THE FLOOR OF THE OCEAN.
The wonders of the ocean floor do not reveal themselves to vulgar eyes.
As the oracle was inaudible to sacrilegious listeners, and as none but
poetic ears heard the cadenced beating of the feet that danced to
unearthly music, near the fountain haunted by the Muses of classic
fable—so, none but the initiated can see the myriad miracles that each
receding tide reveals on the ocean floor. The initiation, however, is
not mysterious; there are no dark rites to observe—no Herculean labours
to accomplish, before entering upon the noviciate, which at once opens a
large area of unexpected pleasures, and an ample field for admiration
and investigation. A few elementary works carefully studied, or even
this present little book attentively perused, would supply the first
helps towards _seeing_, at all events, a portion of the “wonders of the
shore,” as the brilliant author of “Glaucus” has eloquently termed those
revelations of the retiring deep.
It is the _seeing_ that is everything. But let none despair of acquiring
that power. “The name of the Devonshire squire, Colonel George Montague”
(thus wrote the late Professor Edward Forbes), “might have become one of
the greatest in the whole range of British science, had his whole career
been devoted to marine physiology;” and that mainly because, from a
sincere devotion to a favourite pursuit of his leisure, he acquired the
art of _seeing_—an art sought by so few, though open to all who will
earnestly seek it.
Each department of science requires a separate and distinct kind of
sight. The astute merchant deciphers at a glance the precise state of
the most intricate accounts, in the midst of thousands of seemingly
conflicting figures; but of the thousand interesting and wonderful
things concerning the little beetle that crosses his path in his country
walk, he is incapable of seeing any single particle; while the despised
entomologist, whom he has contemptuously observed turning over the
stones at the road-side, and peering curiously beneath them, could tell
him a tale of wonder, could preach him a sermon upon that tiny type,
such as would surely wake up many latent and unsuspected powers in his
mind, that would enable him to _see_ wonders where all had previously
been blank, and teach him that there are things well worthy of
investigation beyond the region of money-making, and the attractive but
narrow circle distinguished by the fascinating characters, £ _s._ _d._
Those who cannot _see_ Nature, who cannot see more than an unclean thing
in the little creeping beetle, are like one gazing at a carved Egyptian
record, who perceives, in the hieroglyphic scarabæus, simply the
sculptured figure of a beetle, and no more—they are in a state of
“Egyptian darkness” as regards one of the highest and most enchanting
fields of human research. But to those who have acquired this rare
though easy art, and learned to _see_ Nature, even to a moderate extent
(for in that art are an infinite number of degrees and gradations), the
aspect of the ocean floor must present an appearance as beautiful and
strange, and seemingly as supernatural, as the wildest imagination could
depicture.
When poets would travel, in their inventive flights, to other floating
and revolving worlds than ours, they describe rosy skies, instead of
azure, and trees like branching crystals, with jewel-like fruits
glittering on every stem. They present us with pictures, in short, in
which all the ordinary aspects of our planet are reversed, or
metamorphosed, in the region of their invention; but in their most
fanciful pictures they do not surpass in strangeness the wonders of the
world beneath the sea.
On the land, we have, as the ordinary aspect of Nature, the green
herbaceous mantle of the earth below the eye, and the azure sky above;
while a spectator, standing beneath the water on the ocean floor, would
see these features more than reversed: he would see above him a liquid
atmosphere of green, and below, an herbage of red or of purple hue,
exhibiting strange yet exquisite forms, such as no terrestrial
vegetation displays. Roseate shrubs of jointed stone, and arborets of
filmy glass, and creatures full of active, energetic life, whose forms
are stranger still, both in structure and in appearance; mere worms,
whose colours are gorgeous as the tints of the butterfly’s wing, or the
peacock’s tail, or the humming-bird’s breast.
What scenery is formed by that translucent and miniature forest of
_Delesseria sanguinea_, how lovely in its tones of soft rich crimson;
and those fan-like shrubs, in crisply graceful tufts, the bright and
singular _Padina pavonia_; and the tree-like masses of _Callithamnion
arbuscula_, and the delicate _Ptilota plumosa_, and the purple-tinted
_Corallines_, forming those
“Arborets of jointed stone.”
And then the high waving fronds of the grandly graceful _Porphyra
vulgaris_, the deep carmine of the _Iridæa edulis_, the nacreous tinges
of the _Chondrus crispus_, and the blood-red of the splendid _Rhodymenia
lacinata_, with its embroidered and lace-like edges; these, with the
gorgeous tufts of the rich purple _Bangia_, and other objects which form
the elements of still life in a submarine landscape, surely cannot be
surpassed, either for magnificence of colour or variety of structure.
But to these features must be added others more extraordinary—forms that
the elder naturalists imagined to be links between the animal and
vegetable creation, but which are now known to have no affinity whatever
with plants, though they exhibit the appearance of expanded flowers of
various hues, displaying the forms of the Carnation, the Anemone, the
Mesembryanthemum, and other beautiful flowers whose names they bear.
These curiously beautiful Zoöphytes, the wonderful _Actiniæ_, exhibit
every tone of colour, from purple and scarlet, to green and white, and
might be taken in their picturesquely-placed groups for rare exotic
flowers, planted among the rosy-tinted shrubs expressly to add the last
touch of richness and effect to the scenery of an ocean flower-show.
Yet they are not flowers, but animals—sea monsters, whose seeming
delicate petals are but their thousand Briarean arms, disguised as the
petals of a flower, and expanded to seize the unconscious victim as he
passes near the beautiful form—fatal to him as the crater of a volcano;
in which he is soon engulphed by the closing tentacles of his
unsuspected enemy. And if he pass not near enough for that deadly floral
embrace, those pretty crimson tubercles that dot so gracefully the
seeming stalk, beneath the seeming flower, can shoot forth a thread,
armed, like the fisher’s line, with a barbed hook, which strikes and
secures the distant prey; and so the unwary _Annelid_ or _Infusory_ is
captured and devoured. In this capacity the creature has been compared
to Pope’s spider, who
“Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.”
But then the living thread of the _Actinia_ (or of the _Cirriped_, which
has a similar power) is a fact, while the sensitive gossamer of the poet
is a fiction.
But notwithstanding these ogre-like attributes, the lovely _Actinia_
long deceived our naturalists as to its true nature—and of course the
poets—from whom his flower-like disc and petaloid tentacles completely
concealed his grosser nature. Then, as the tide recedes, he so meekly
closes his beautiful _oubliette_, with so much grace, and looking so
much like those shrinking flowers that close at eve, as though they
dared not to look on the black darkness of the night, that it is no
wonder poets were beguiled, and that the romantic Southey sings of the
_Actinia_ as of some lily of the deep that, on the retiring of the
ocean,
“Sinks down within its purple stem to sleep.”
To add to the wonders of this strange landscape come the creeping
_Nudibranchs_ and _Tectibranchs_, gliding over the gracefully-waving
_Algæ_; their elegant forms decorated with their external breathing
apparatus, like the pale skeleton of some delicate flower, so fine are
its milk-white filaments, arranged nearly always in a symmetrical and
star-like form. And then there are the singular and shadowy _Medusæ_
floating past, in the form of parachutes, with low suspended cars, just
as though the science of ballooning had been carried to perfection under
the sea; and that they were made of elastic glass, instead of silk,
though richly flushed with iridescent and varying tinges, sometimes
metallic azure, and anon emerald green; hues that seem added by some
delicate process which the glass-blowers above the water have not yet
discovered. Some of these creatures are fragile as a soap-bubble, to
which their transparency and prismatic flashes of colour give them a
curious resemblance; and their ephemeral existence, dependent upon the
will of even an angry ripple of the element in which they live, is
doubtless as brief.
The deep has even its butterflies, as well as the land. The fluttering
of the fins of some small and brightly-coloured fish has been compared
to the action of the wings of moths—as also the members, likewise used
for locomotive purposes, of some of the animals of the univalve shells.
Then there are minute phosphorescent animals, which represent the
fire-flies of the south, pouring a living flood of light as they glide
along—some emitting silvery, and others golden flashes, like floating
lamps that seem hurrying to light up the darkness of the far ocean
depths.
Even the worms are gorgeous and wonderful in this subaqueous world. The
_Serpulæ_, with their radiating coronets of crimson _branchiæ_; the
_Pectinaria_, with its golden comb, glittering in burnished brightness;
and the _Nereis_, with white and crimson stripes—are all wonderful as
well as beautiful objects. But the _Halithea_, or sea-goddess, as Lamark
has named it, from the extraordinary beauty and the gorgeous colours
that radiate from the silky hairs with which it is clothed, surpasses
them all.
These, and other wonders of still greater beauty, will reward the
persevering student who learns to _see_ them; but then he _must_ learn.
Even the intellectual giant, Shakspeare, could not see clearly many of
the minuter things of Nature. In his line upon the slow-worm, for
instance, vulgarly called the blind-worm, which he describes as
“The eyeless, venomed worm,”
are concentrated two mistakes; in the first place, the minute eyes of
this little creature are brilliant in the extreme, and not very
difficult to discover, to the naturalist who has learnt to see nature;
and, in the second place, it has no venom, its tiny bite being perfectly
harmless. In another place he speaks of
“The blind-worm’s _sting_.”
But it is useless to multiply examples of the physiological errors of
great men who had not learned to _see_ Nature; or, Milton’s errors in
regard to the leaf of the Banyan-tree, and many others, might be readily
cited.
There are many glorious things to be seen in the sea, but we have to
learn to _see_ them; and those who find they cannot see with their own
eyes, must do so through the more gifted sense of others. To many—how
many, unguided by an able Cicerone—the fields round Selborne would
appear common and uninteresting enough; but guided by a Gilbert White,
whose searching eye knew even the hidden forms of plants, whose ear at
once distinguished and classified the song of birds, and even the buzz
of insects—guided by him, things assume a far different aspect; like
another Prospero, he waves his wand, and every object begins to
brighten, and a thousand new and beautiful features develop themselves
under the magic of his descriptions; crowds of marvels springing up
around, as from enchanted ground. In like manner, guided by the
fascinating science of a Johnston or a Harvey, or the persuasive
industry of a Gosse, or the eloquently glowing descriptions of a
Kingsley, students, who have not the energy or leisure to work for
themselves, will find the dark ocean glow with an unexpected light; and
the delighted explorer will long for the power to renew the impressions
of his sea-side rambles after his return to his inland home, perhaps in
the heart of a densely-populated city. Even this he may now do through
the medium of the marine Aquarium, within the narrow boundaries of which
he may, with a little care and experience, establish in healthy
existence some of the most beautiful of the animal and vegetable forms
that people the caves and depths of the ocean, and make its watery world
a region of wonders.
------------------------------------------------------------------------