walking disk like the former, it has a free termination like the latter, which has an opening. It is also described by Mr. Kingsley, who watched its habits, as “ more rapid and springy ” in its movements than any others of its 43 APPENDIX TO “ GLAUCUS.” class. Like Synapta it lias a tendency to transverse constriction. Its habit is to remain buried upright in sand, with its mouth and circle of tentacles just above the surface. These it retracts on the least alarm, and buries its whole body to the depth of nine inches. The colouring matter of the body appears to reside in a thin epidermis, which some¬ times bursts and tears, showing a pellucid substance beneath. A small figure to the left of our Plate represents a curious clump of papillae which projects from one side of the orifice. Uraster rueens. PL XII. Hg. 2. ( Glaucus , p. 54.) The common Star-fish, or Cross-fish, is here represented clinging to a piece of rock by means of its numerous suckers which are arranged in double rows along a canal on the under side of each arm or finger. These are shown in the up¬ turned corner of the nearest finger. They correspond with the walking suckers already noticed in Echinus and Cucumaria. EXPLANATION OF THE PLATES IN BRIEF. PLATE I. (Glaucus, p. 31.) Fig. 1. Flustra lineata. a , enlarged, with polypes protruding. 2. Flustra folia ce a. 3. Anguinaria spathulata. 4. Valkeria cuscuta, enlarged ; a, nat. size ; 1, two tentacles ; c, tentacles bent inwards ; d, enlarged, showing the gradual eversion of the animal. 5. Crisia denticulata, enlarged ; a, nat. size. 6. Gemellaria loricata, enlarged ; a, nat. size. 7. Sertularia rosea, enlarged ; fr, nat. size. 8. Cellularia cilIxVTA, enlarged ; a, nat. size ; b, one of the “bird’s heads;” c, cell and bird’s head, much enlarged. 9. Campanularia Syringa, enlarged ; a, nat. size. 10. Campanularia volubilis, enlarged. PLATE II. Fig. 1. Siphunculus Bernhardus in shell of Turritella, with living Balani. 2. Saxicava rugosa in the stone ; a, shell of the same. ( Glaucus , p. 99.) 3. Cardium tuberculatum, or Rusticum. ( Gian - cus, pp. 54, 61.) APPENDIX TO “ GLAUCUS.” PLATE III. «. Nemertes Bore ash ; b , head enlarged ; c, head ex¬ panded in the act of swallowing. ( Glaums , p. 97.) d. Terebella conchilega ; e, sandy tube of the same. PLATE IV. a. SYNArTA DIGITATA ; b, the same separating, and throwing out capsuliferous threads ; c, d, fingered tentacles, enlarged ; e, spiculse of S. digitata, magnified ; /, spiculse of “ Chirodota vittata ” (Synapta Baltica?); g, perforated plate of the latter species. ( Glaucus, p . 74.) PLATE V. 1. Balanothyllea regia; a, with the tentacles ex¬ panded ; b, animal contracted ; c, coral. ( Glaucus , p. 84.) 2. Caryophyllea Smithii ; a, animal partly ex¬ panded ; b, section of the bony plates. ( Glaucus , pp. 32, 80, 82.) 3. Sagartia anguicoma ; a, closed ; b, basal disk showing radiating septa. ( Glaucus , pp. 54, 61.) PLATE VI. 1. Actinia Mesembryanthemum partially expanded : 1, «, closed. 2. Bunodes crassicornis. {Glaucus, pp. 155 — 7.) 3. Caryophyllea Smithii. APPENDIX TO “GLAUCUS.” 47 PLATE VII. Fig. a. Echinus miliaris creeping over Modiola barbata ; h, creeping up the glass ; c, hiding under stones ; d, teeth and digesting mill ; e, suckers, enlarged ; /, a spine, enlarged ; g, its socket ; h, portion of the shell, denuded; i, Pedicellaria. (Gkmcus, p. 88.) PLATE VIII. Fig. 1. LlTTORlNA littorea ; a , b, animal and shell; c, operculum ; d, pallet ; e, part of the same, magnified. 2. Nassa reticulata ; a, animal and shell ; b, egg capsules ; c, d, fry, magnified ; e, shell of fry ; f, pallet, magnified. (Glaucus, p. 100.) 3. Palate of Patella vulgaris : a, nat. size ; b, c, enlarged. PLATE IX. Fig. 1. Cucumaria Hyndmanni. (Glaucus, p. 79.) 2. Sabella ? PLATE X. Fig. 1. Serpula contortuplicata. ( Glaucus , p. 121.) Hinnites Pusio,on the same block. ( Glaucus , p.100.) Doris repanda, on the left, in the lower corner, {Glaucus, pp. 92, 93.) 2. Eons pellucid a. {Glaucus, pp. 92, 93.) 3. PHOLADIDiEA PAPYRACEA. 4. Pholas parva. {Glaucus, p. 77.) 5. Fissurella GRiECA. {Glaucus, p. 91.) 48 APPENDIX TO “ GLAUCUS.” PLATE XI. Fig. 1. Syngnathus lumbriciformis. (Glaucus, p. 120.) 2. Pagurus Bernhardi in a Periwinkle shell. ( Glaucus , p. 141.) PLATE XII. Fig. 1. Peachia hastata. (Glaucus, pp. 64, 74.) 2. U raster rubens. ( Glaucus , p. 54.) •VOZilOJ ‘ VlilUOi O'Z ✓ M xJl 1 tt aV J) • VAV 3 IIV 8 ' H -OLTLxl 0> 1 fi ia ■JTiE M. E B T E S BOB. LA S IX V . Tl.1V. SY¥AT TA BI&ITATA. vu»t:)'Vs 3* va-iTiiLiojffTWT • va'n«n.mm.) ri. n AfTIIIAV. BUirOTDTE S . CAET OlPIBtYXXlE A. FI VII S XI., X-A 1RX5 (n TTORUA A¥to XI' Id "VTltl 3lsev § nnr Mirwtni statu ‘vravMHU)ii3 S ERIPUTL A- . 1P1HLOX.AS . ID O E I S 77. XI. 'V «o’ l v§y|J§|l |^SEp£ K H N Mi e ’■C V. FI. XU JPEACHIA „ UB AS TER. WORKS OF THE REV. C. KINGSLEY, RECTOR OF EVERSIEY, AND CANON OF MIBD1EHAM. THE HEROES; or, Greek Fairy Tales for my Children. WESTWARD HO ! 3 vols. Second Edition. 31s. 6d. THE SAINT’S TRAGEDY. Second Edition. 2s. VILLAGE SERMONS. Third Edition. 2s. 6a'. YEAST; A Problem. Third Edition. 5s. ALTON LOCKE. Fourth and Cheap Edition. 2s. HYPATIA; or, New Foes with old Faces. 2 vols. 18s. PHAETHON ; or, Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers. Edition. 2s. ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 5s. NATIONAL SERMONS. First Series. 5s. NATIONAL SERMONS. Second Series. 5s. SERMONS FOR THE TIMES. 5s. 7s. 6d Second MARINE NATURAL HISTORY CLASS. In the summer of 1855, I met, at Ilfracombe, on the coast of North Devon, a small party of ladies and gentlemen, who formed themselves into a Class for the study of Marine Natural History. There was much to be done in the way of collecting, much to be learned in the way of study. Not a few species of interest, and some rarities, fell under our notice, scattered as we were over the rocks, and peeping into the pools, almost every day for a month. Then the prizes were to be brought home, and kept in little Aquariums for the study of their habits ; their beauties to be investigated by the pocket-lens, and the minuter kinds to be examined under the microscope. An hour or two was spent on the shore every day on which the tide and the weather were suitable ; and, when otherwise, the occupation was varied by an indoor’s lesson, on the identification of the animals obtained, the specimens themselves affording illustrations. Thus the two great desiderata of young naturalists were attained simultaneously; they learned at the same time how to collect, and how to determine the names and the zoological relations of the specimens when found. A little also was effected in the way of dredging the sea-bottom and in surface-fishing for Medusae, &c. ; but our chief attention was directed to shore-collecting. Altogether, the experiment was found so agreeable that I propose to repeat it by forming a similar party every year, if spared, at some suitable part of the coast. Such ladies or gentlemen as may wish to join the Class should give in their names to me, early in the summer ; and any preliminary inquiries about plans, terms, & c., shall meet the requisite attention. P. H. GOSSE. 58, Huntingdon Street, Islington, London, March, 185G. * PRICE ONE SHILLING, One hundred and twenty-eight pages, post octavo, and Eighty-seven woodcuts. A LIST, WITH DESCRIPTIONS, ILLUSTRATIONS, AND PRICES, OF "WHATEVER RELATES TO 1 • ' * \ i \ ‘ • . ; ) :• A Q IT A B I A, W. ALFORD LLOYD, AQUARIUM WAREHOUSE, 19, 20, AND 20 A, PORTLAND ROAD, REGENT’S PARK, LONDON, W. 1858. [over. JL* V, 1 ,J XX This List contains not only the description, the engraving, and the cost, of every article connected with Aquaria, but also much valuable information on the greatly improved system of Tank management lately introduced. [over. ®ambt tfcge. SELECT LIST OF PUBLISHED BY MACMILLAN AND CO. A NNO UNCEMENTS . NEW LIFE OF MILTON. The Life of John Milton, narrated in connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time. By David Masson, M.A., Professor of English Literature in University College, London. 8vo. With Portraits. Vol. I. Comprehending the Period from 1608 to 1639. [ Shortly . AUTHOR’S NOTE. “It is intended that the title of this Work should indicate its character. Such an alternative title as ‘ The Life and Times of Milton ’ might suggest more familiarly, perhaps, the precedents which the Author has had in view. While his first object has been to narrate the Life of Milton fully, delibe¬ rately, and minutely, with as much of additional fact and illustration as might be supposed to result, even at this distance of time, from new research and from a further examination of the old materials, he has not deemed it No. 1.] A 2 NEW WORKS AND NEW EDITIONS, MASSON’S LIFE OF MILTON-continued. unfit, in the instance of such a Life, to allow the forms of Biography to over¬ flow, to some extent, into those of History. In other words, it is intended to exhibit Milton’s Life in its connexions with all the more notable pheno¬ mena of the period of British history in which it was cast — its state-politics, its ecclesiastical variations, its literature and speculative thought. Com¬ mencing in 1608, the Life of Milton proceeds through the last sixteen years of the reign of James I., includes the whole of the reign of Charles I. and the subsequent years of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, and then, passing the Restoration, extends itself to 1674, or through fourteen years of the new state of things under Charles II. No portion of our national history has received more abundant or more admirable elucidation than these sixty-six years; but, perhaps, in traversing it again in that mood and with that special bent of inquiry which may be natural where the Biography of Milton is the primary interest, some facts may be seen in a new light, and, at all events, certain orders of facts lying by the sides of the main track may come into notice. As the great poet of the age, Milton may, obviously enough, be taken as the representative of its literary efforts and capabilities; and the general history of its literature may, therefore, in a certain manner, be narrated in connexion with his life. But even in the political and ecclesiastical departments Milton was not one standing aloof. He was not the man of action of the party with which he was associated, and the actual and achieved deeds of that party, whether in war or in council, are not the property of his life ; but he was, as nearly as any private man in his time, the thinker and idealist of the party — now the expositor and champion of their views, now their instructor and in advance of them, — and hence, without encroaching too much on known and common ground, there are incidents and tendencies of the great Puritan Revolution which illustrate his Life especially, and seek illustration from it. “ As if to oblige Biography, in this instance, to pass into History, Milton’s Life divides itself, with almost mechanical exactness, into three periods, corresponding with those of the contemporary social movement, — the first extending from 1608 to 1640, which was the period of his education and of his minor poems; the second, extending from 1640 to 1660, or from the beginning of the Civil Wars to the Restoration, and forming the middle period of his polemical activity as a prose-writer; and the third extending from 1660 to 1674, which was the period of his later muse and of the publi¬ cation of ‘ Paradise Lost.’ It is proposed to devote a volume to each of these periods ; and the present volume embraces the first of them. 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