THE MILKY SEA.
The water of the Sea, even the purest, examined when you are far away
from land, and from all possible admixture, is somewhat viscuous; take
some between your fingers, and you find it somewhat ropy and
tenacious. Chemical analysis has not yet explained this peculiarity;
there is in that an organic substance which Chemistry touches only to
destroy, taking from it all that it has of special, and violently
reducing it back to general elements.
The marine plants and animals are covered with this substance, whose
mucousness gives them the appearance of a coating of jelly, now fixed,
anon trembling, and always semi-transparent. And nothing more than
this contributes to the fanciful illusions presented to us by the
world of waters. Its reflections are irregular, often strangely
variegated, as, for instance, on the scales of fish and on the
molluscæ, which seem to owe to it the exquisite beauty of their pearly
shells.
It is that which most attracts and enchains the interest of the child
when he first sees a fish. I was very young when I first saw one, but
I still remember how vividly I felt the impression. That creature with
variously colored lights flashing from its silvery scales, threw me
into an astonishment, a fascination, a rapture, which no words can
describe. I endeavored to catch it, but found that it could no more be
held than the water which glided through my small weak hand. That fish
seemed to me to be identical with the element in which it swam, and
gave me a confused idea of animated, organized and surpassingly
beautiful water.
A long time after, in my maturity, I was scarcely less impressed when
on a sea beach I saw, I know not what of shining and transparent
substance, through which I could clearly see the sand and pebbles.
Colorless as crystal, slightly, very slightly solid, tremulous when
ever so slightly touched, it seemed to me as to the ancients and to
Réaumur, that which Réaumur so graphically named it--_gelatinised
water_.
Still more forcibly do we feel this impression when we discover in the
early stage of their formation the yellowish white threads in which
the sea makes her first outlines of the fuci and algæ which are to
harden and darken to the strength and color of hides and leather. But
when quite young, in their viscuous state, and in their elasticity,
they have the consistence of a solidified wave, all the stronger
because it is soft. What we now know of the generation and the complex
organization of the inferior creatures, animal or vegetable,
contradicts the explanation of Réaumur and the ancients. But all this
does not forbid us to return to the question which was first put by
Borg. de Saint Vincent; viz: What is the _mucus_ of the Sea? That
viscuousness which water in general presents? Is it not the universal
element of life?
Much engaged with these and the like reflections, I called upon an
illustrious chemist, a man at once positive and sound, an innovator no
less prudent than bold, and I abruptly asked him this plain
question--"What, in your opinion, is that whitish, viscuous matter
which we find in sea water?" "Nothing else than life," was his reply,
then retracting, or rather explaining his somewhat too simple and too
absolute dictum, he added, "I should rather say a half organized and
wholly organizable matter. In certain waters it is a dense mass of
infusoriæ, in others a matter which is not yet, but which is to become
infusoriæ. In fact, we have yet to begin, at all seriously, the study
of this matter."
This was spoken on the 17th of May, 1860.
On leaving our great Chemist, I went to a Physiologist, whose opinion
has no less weight with me, and to him I put the same question. His
reply was very long and very beautiful. In substance it ran thus: "We
know in reality no more about the composition of water than we know
about that of blood. What we best know and can most safely affirm
about the _mucus_ of sea water, is that it is at once an Alpha and an
Omega, a beginning and an end. Is it the result of the numberless
deaths which furnish forth materials for new lives? No doubt, that is
the general law; but in the case of the sea, that world of rapid
absorption, the majority of the creatures there are absorbed while in
full life; they do not slowly linger on towards death, as we on land
do. The sea is a very pure element; war and death purvey to it. But
life, without arriving at its final dissolution, is incessantly
approaching it, exuding and exhaling all that is superfluous. With us,
the animals of the earth, the epidermis, through its millions of
pores, wastes the body at every instant; we suffer, as it were, a
partial death at every breath we draw. Now this partial death, this
vast exudation, in the case of the marine world, fills that vast world
of waters with a gelatinous wealth of which the young world has the
instant benefit. It finds in suspension the oily superabundance of
this common exudation, the still living atoms and liquids which have
not had time to die. All this does not fall back into the inorganic,
but enters quickly into new organisms. Of all the theories on the
subject, this seems the most reasonable; rejecting this theory, we
plunge into a sea of extreme difficulties."
These ideas of the most enlightened and earnest thinkers of the
present day, are not irreconcilable with those which, nearly thirty
years ago were promulgated by Geoffrey Saint Hilaire, upon that
general _mucus_ in which nature seems to find all life. He calls it
"the _animalisible_ substance, the raw material of organic bodies. Not
a creature, whether animal or vegetable, but both absorbs and produces
it from the earliest to the latest breath; indeed, the weaker the
creature, the more abundant that is."
This remark suggests a broad and bright light upon the life of the
seas. Their tenants seem, for the most part, foetuses in the
gelatinous stage, which absorb and produce the mucous substance,
permeate and saturate with it all the waters, and give to them the
fecund and nourishing powers of a vast womb, in whose depths an
infinite succession of generations, perpetually float, as in warm
milk.
Let us make ourselves present in this divine work. Let us take a drop
from the sea; in it we shall be able to espy the very process of the
primitive creation. Nature's God is ever consistent; he does not work
in one fashion to-day, and in another to-morrow. This drop of water, I
doubt not, will tell us in its transformations, the tale of the
Universe. Let us be patient, and observe. Who can foresee or guess
the history of this drop of water? Which will it first produce, the
vegetable-animal, or the animal-vegetable? Will this drop be the
infusoriæ, the primitive _monad_, which, vibrating, shall shortly
become _vibrion_, and ascending step by step, from rank to rank,
polypus, coral, or pearl, may perchance in ten thousand years reach
the dignity of insect? Will it produce the vegetable thread, so slight
and silken that one would scarcely discern it, and yet already is no
less than the first born hair, amorous and sensitive, which is so well
known as _Venus's hair_? This is no fable--it is true natural history.
This hair, of double nature, at once animal and vegetable, is, in
fact, the commencement of life.
Look quite down into the depths of a vessel of water; at first you
discover nothing; patience for a few moments and you perceive drops,
atomies, that are moving. Bring a good glass into the service, and you
see a whole cloud of these atomies. Are they gelatinous or fleecy?
Under the microscope this seeming fleece becomes a group of filaments,
of finest and silkiest threads; a thousand times finer, it is
believed, than the finest hair that adorns the head of woman. You are
now looking upon the first timid attempt of life that is struggling to
achieve organization. These confervæ, these hair-weeds, are to be
found wherever there is stagnant water, whether fresh or salt. They
are the commencement of that double series of the primary vegetation
of the sea which became terrestrial when the earth emerged from the
watery depths. Once above and beyond the waters, they become the vast,
the numberless Fungus-family; in the water, they are the hair-weeds,
the many-formed and many-named Algæ.
This is the primitive, the indispensable element of organized
vitality, and we find it even where we should, at the first glance
deem it to be impossible. Even in the dark depths of the ferruginous
waters, supersaturated with iron; even in the all but boiling hot
springs, you find this mucus, this abounding mass of little creatures,
moving, writhing, agitated ever, which to your first glance, seem only
so many lifeless specks. You need not greatly care into what class our
finite and dim science consigns them. If Candolle honors them with the
title of animals, if Dujardin, on the other hand, degrades them into
the low rank of the lowest vegetation--let us not stay to heed these
mere names. Such as they are, all that they ask is that they may live
and that their humble existence may open up the long series of beings
which, but for them, would never be. These atomies, whether we call
them living or dead, or passing from life to death, or vigorously
struggling from death into organic life, are self-supporting,
independently struggling, and ever taking and giving from and to the
maternal waters, the life creating and the life supporting gelatine.
It really is without any approach, even, to probability, that they
show us, as specimens of the first creation, the primitive
organization, the fossil imprints, more or less complex, whether of
animal or vegetable--of the Trilobites, for instance, already
furnished with the superior organs--eyes, &c.,--or gigantic
vegetation, widely branched and richly foliaged. It is beyond all
computation more probable that these were preceded and heralded, and
prepared, by species far more simple, but of such yielding and
destructible matter that it could make no impress, leave no mark
behind. How can we expect that those gelatinous, those almost liquid
creatures should _not_ "die and make no sign" when we see that the
hard shells are ground into very dust? In the South Seas we see fish
with teeth so sharp, at once, and of such iron strength that they
browse on the tough coral, even as the timid sheep browses on the
tender grass-blades. Oh! Depend upon it, generation after generation
of the soft gelatinous germs of life have breathed before nature put
forth its robust Trilobite and its imperishable ferns.
Let us be just to these conservæ; let us restore to them their pretty
obvious right to eldership in this glad and various world of ours. Be
they animal or be they vegetable, or do they vibrate and struggle
between both--let us at least do them justice, let us speak about them
all that is evidently true.
Upon them, and at their expense, arose the immense, the really
marvellous marine Flora.
At that starting point I will not hesitate to express my tender
sympathy. For three very sound and sufficient reasons I love and I
bless that vast vegetation; small or large, that vegetation has three
lovely qualities:--
Firstly, how innocent are all its members. Not one of them all is
poisonous. Vainly in the whole marine vegetation shall you search for
one poisonous plant. Seek in every sea, and in every latitude, you
will find the vegetation wholesome, genial, a blessing and a mercy.
Those innocent plants ask for nothing more than to nourish or to heal
animality. Many of them, the Laminaires, for instance, contain a
luscious sugar; and others, as, for instance, the Corsican or Irish
Moss, have a health-restoring bitter; and all, without exception,
contain a concentrated and most nourishing mucilage, not a few of them
saviours to the weak, worn, perishing lungs of presumptuous and
ungrateful man. Where we now exhibit iodide, the English formerly used
nothing but a confection of that same Corsican, or Irish, Moss.
The third characteristic of that vegetation is its marvellous
amorousness. We cannot doubt that if we pay the slightest attention to
its strange hymeneial metamorphoses, here is the striving to be,
beyond being, to be potent beyond power. We see it in the fire flies
and the like small things, and we see it no less, if we will only look
for it, in the sea weeds which, at the consecrated moment, seem to
quit their merely vegetable life and leap into animality.
Where do these wonders commence? Where are these first sketches of
animality made? Where are we to look for the primitive scene of
organization?
Formerly these things were hotly disputed; in our own day there seems
to be a certain agreement in the learned world of Europe. I can find
the reply to these questions in many recognized and authorized
volumes, but I prefer to borrow it from an Essay recently crowned by
the Academy of Sciences, and, consequently, shielded by its high,
unquestionable authority.
Living creatures are found in the hot waters of eighty, even up to
ninety, degrees. It is when the cooled globe gets down to that
temperature that life becomes possible. The water has then absorbed,
at least in part, that terrible element of death--carbonic acid gas.
It becomes possible to breathe.
All the seas were at first like those parts of the great Pacific
Ocean, which are comparatively shallow, and are studded with small,
low islets. These islets are extinct craters of by-gone volcanoes; the
seaman knows them only by the summits which the slow but steadfast
toil of the coral insect has upheaved from the depths. But the depths
between these volcanoes are probably themselves no less volcanic, and
must have been, for the first essays of primitive creation, so many
receptacles of life.
Popular tradition has, for ages past, attributed to volcanoes the
guardianship of buried treasures, which from time to time give out to
our upper world the gold that lies buried in the depths.--Poetic
fiction, which yet has its firm foundation in fact. The volcanic
regions have within themselves the treasure of our globe, potent
virtues of fecundity. It is they that most largely dower the otherwise
sterile earth; from the dust of their lavas, from their still warm
ashes, life springs, expands, glows, and creates new life. We
recognize the wealth of Vesuvius, and of Etna in the long offshoots
that they send far into the Sea, and we know what a lovely paradise is
formed under the Himalayas, by the volcanic circle of the vale of
Cachemire. And the same thing is repeated in the lovely isles of the
far South Sea.
Even under the least favorable circumstances, the vicinity of
volcanoes, and the warm currents which are their concomitants, create
and preserve animal life, even in the most desolate and dreary places.
Amidst all the freezing horrors of the Antarctic pole, not far from
the volcanic Erebus, Captain James Ross found living coral insects at
the depth of a thousand fathoms below the surface of the frozen sea.
In the early ages of our world, innumerable volcanoes exerted a
submarine action far more powerful than they exhibit now. Their clefts
and their intermediate valleys allowed the marine mucus to accumulate
in places, and to be electrified into life by the warm currents. No
doubt the _mucus_ affected those parts, fixed itself there and worked
and fermented to the utmost of its young power. Its leaven was the
attraction of the substance for itself. The creative elements,
originally dissolved in the sea formed combinations, leagues, I had
well nigh written marriages. First appeared, merely elementary
lives--death following almost inseparably, indistinguishably, upon
young life; and other lives following close upon, and nourished by,
those wrecks and spoils, had firmer hold on life, became preparatory
beings, slow but sure creators, which, thenceforth, began beneath the
waters that eternal labor which, even in our own day and beneath our
own scrutiny, they still continue.
The sea nourishing them all, gives to each that which best suits it.
Each draws from that great nursing-mother, in its own fashion, and for
its own especial behoof, that which it most needs, must have, to make
it what we see of naked, or of shelled, of seeming vegetable, or of
fierce, vigorous, and pugnacious life. And whether in life or in
death, whether building actively or passively decomposing, they clothe
the sad nudity of the virgin rocks, those daughters of the volcanic
fires from which flaming and sterile, they were hurled from the
planetary nucleus.
Quartz, basalt, porphyry, and semi-vitrified flints, each and all
receive from these minute laborers a new, a more graceful, and a more
fecund garb; from the fecund maternal milk (for such we must call the
_mucus_ of the Sea) they absorb and restore, and thus build up, and
secure, and fructify, and beautify, this, our habitable earth. It is
from these more favoring localities that have arisen our primal
species.
These works must have been commenced among the volcanic isles and
islets, in the depths of their Archipelagoes, in those sinuous
windings, those peaceful labyrinths where the tides enter timidly and
gently, warm and sheltered cradles for the newly-born.
But the bolder strength of the fully-expanded flower, is to be sought
for in, for instance, the vast depths of the Indian Gulfs. There, the
Sea is veritably a great artist. There she gives to the earth its most
adorable forms, lively, loving, and lovable. With her assiduous
caresses she rounds or slopes the shore, and gives it those maternal
outlines, and I had almost said the visible tenderness of that
feminine bosom on which the pleased child finds so softly safe a
shelter, such warmth, such saving warmth, and rest.