WOOD ENGRAVINGS.
FIG. PAGE
1. Nymphon Abyssorum, NORMAN 81
2. Caprella spinosissima, NORMAN 83
3. Pentacrinus asteria, LINNÆUS 85
COLOURED PLATES.
PLATE
1. 1. FLUSTRA LINEATA; (_a_) enlarged with polypes 73
protruding. 2. FLUSTRA FOLIACEA. 3. VALKERIA
CUSCUTA; (_a_) natural size; (_b_) two
tentacles; (_c_) tentacles bent inwards; (_d_)
enlarged, showing the gradual eversion of the
animal. 4. CRISIA DENTICULATA; (_a_) natural
size. 5. GEMELLARIA LORIOATA; (_a_) natural
size. 6. SERTULARIA ROSEA; (_a_) natural size.
7. CELLULARIA CILIATA; (_a_) natural size; (_b_)
one of the bird’s heads; (_c_) cell and bird’s
head, much enlarged. 8. CAMPANULARIA SYRINGA;
(_a_) natural size. 9. CAMPANULARIA VOLUBILIS,
enlarged. 10. SERIALARIA LENDIGERA. 11.
NOTAMIA BURSARIA; (_a_) natural size; (_b_) two
pairs of polype cells with the tobacco pipe
appendages
2. 1. CARDIUM RUSTICUM, (TUBERCULATUM). 2. PAGURUS 65
BERNHARDI, in a Periwinkle Shell
3. 1. NEMERTIES BORLASII. 2. SABELLA? 3. 136
Sand-tube of TEREBELLA CONCHILEGA (_See Plate_
8)
4. 1. SYNAPTA DIGITATA; (_a_) Ditto separating and 109
throwing out capsuliferous threads. 2.
THALASSIMA NEPTUNI
5. 1. BALANOPHYLLEA REGIA, expanded; (_a_) Ditto, 117
contracted; (_b_) Ditto coral; (_c_) Ditto,
tentacle enlarged; 2. CARYOPHYLLEA SMITHII
partly expanded; (_a_) Ditto, section of bony
plates; (_b_) Ditto, tentacle. 3. SAGARTIA
ANGUICOMA closed; (_a_) Ditto, basal disc
showing radiating septa. 4. SYNAPTA DIGITATA
(_See Plate_ 4); (_a_, _b_) Ditto, fingered
tentacles enlarged; (_c_) Ditto, Spiculæ; (_d_)
Ditto, anchor lying on its transparent
anchor-plate. 5. S. VITTATA? perforated
anchor-plate; (_a_) Spicula
6. 1. ACTINIA MESEMBRYANTHEMUM, partially expanded; 135
(_a_) Ditto, closed. 2. BUNODES CRASSICORNIS.
3. CARYOPHYLLEA SMITHII _Front_
7. 1. ECHINUS MILIARIS, creeping over Modiola 168
barbata. 2. Ditto, creeping up the glass. 3.
Hiding under stones
8. 1. LITTORINA LITTOREA (_See Plate_ 9); (_a_) 201
operculum; (_b_) pallet; (_c_) part of pallet,
magnified. 2. NASSA RETICULATA (_See Plate_
11); (_a_) egg capsules; (_b_, _c_) fry; (_d_)
shell of fry; (_e_) pallet, magnified. 3.
PATELLA VULGARIS; (_a_) palate, natural size;
(_b_, _c_) Ditto, enlarged. 4. ECHINUS MILIARIS
(_See Plate_ 7); (_a_) teeth and digesting mill;
(_b_) suckers, enlarged; (_c_) spine and socket;
(_d_) shell denuded; (_e_) Pedicellaria. 5.
NEMERTES BORLASII (_See Plate_ 3); (_a_) head,
enlarged; (_b_) head expanded swallowing a
Terebella
9. 1. CUCUMARIA HYNDMANNI. 2. LITTORINA LITTOREA. 114
3. SIPHUNCULUS BERNHARDUS in shell of
TURRITELLA, with living BALANI
10. 1. SERPULA CONTORTUPLICATA. 2. HINNITES PUSIO. 129
3. DORIS REPANDA. 4. EOLIS PELLUCIDA. 5.
PHOLADIDÆA PAPYRACEA. 6. PHOLAS PARVA. 7.
FISSURELLA GRÆCA
11. 1. SYNGNATHUS LUMBRICIFORMIS. 2. SAXICAVA 163
RUGOSA; (_a_) Shell of SAXICAVA RUGOSA. 3.
NASSA RETICULATA
12. 1. PEACHIA HASTATA. 2. URASTER RUBENS 92
GLAUCUS;
OR,
THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.
YOU are going down, perhaps, by railway, to pass your usual six weeks at
some watering-place along the coast, and as you roll along think more
than once, and that not over-cheerfully, of what you shall do when you
get there. You are half-tired, half-ashamed, of making one more in the
ignoble army of idlers, who saunter about the cliffs, and sands, and
quays; to whom every wharf is but a “wharf of Lethe,” by which they rot
“dull as the oozy weed.” You foreknow your doom by sad experience. A
great deal of dressing, a lounge in the club-room, a stare out of the
window with the telescope, an attempt to take a bad sketch, a walk up one
parade and down another, interminable reading of the silliest of novels,
over which you fall asleep on a bench in the sun, and probably have your
umbrella stolen; a purposeless fine-weather sail in a yacht, accompanied
by many ineffectual attempts to catch a mackerel, and the consumption of
many cigars; while your boys deafen your ears, and endanger your personal
safety, by blazing away at innocent gulls and willocks, who go off to die
slowly; a sport which you feel to be wanton, and cowardly, and cruel, and
yet cannot find in your heart to stop, because “the lads have nothing
else to do, and at all events it keeps them out of the billiard-room;”
and after all, and worst of all, at night a soulless _réchauffé_ of
third-rate London frivolity: this is the life-in-death in which thousands
spend the golden weeks of summer, and in which you confess with a sigh
that you are going to spend them.
Now I will not be so rude as to apply to you the old hymn-distich about
one who
“—finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do:”
but does it not seem to you, that there must surely be many a thing worth
looking at earnestly, and thinking over earnestly, in a world like this,
about the making of the least part whereof God has employed ages and
ages, further back than wisdom can guess or imagination picture, and
upholds that least part every moment by laws and forces so complex and so
wonderful, that science, when it tries to fathom them, can only learn how
little it can learn? And does it not seem to you that six weeks’ rest,
free from the cares of town business and the whirlwind of town pleasure,
could not be better spent than in examining those wonders a little,
instead of wandering up and down like the many, still wrapt up each in
his little world of vanity and self-interest, unconscious of what and
where they really are, as they gaze lazily around at earth and sea and
sky, and have
“No speculation in those eyes
Which they do glare withal”?
Why not, then, try to discover a few of the Wonders of the Shore? For
wonders there are there around you at every step, stranger than ever
opium-eater dreamed, and yet to be seen at no greater expense than a very
little time and trouble.
Perhaps you smile, in answer, at the notion of becoming a “Naturalist:”
and yet you cannot deny that there must be a fascination in the study of
Natural History, though what it is is as yet unknown to you. Your
daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing “Pteridomania,”
and are collecting and buying ferns, with Ward’s cases wherein to keep
them (for which you have to pay), and wrangling over unpronounceable
names of species (which seem to be different in each new Fern-book that
they buy), till the Pteridomania seems to you somewhat of a bore: and yet
you cannot deny that they find an enjoyment in it, and are more active,
more cheerful, more self-forgetful over it, than they would have been
over novels and gossip, crochet and Berlin-wool. At least you will
confess that the abomination of “Fancy-work”—that standing cloak for
dreamy idleness (not to mention the injury which it does to poor starving
needlewomen)—has all but vanished from your drawing-room since the
“Lady-ferns” and “Venus’s hair” appeared; and that you could not help
yourself looking now and then at the said “Venus’s hair,” and agreeing
that Nature’s real beauties were somewhat superior to the ghastly woollen
caricatures which they had superseded.
You cannot deny, I say, that there is a fascination in this same Natural
History. For do not you, the London merchant, recollect how but last
summer your douce and portly head-clerk was seized by two keepers in the
act of wandering in Epping Forest at dead of night, with a dark lantern,
a jar of strange sweet compound, and innumerable pocketfuls of
pill-boxes; and found it very difficult to make either his captors or you
believe that he was neither going to burn wheat-ricks, nor poison
pheasants, but was simply “sugaring the trees for moths,” as a blameless
entomologist? And when, in self-justification, he took you to his house
in Islington, and showed you the glazed and corked drawers full of
delicate insects, which had evidently cost him in the collecting the
spare hours of many busy years, and many a pound, too, out of his small
salary, were you not a little puzzled to make out what spell there could
be in those “useless” moths, to draw out of his warm bed, twenty miles
down the Eastern Counties Railway, and into the damp forest like a
deer-stealer, a sober white-headed Tim Linkinwater like him, your very
best man of business, given to the reading of Scotch political economy,
and gifted with peculiarly clear notions on the currency question?
It is puzzling, truly. I shall be very glad if these pages help you
somewhat toward solving the puzzle.
We shall agree at least that the study of Natural History has become
now-a-days an honourable one. A Cromarty stonemason was till lately—God
rest his noble soul!—the most important man in the City of Edinburgh, by
dint of a work on fossil fishes; and the successful investigator of the
minutest animals takes place unquestioned among men of genius, and, 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
recommendation) even fashionable. Every well-educated person is eager to
know something at least of the wonderful organic forms which surround him
in every sunbeam and every pebble; and books of Natural History are
finding their way more and more into drawing-rooms and school-rooms, and
exciting greater thirst for a knowledge which, even twenty years ago, was
considered superfluous for all but the professional student.
What a change from the temper of two generations since, when the
naturalist was looked on as a harmless enthusiast, who went
“bug-hunting,” simply because he had not spirit to follow a fox! There
are those alive who can recollect an amiable man being literally bullied
out of the New Forest, because he dared to make a collection (at this
moment, we believe, in some unknown abyss of that great Avernus, the
British Museum) of fossil shells from those very Hordwell Cliffs, for
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 bought a book about “cock
sparrows”? and had to justify himself again and again, simply by lending
the book to his brother sportsmen, to convince them that there were
rather more than a dozen sorts of birds (as they then held) 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 everyone else’s. And all gentlemen,
from the Weald of Kent to the Vale of Blackmore, shrugged their shoulders
mysteriously, and said, “Poor fellow!” till they opened the book itself,
and discovered to their surprise that it read like any novel. And then
came a burst of confused, but honest admiration; from the young squire’s
“Bless me! who would have thought that there were so many wonderful
things to be seen in one’s own park!” to the old squire’s more morally
valuable “Bless me! why, I have seen that and that a hundred times, and
never thought till now how wonderful they were!”
There were great excuses, though, of old, for the contempt in which the
naturalist was held; great excuses for the pitying tone of banter with
which the Spectator talks of “the ingenious” Don Saltero (as no doubt the
Neapolitan gentleman talked of Ferrante Imperato the apothecary, and his
museum); great excuses for Voltaire, when he classes the collection of
butterflies among the other “bizarreries de l’esprit humain.” For, in
the last generation, 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 grandfathers came when it was wanted, and did
the work which was required of it, else we had not been here now. Let us
be thankful that we have had leisure for science; and show now in war
that our science has at least not unmanned us.
Moreover, Natural History, if not fifty years ago, certainly a hundred
years ago, was hardly worthy of men of practical common sense. After,
indeed, Linné, by his invention of generic and specific names, had made
classification possible, and by his own enormous labours had shown how
much could be done when once a method was established, the science has
grown rapidly enough. But before him little or nothing had been put 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 (whether facts, like cockatrices, basilisks, and
krakens, the breeding of bees out of a dead ox, and of geese from
barnacles; or theories, like those of elements, the _vis plastrix_ in
Nature, animal spirits, and the other musty heirlooms of Aristotleism and
Neo-platonism), to try to make a science popular, which as yet was not
even a science at all. Honour to them, nevertheless. Honour to Ray and
his illustrious contemporaries in Holland and France. Honour to Seba and
Aldrovandus; to Pomet, with his “Historie of Drugges;” even to the
ingenious Don Saltero, and his tavern-museum in Cheyne Walk. Where all
was chaos, every man was useful who could contribute a single spot of
organized standing ground in the shape of a fact or a specimen. 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. For, when
questions belonging to the most sacred hereditary beliefs of Christendom
were supposed to be affected by the verification of a fossil shell, or
the proving that the Maestricht “homo diluvii testis” was, after all, a
monstrous eft, it became necessary to work upon Conchology, Botany, and
Comparative Anatomy, with a care and a 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 Mathematics
and Metaphysics.
But how very lately have they attained that firm and honourable standing
ground! It is a question whether, even twenty years ago, Geology, as it
then stood, was worth troubling one’s head about, so little had been
really proved. And heavy and uphill was the work, even within the last
fifteen years, of those who stedfastly 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, Murchison and Lyell, Delabêche and Phillips,
Forbes 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
Bible, and the Bible just enough to make it fit the fancied meaning of
the facts. But there were a few who would have no compromise; who
laboured on with a noble recklessness, 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 geologists—like Hugh Miller,
in his “Footprints of the Creator,” and Professor Sedgwick, in the
invaluable notes to his “Discourse on the Studies of Cambridge”—have
wielded 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 significancies,
harmonies, laws, chains of cause and effect endlessly interlinked, which
draw him out of the narrow sphere of self-interest and self-pleasing,
into a pure and wholesome region of solemn joy and wonder. He goes up
some Snowdon valley; to him it is a solemn spot (though unnoticed by his
companions), where the stag’s-horn 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
æons and ages back, that rock which he passed a thousand feet below was
fringed, not as now with fern and blue bugle, and white bramble-flowers,
but perhaps with the alp-rose and the “gemsen-kraut” of Mont Blanc, at
least with Alpine Saxifrages which have now retreated a thousand feet up
the mountain side, and with the blue Snow-Gentian, and the Canadian
Sedum, which have all but vanished out of the British Isles. And what is
it which tells him that strange story? Yon smooth and rounded surface of
rock, polished, remark, across the strata and against the grain; and
furrowed here and there, as if by iron talons, with long parallel
scratches. It was the crawling of a glacier which polished that
rock-face; the stones fallen from Snowdon peak into the half-liquid lake
of ice above, which ploughed those furrows. Æons and æons 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
unmistakeable, boundless in significance, like Crusoe’s one savage
footprint on the sea-shore; and the naturalist acknowledges the
finger-mark of God, and wonders, and worships.
Happy, especially, is the sportsman who is also a naturalist: for as he
roves in pursuit of his game, over hills or up the beds of streams where
no one but a sportsman ever thinks of going, he will be certain to see
things 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 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 huntsman, who, by
discovering a law for the mysterious and seemingly capricious phenomena
of “scent,” might perhaps throw light on a hundred dark passages of
hygrometry. The fisherman, too,—what an inexhaustible treasury of wonder
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
fisherman but knows, to his sorrow, that there are plenty of minutes, ay,
hours, in each day’s fishing in which he would be right glad of any
employment better than trying to
“Call spirits from the vasty deep,”
who will not
“Come when you do call for them.”
What to do, then? You are sitting, perhaps, in your coracle, upon some
mountain tarn, waiting for a wind, and waiting in vain.
“Keine luft an keine seite,
Todes-stille fürchterlich;”
as Göthe has it—
“Und der schiffer sieht bekümmert
Glatte fläche 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
question, “How did this lake come here? What does it mean?”
It is a hole in the earth. True, but how was the hole made? There must
have been huge 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, remained higher than the
centre, and so the water lodged between them. Perhaps it was formed
thus. You will at least agree that its formation must have been a grand
sight enough, and one during which a spectator would have had some
difficulty in keeping his footing.
And when you learn that this convulsion probably took plus 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 fully.
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 gradually into the
lake; forty yards out, as you know, there is not ten feet water; and then
a steep bank, the edge whereof we and the big trout know well, sinks
suddenly to unknown depths. On the opposite side, that flat-topped wall
of rock towers up shoreless into the sky, seven hundred feet
perpendicular; the deepest water of all we know is at its very foot.
Right and left, two shoulders of down slope into the lake. Now turn
round and look down the gorge. Remark that this pebble bank on which we
stand reaches some fifty yards downward: you see the loose stones peeping
out everywhere. We may fairly suppose that we stand on a dam of loose
stones, a hundred feet deep.
But why loose stones?—and if so, what matter? and what wonder? There are
rocks cropping out everywhere down the hill-side.
Because if you will take up one of these stones and crack it across, you
will see that it is not of the same stuff as those said rocks. Step into
the next field and see. That rock is the common Snowdon slate, which we
see everywhere. The two shoulders of down, right and left, are slate,
too; you can see that at a glance. But the stones of the pebble bank are
a close-grained, yellow-spotted rock. They are Syenite; and (you may
believe me or not, as you will) they were once upon a time in the
condition of a hasty pudding heated to some 800 degrees of Fahrenheit,
and in that condition shoved their way up somewhere or other through
these slates. But where? whence on earth did these Syenite pebbles come?
Let us walk round to the cliff on the opposite side and see. It is worth
while; for even if my guess be wrong, there is good spinning with a brass
minnow round the angles of the rocks.
Now see. Between the cliff-foot and the 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 these 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 carried them; for stones do not
fly, nor swim either.
Shot out of a volcano? As you seem determined to have a prodigy, it may
as well be a sufficiently huge one.
Well—these stones lie altogether; and a volcano would have hardly made so
compact a shot, not being in the habit of using Eley’s wire cartridges.
Our next hope of a solution lies in John Jones, who carried up the
coracle. Hail him, and ask him what is on the top of that cliff . . .
So, “Plainshe and pogshe, and another Llyn.” Very good. Now, does it
not strike you that this whole cliff has a remarkably smooth and
plastered look, like a hare’s run up an earthbank? And do you not see
that it is polished thus only over the lake? that as soon as the cliff
abuts on the downs right and left, it forms pinnacles, caves, broken
angular boulders? Syenite usually does so in our damp climate, from the
“weathering” effect of frost and rain: why has it not done so over the
lake? On that part something (giants perhaps) has been scrambling up or
down on a very large scale, and so rubbed off every corner which was
inclined to 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 a
while what agent could possibly have produced either one or both of these
effects?
There is but one; and that, if you have been an Alpine traveller—much
more if you have been a Chamois hunter—you have seen many a time (whether
you knew it or not) at the very same work.
Ice? Yes; ice; Hrymir the frost-giant, and no one else. And if you will
look at the facts, you will see how ice may have done it. Our friend
John Jones’s report of plains and bogs and a lake above makes it quite
possible that in the “Ice age” (Glacial Epoch, as the big-word-mongers
call it) there was above that cliff a great neve, or snowfield, such as
you have seen often in the Alps at the head of each glacier. Over the
face of this cliff a glacier has crawled down from that neve, polishing
the face of the rock in its descent: but the snow, having no large and
deep outlet, has not slid down in a sufficient stream to reach the vale
below, and form a 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 up on 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 Charmoz.
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 remains to
this day, as 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 get across
the lake?”
Now, reader, we have had no abstruse science here, no long words, not
even a microscope or a book: and yet we, as two plain sportsmen, have
gone back, or been led back by fact and common sense, into the most awful
and sublime depths, into an epos of the destruction and re-creation of a
former world.
This is but a single instance; I might give hundreds. This one,
nevertheless, may have some effect in awakening you to the boundless
world of wonders which is all around you, and make you ask yourself
seriously, “What branch of Natural History shall I begin to investigate,
if it be but for a few weeks, this summer?”
To which I answer, Try “the Wonders of the Shore.” There are along every
sea-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 conquer. 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 dilettanti, like myself, that I principally
write) must be content to tread in the tracks of greater men who have
preceded him, and accept at second or third hand their foregone
conclusions.
But this is most unsatisfactory; for in giving up discovery, one gives up
one of the highest enjoyments of Natural History. There is a mysterious
delight in the discovery of a new species, akin to that of seeing for the
first time, in their native haunts, plants or animals of which one has
till then only read. Some, surely, who read these pages have experienced
that latter delight; and, though they might find it hard to define whence
the pleasure arose, know well that it was a solid pleasure, the memory of
which they would not give up for hard cash. Some, surely, can recollect,
at their first sight of the Alpine Soldanella, the Rhododendron, or the
black Orchis, growing upon the edge of the eternal snow, a thrill of
emotion not unmixed with awe; a sense that they were, as it were, brought
face to face with the creatures of another world; 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 foundation
of the world, taking no heed of man, and all the coil which he keeps in
the valleys far below.
And even, to take a simpler instance, there are those who will excuse, or
even approve of, a writer for saying that, among the memories of a
month’s eventful tour, those which stand out as beacon-points, those
round which all the others group themselves, are the first wolf-track by
the road-side in the Kyllwald; the first sight of the blue and green
Roller-birds, walking behind the plough like rooks in the tobacco-fields
of Wittlich; the first ball of Olivine scraped out of the volcanic
slag-heaps of the Dreisser-Weiher; the first pair of the Lesser Bustard
flushed upon the downs of the Mosel-kopf; the first sight of the cloud of
white Ephemeræ, fluttering in the dusk like a summer snowstorm between us
and the black cliffs of the Rheinstein, while the broad Rhine beneath
flashed blood-red in the blaze of the 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
cliffs of clink-stone across the downs, in a clanging stream of fire,
damming up rivulets, and blasting its path through forests, far away
toward the valley of the Moselle—the sight of an object for which was
forgotten for the moment that battle-field of the Titans at our feet, and
the glorious panorama, Hundsruck and Taunus, Siebengebirge and Ardennes,
and all the crater peaks around; and which was—smile not, reader—our
first yellow foxglove.
But what is even this to the delight of finding a new species?—of
rescuing (as it seems to you) one more thought of the Divine mind from
Hela, and the realms of the unknown, unclassified, uncomprehended? As it
seems to you: though in reality it only seems so, in a world wherein not
a sparrow falls to the ground unnoticed by our Father who is in heaven.
The truth is, the pleasure of finding new species is too great; it is
morally dangerous; for it brings with it the temptation to look on the
thing found as your own possession, all but your own creation; to pride
yourself on it, as if God had not known it for ages since; even to
squabble jealously for the right of having it named after you, and of
being recorded in the Transactions of I-know-not-what Society as its
first discoverer:—as if all the angels in heaven had not been admiring
it, long before you were born or thought of.
But to be forewarned is to be forearmed; and I seriously counsel you to
try if you cannot find something new this summer along the coast to which
you are going. There is no reason why you should not be so successful as
a friend of mine who, with a very slight smattering of science, and very
desultory research, obtained in one 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 most of us prefer discovering monstrous apes in the tropical
forests of Borneo, or stumbling upon herds of gigantic Ammon sheep amid
the rhododendron thickets of the Himalaya: but it cannot be; and “he is a
fool,” says old Hesiod, “who knows not how much better half is than the
whole.” Let us be content with what is within our reach. And doubt not
that in these tiny creatures are 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 monsters whose models
fill the lake at the Crystal Palace. The research which has been
bestowed, for the last century, upon these once unnoticed atomies has
well repaid itself; for from no branch of physical science has more been
learnt of the _scientia scientiarum_, the priceless art of learning; no
branch of science has more utterly confounded a 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,” “vegetable,” and “mineral” are trembling in the balance,
seemingly ready to vanish like their fellows—“the four elements” of fire,
earth, air, and water. No branch of science has helped so much to sweep
away that sensuous idolatry of mere size, which tempts man to admire and
respect objects in proportion to the number of feet or inches which they
occupy in space. No branch of science, moreover, has been more humbling
to the boasted rapidity and omnipotence of the human reason, or has more
taught those who have eyes to see, and hearts to understand, how weak and
wayward, staggering and slow, are the steps of our fallen race (rapid and
triumphant enough in that broad road of theories which leads to
intellectual destruction) whensoever they tread the narrow path of true
science, which leads (if I may be allowed to transfer our Lord’s great
parable from moral to intellectual matters) to Life; to the living and
permanent knowledge of living things and of the laws of their existence.
Humbling, truly, to one who looks back to the summer of 1754, when good
Mr. Ellis, the wise and benevolent West Indian merchant, read before the
Royal Society his paper proving the animal nature of corals, and followed
it up the year after by that “Essay toward a Natural History of the
Corallines, and other like Marine Productions of the British Coasts,”
which forms the groundwork of all our knowledge on the subject to this
day. The chapter in Dr. G. Johnston’s “British Zoophytes,” p. 407, or
the excellent little _résumé_ thereof in Dr. Landsborough’s book on the
same subject, is really a saddening one, as one sees how loth were, not
merely dreamers like, Marsigli or Bonnet, but sound-headed men like
Pallas and Linné, to give up the old sense-bound fancy, that these corals
were vegetables, and their polypes some sort of living flowers. Yet,
after all, there are excuses for them. Without our improved microscopes,
and while the sciences of comparative anatomy and chemistry were yet
infantile, it was difficult to believe what was the truth; and for this
simple reason: that, as usual, the truth, when discovered, turned out far
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 be “the
operations of little, poor, helpless, jelly-like animals, and not the
work of more sure vegetation;” than Baker the microscopist’s detailed
theory of their being produced by the crystallization of the mineral
salts in the sea-water, just as he had seen “the particles of mercury and
copper in aquafortis assume tree-like forms, or curious delineations of
mosses and minute shrubs on slates and stones, owing to the shooting of
salts intermixed with mineral particles:”—one smiles at it now: yet these
men were no less sensible than we; 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 dreams of a Bonnet or a Darwin. For who, after all, to take a few
broad instances (not to enlarge on the great root-wonder of a number of
distinct individuals connected by a common life, and forming a seeming
plant invariable in each species), would have dreamed of the
“bizarreries” which these very zoophytes present in their classification?
You go down to any shore after a gale of wind, and pick up a few delicate
little sea-ferns. You have two in your hand, which probably look to you,
even under a good pocket magnifier, identical or nearly so. {37} But you
are told to your surprise, that however like the dead horny polypidoms
which you hold may be, the two species of animal which have formed them
are at least as far apart in the scale of creation as 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 a foot long, with hundreds of rosy flowerets
arranged in half-rings round it from end to end; and you are told that
these are the congeners of the great stony Venus’s fan which hangs in
seamen’s cottages, brought home from the West Indies. And ere you have
done wondering, you hear that all three are congeners of the ugly,
shapeless, white “dead man’s hand,” which you may pick up after a storm
on any shore. You have a beautiful madrepore or brain-stone on your
mantel-piece, brought home from some Pacific coral-reef. You are to
believe that its first cousins are the soft, slimy sea-anemones which you
see expanding their living flowers in every rock-pool—bags of sea-water,
without a trace of bone or stone. You must believe it; for in science,
as in higher matters, he who will walk surely, must “walk by faith and
not by sight.”
These are but a few of the wonders which the classification of marine
animals affords; and only drawn from one class of them, though almost as
common among every other family of that submarine world whereof Spenser
sang—
“Oh, what an endless work have I in hand,
To count the sea’s abundant progeny!
Whose fruitful seed far passeth those in land,
And also those which won in th’ azure sky,
For much more earth to tell the stars on high,
Albe they endless seem in estimation,
Than to recount the sea’s posterity;
So fertile be the flouds in generation,
So huge their numbers, and so numberless their nation.”
But these few examples will be sufficient to account both for the slow
pace at which the knowledge 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 which treat of them
carry with them a certain charm of romance, and feed the play of fancy,
and that love of the marvellous which is inherent in man, at the same
time that they lead the reader to more solemn and lofty trains of
thought, which can find their full satisfaction only in self-forgetful
worship, and that hymn of praise which goes up ever from land and sea, as
well as from saints and martyrs and the heavenly host, “O all ye works of
the Lord, and ye, too, spirits and souls of the righteous, praise Him,
and magnify Him for ever!”
I have said, that there were excuses for the old contempt of the study of
Natural History. I have said, too, it may be hoped, enough to show that
contempt to be now ill-founded. But still, there are those who regard it
as a mere amusement, and that as a somewhat effeminate one; and think
that it can at best help to while away a leisure hour harmlessly, and
perhaps usefully, as a substitute for coarser sports, or for the reading
of novels. Those, however, who have followed it out, especially on the
sea-shore, know better. They can tell from experience, that over and
above its accessory charms of pure sea-breezes, and wild rambles by cliff
and loch, the study itself has had a weighty moral effect upon their
hearts and spirits. There are those who can well understand how the good
and wise John Ellis, amid all his philanthropic labours for the good of
the West Indies, while he was spending his intellect and fortune in
introducing into our tropic settlements the bread-fruit, the mangosteen,
and every plant and seed which he hoped might be useful for medicine,
agriculture, and commerce, could yet feel himself justified in devoting
large portions of his ever well-spent time to the fighting the battle of
the corallines against Parsons and the rest, and even in measuring pens
with Linné, the prince of naturalists.
There are those who can sympathise with the gallant old Scotch officer
mentioned by some writer on sea-weeds, who, desperately wounded in the
breach at Badajos, and a sharer in all the toils and triumphs of the
Peninsular war, could in his 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 late illustrious geologist, Sir Roderick Murchison,
was also an old Peninsular officer. I doubt not 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 the late E. Forbes
well says, that “had he been educated a physiologist” (and not, as he
was, a soldier and a sportsman), “and made the study of Nature his aim
and not his amusement, his would have been one of the greatest names in
the whole range of British science.” 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 E. Forbes,
after bewailing the vagueness of most naturalists, “about the identity of
any animal Montagu described. . . . He was a forward-looking 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. Consequently his
descriptions are permanent.” Scientific men will recognize in this the
highest praise which can be bestowed, because it attributes to him the
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 effeminate or pedantic men.
I should say, rather, that the qualifications required for a perfect
naturalist are as many and as lofty as were required, by old chivalrous
writers, for the perfect knight-errant of the Middle Ages: for (to sketch
an ideal, of which I am happy to say our race now affords many a fair
realization) our perfect naturalist should be strong in body; able to
haul a dredge, climb a rock, turn a boulder, walk all day, uncertain
where he shall eat or rest; ready to face sun and rain, wind and frost,
and to eat or drink thankfully anything, however coarse or meagre; he
should know how to swim for his life, to pull an oar, sail a boat, and
ride the first horse which comes to hand; and, finally, he should be a
thoroughly good shot, and a skilful fisherman; and, if he go far abroad,
be able on occasion to fight for his life.
For his moral character, he must, like a knight of old, be first of all
gentle and courteous, ready and able to ingratiate himself with the poor,
the ignorant, and the savage; not only because foreign travel will be
often otherwise impossible, but because he knows how much invaluable
local information can be only obtained from fishermen, miners, hunters,
and tillers of the soil. Next, he should be brave and enterprising, and
withal patient and undaunted; not merely in travel, but in investigation;
knowing (as Lord Bacon might have put it) that the kingdom of Nature,
like the kingdom of heaven, must be taken by violence, and that only to
those who knock long and earnestly does the great mother open the doors
of her sanctuary. He must be of a reverent turn of mind also; not rashly
discrediting any reports, however vague and fragmentary; giving man
credit always for some germ of truth, and giving Nature credit for an
inexhaustible fertility and variety, which will keep him his life long
always reverent, yet never superstitious; wondering at the commonest, but
not surprised by the most strange; free from the idols of size and
sensuous loveliness; able to see grandeur in the minutest objects,
beauty, in the most ungainly; estimating each thing not carnally, as the
vulgar do, by its size or its pleasantness to the senses, but
spiritually, by the amount of Divine thought revealed to Man therein;
holding every phenomenon worth the noting down; believing that every
pebble holds a treasure, every bud a revelation; making it a point of
conscience to pass over nothing through laziness or hastiness, lest the
vision once offered and despised should be withdrawn; and looking at
every object as if he were never to behold it again.
Moreover, he must keep himself free from all those perturbations of mind
which not only weaken energy, but darken and confuse the inductive
faculty; from haste and laziness, from melancholy, testiness, pride, and
all the passions which make men see only what they wish to see. Of
solemn and scrupulous reverence for truth; of the habit of mind which
regards each fact and discovery, not as our own possession, but as the
possession of its Creator, independent of us, our tastes, our needs, or
our vain-glory, I hardly need to speak; for it is the very essence of a
nature’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. He should have this great virtue; and in spite of many
shortcomings (for what man is there who liveth and sinneth not?),
naturalists as a class have it to a degree which makes them stand out
most honourably in the midst of a self-seeking and mammonite generation,
inclined to value everything by its money price, its private utility.
The spirit which gives freely, because it knows that it has received
freely; which communicates knowledge without hope of reward, without
jealousy and 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 manful 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.
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 naturalist by profession,
yet this age offers no more wholesome training, both moral and
intellectual, than that which is given by instilling into the young an
early taste for 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 shallowed and
conceited 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 observation, which the
counting-house or the library will never bestow; above all, how to
develop the physical powers, without engendering brutality and
coarseness—are questions becoming daily more and more puzzling, while
they need daily more and more to be solved, in an age of enterprise,
travel, and emigration, like the present. For the truth must be told,
that the great majority of men who are now distinguished by commercial
success, have had a training the directly opposite to that which they are
giving to their sons. They are for the most part men who have migrated
from the country to the town, and had in their youth all the advantages
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 frivolity, not to say on
secret profligacy, parents know too well; and often shut their eyes in
very despair to evils which they know not how to cure. A frightful
majority of our middle-class young men are growing up effeminate, empty
of all knowledge but what tends directly to the making of a fortune; or
rather, to speak correctly, to the keeping up the fortunes which their
fathers have made for them; while of the minority, who are indeed
thinkers and readers, how many women as well as men have we seen wearying
their souls with study undirected, often misdirected; craving to learn,
yet not knowing how or what to learn; cultivating, with unwholesome
energy, the head at the expense of the body and the heart; catching up
with the most capricious self-will one mania after another, and tossing
it away again for some new phantom; gorging the 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 in a chronic
fever of the brain, which too often urge them on to plunge, as it were,
to cool the inward fire, into the ever-restless seas of doubt or of
superstition. It is a sad picture. There are many who may read these
pages whose hearts will tell them that it is a true one. What is wanted
in these cases is a methodic and scientific habit of mind; and a class of
objects on which to exercise that habit, which will fever neither the
speculative intellect nor the moral sense; and those physical science
will give, as nothing else can give it.
Moreover, to revert to another point which we touched just now, man has a
body as well as a mind; and with the vast majority there will be no _mens
sana_ unless there be a _corpus sanum_ for it to inhabit. And what
outdoor training to give our youths is, as we have already said, more
than ever puzzling. This difficulty is felt, perhaps, less in Scotland
than in England. The Scotch climate compels hardiness; the Scotch bodily
strength makes it easy; and Scotland, with her mountain-tours in summer,
and her frozen lochs in winter, her labyrinth of sea-shore, and, above
all, that priceless boon which Providence has bestowed on her, in the
contiguity of her great cities to the loveliest scenery, and the hills
where every breeze is health, affords facilities for healthy physical
life unknown to the Englishman, who has no Arthur’s Seat towering above
his London, no Western Islands sporting the ocean firths beside his
Manchester. Field sports, with the invaluable training which they give,
if not
“The reason firm,”
yet still
“The temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill,”
have become impossible for the greater number: and athletic exercises are
now, in England at least, becoming more and more artificialized and
expensive; and are confined more and more—with the honourable exception
of the football games in Battersea Park—to our Public Schools and the two
elder Universities. All honour, meanwhile, to the Volunteer movement,
and its moral as well as its physical effects. But it is only a
comparatively few of the very sturdiest who are likely to become
effective Volunteers, and so really gain the benefits of learning to be
soldiers. And yet the young man who has had no substitute for such
occupations 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 possible for too many inhabitants of the British Isles.
But a walk without an object, unless in the most lovely and novel of
scenery, is a poor exercise; and as a recreation, utterly nil. I never
knew two young lads go out for a “constitutional,” who did not, if they
were commonplace youths, gossip the whole way about things better left
unspoken; or, if they were clever ones, fall on arguing and brainsbeating
on politics or metaphysics from the moment they left the door, and return
with their wits even more heated and tired than they were when they set
out. I cannot help fancying that Milton made a mistake in a certain
celebrated passage; and that it was not “sitting on a hill apart,” but
tramping four miles out and four miles in along a turnpike-road, that his
hapless spirits discoursed
“Of fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.”
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 experience: and I have had experience enough and to
spare that what I say is true. I have seen the young man of fierce
passions, and uncontrollable daring, expend healthily that energy which
threatened 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 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 keeping his spirit calm, and perhaps his morals all
the more righteous, by spending over his microscope evenings which would
too probably have gradually been wasted at the theatre. I have seen the
young London beauty, amid all the excitement and temptation of luxury and
flattery, with her heart pure and her mind occupied in a boudoir full of
shells and fossils, flowers and sea-weeds; keeping herself unspotted from
the world, by considering the lilies of the field, how they grow. And
therefore it is that I hail with thankfulness every fresh book of Natural
History, as a fresh boon to the young, a fresh help to those who have to
educate them.
The greatest difficulty in the way of beginners is (as in most things)
how “to learn the art of learning.” 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. Forty years ago, during an autumn’s work of
dead-leaf-searching in the Devon woods for poor old Dr. Turton, while he
was writing his book on British land-shells, the present writer learnt
more of the art of observing than he would have learnt in three years’
desultory hunting on his own account; and he has often regretted that no
naturalist has established shore-lectures at some watering-place, like
those up hill and down dale field-lectures which, in pleasant bygone
Cambridge days, Professor Sedgwick used to give to young geologists, and
Professor Henslow to young botanists.
In the meanwhile, to show you something of what may be seen by those who
care to see, let me take you, in imagination, to a shore where I was once
at home, and for whose richness I can vouch, and choose our season and
our day to start forth, on some glorious September or October morning, to
see what last night’s equinoctial gale has swept from the populous
shallows of Torbay, and cast up, high and dry, on Paignton sands.
Torbay is a place which should be as much endeared to the naturalist as
to the patriot and to the artist. We cannot gaze on its blue ring of
water, and the great limestone bluffs which bound it to the north and
south, without a glow passing through our hearts, as we remember the
terrible and glorious pageant which passed by in the glorious July days
of 1588, when the Spanish Armada ventured slowly past Berry Head, with
Elizabeth’s gallant pack of Devon captains (for the London fleet had not
yet joined) following fast in its wake, and dashing into the midst of the
vast line, undismayed by size and numbers, while their kin and friends
stood watching and praying on the cliffs, spectators of Britain’s
Salamis. The white line of houses, too, on the other side of the bay, is
Brixham, famed as the landing-place of William of Orange; the stone on
the pier-head, which marks his first footsteps on British ground, is
sacred in the eyes of all true English Whigs; and close by stands the
castle of the settler of Newfoundland, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Raleigh’s
half-brother, most learned of all Elizabeth’s admirals in life, most
pious and heroic in death. And as for scenery, though it can boast of
neither mountain peak nor dark fiord, and would seem tame enough in the
eyes of a western Scot or Irishman, yet Torbay surely has a soft beauty
of its own. The rounded hills slope gently to the sea, spotted with
squares of emerald grass, and rich red fallow fields, and parks full of
stately timber trees. Long lines of tall elms run down to the very
water’s edge, their boughs unwarped by any blast; here and there apple
orchards are bending under their loads of fruit, and narrow strips of
water-meadow line the glens, where the red cattle are already lounging in
richest pastures, within ten yards of the rocky pebble beach. The shore
is silent now, the tide far out: but six hours hence it will be hurling
columns of rosy foam high into the sunlight, and sprinkling passengers,
and cattle, and trim gardens which hardly know what frost and snow may
be, but see the flowers of autumn meet the flowers of spring, and the old
year linger smilingly to twine a garland for the new.
No wonder that such a spot as Torquay, with its delicious Italian
climate, and endless variety of rich woodland, flowery lawn, fantastic
rock-cavern, and broad bright tide-sand, sheltered from every wind of
heaven except the soft south-east, should have 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 Firth of Forth, under the auspices of Sir J. G. Dalyell,
has been for Scotland. For here worked Montagu, Turton, and Mrs.
Griffith, to whose extraordinary powers of research English marine botany
almost owes its existence, and who survived to 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. Here, too, the scientific succession is still
maintained by Mr. Pengelly and Mr. Gosse, the latter of whom by his
delightful and, happily, well-known books has done more for the study of
marine zoology than any other living man. 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-mouth the soft
sandstones and hard conglomerates of the new red series slope down into
the tepid and shallow waves, affords an abundance and variety of animal
and vegetable life, unequalled, perhaps, in any other part of Great
Britain. It cannot boast, certainly, of those strange deep-sea forms
which Messrs. Alder, Goodsir, and Laskey dredge among the lochs of the
western Highlands, and the sub-marine mountain glens of the Zetland sea;
but it has its own varieties, its own ever-fresh novelties: and in spite
of all the research which has been lavished on its shores, a naturalist
cannot, I suspect, 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 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 ankle-deep are spread, for some ten yards long by five
broad, huge dirty bivalve shells, as large as the hand, each with its
loathly grey and black siphons hanging out, a confused mass of slimy
death. Let us walk on to some cleaner heap, and leave these, the great
Lutraria 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
(ore-weed, as they call it in the south), and the delicate green ribbons
of the Zostera (the only English flowering plant which grows beneath the
sea). 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 tamarisks, 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-striped pears? What those tiny babies’ heads, covered with grey
prickles instead of hair? The great red star-fish, which Ulster children
call “the bad man’s hands;” and the great whelks, which the youth of
Musselburgh know as roaring buckies, these we have seen before; 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 child’s two fists, out of which they
are protruded? Mark them well, for you will perhaps never see them
again. They are a Mediterranean species, or rather three species, left
behind upon these extreme south-western coasts, probably at the vanishing
of that warmer ancient epoch, which clothed the Lizard Point with the
Cornish heath, and the Killarney mountains with Spanish saxifrages, and
other relics of a flora whose home is now the Iberian peninsula and the
sunny cliffs of the Riviera. Rare on every other shore, even in the
west, it abounds in Torbay at certain, or rather uncertain, times, to so
prodigious an amount, that the dredge, after five minutes’ scrape, will
sometimes come up choked full of this great cockle only. You will see
hundreds of them in every cove for miles this day; a seeming waste of
life, which would be awful, in our eyes, were not the Divine Ruler, as
His custom is, making this destruction the means of fresh creation, by
burying them in the sands, as soon as washed on shore, to fertilize the
strata of some future world. It is but a shell-fish truly; but the 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. (Plate II. Fig. 3.)
[Picture: Plate 2: 1. Cardium Rusticum, (tuberculatum). 2. Pagurus
Bernhardi, in a Periwinkle Shell]
That red capsicum is the foot of the animal contained in the cockleshell.
By its aid it crawls, leaps, and burrows in the sand, where it lies
drinking in the salt water through one of its siphons, and discharging it
again through the other. Put the shell into a rock pool, or a basin of
water, and you will see the siphons clearly. The valves gape apart some
three-quarters of an inch. The semi-pellucid orange “mantle” fills the
intermediate space. Through that mantle, at the end from which the foot
curves, the siphons protrude; two thick short tubes joined side by side,
their lips fringed with pearly cirri, or fringes; and very beautiful they
are. The larger is always open, taking in the water, which is at once
the animal’s food and air, and which, flowing over the delicate inner
surface of the mantle, at once oxygenates its blood, and fills its
stomach with minute particles of decayed organized matter. The smaller
is shut. Wait a minute, and it will open suddenly and discharge a jet of
clear water, which has been robbed, I suppose, of its oxygen and its
organic matter. But, I suppose, your eyes will be rather attracted by
that same scarlet and orange foot, which is being drawn in and thrust out
to a length of nearly four inches, striking with its point against any
opposing object, and sending the whole shell backwards with a jerk. The
point, you see, is sharp and tongue-like; only flattened, not
horizontally, like a tongue, but perpendicularly, so as to form, as it
was intended, a perfect sand-plough, by which the animal can move at
will, either above or below the surface of the sand. {67}
But for colour and shape, to what shall we compare it? To polished
cornelian, says Mr. Gosse. I say, to one of the great red capsicums
which hang drying in every Covent-garden seedsman’s window. Yet is
either simile better than the guess of a certain lady, 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!”
“C. tuberculatum,” says Mr. Gosse (who described it from specimens which
I sent him in 1854), “is far the finest species. The valves are more
globose and of a warmer colour; those that I have seen are even more
spinous.” Such may have been the case in those I sent: but it has
occurred to me now and then to dredge specimens of C. aculeatum, which
had escaped that rolling on the sand fatal in old age to its delicate
spines, and which equalled in colour, size, and perfectness the noble one
figured in poor dear old Dr. Turton’s “British Bivalves.” Besides,
aculeatum is a far thinner and more delicate shell. And a third species,
C. echinatum, with curves more graceful and continuous, is to be found
now and then with the two former. In it, each point, instead of
degenerating into a knot, as in tuberculatum, or developing from delicate
flat briar-prickles into long straight thorns, as in aculeatum, 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 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 altogether on the thicker one, tuberculatum, as old
age gives him a solid and heavy globose shell; and next, that he too,
while young and tender, and liable therefore to be bored through by
whelks and such murderous univalves, does actually possess the same
briar-prickles, which his thinner cousins keep throughout life.
Nevertheless, prickles, in all three species, are, as far as we can see,
useless in Torbay, where no wolf-fish (Anarrhichas lupus) or other owner
of shell-crushing jaws wanders, terrible to lobster and to cockle.
Originally intended, as we suppose, to face the strong-toothed monsters
of the Mediterranean, these foreigners have wandered northward to 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. This—if my
explanation is the right one—is but one more case among hundreds in which
peculiarities, useful doubtless to their original possessors, remain,
though now useless, in their descendants. Just so does the tame ram
inherit the now superfluous horns of his primeval wild ancestors, though
he fights now—if he fights at all—not with his horns, but with his
forehead.
Enough of Cardium tuberculatum. Now for the other animals of the heap;
and first, for those long white razors. They, as well as the grey
scimitars, are Solens, Razor-fish (Solen siliqua and S. ensis), burrowers
in the sand by that foot which protrudes from one end, nimble in escaping
from the Torquay boys, whom you will see boring for them with a long iron
screw, on the sands at low tide. They are very good to eat, these
razor-fish; at least, for those who so think them; and abound in millions
upon all our sandy shores. {70}
Now for the tapering brown spires. They are Turritellæ, snail-like
animals (though the form of the shell is different), who crawl and browse
by thousands on the beds of Zostera, or grass wrack, which you see thrown
about on the beach, and which grows naturally in two or three fathoms
water. Stay: here is one which is “more than itself.” On its back is
mounted a cluster of barnacles (Balanus Porcatus), of the same family as
those which stud the tide-rocks in millions, scratching the legs of
hapless bathers. Of them, I will speak presently; for I may have a still
more curious member of the family to show you. But meanwhile, look at
the mouth of the shell; a long grey worm protrudes from it, which is not
the rightful inhabitant. He is dead long since, and his place has been
occupied by one Sipunculus Bernhardi; a wight of low degree, who connects
“radiate” with annulate forms—in plain English, sea-cucumbers (of which
we shall see some soon) with sea-worms. But however low in the scale of
comparative anatomy, he has wit enough to take care of himself; mean ugly
little worm as he seems. For finding the mouth of the Turritella too big
for him, he has plastered it up with sand and mud (Heaven alone knows
how), just as a wry-neck plasters up a hole in an apple-tree when she
intends to build therein, and has left only a round hole, out of which he
can poke his proboscis. A curious thing is this proboscis, when seen
through the magnifier. You perceive a ring of tentacles round the mouth,
for picking up I know not what; and you will perceive, too, if you watch
it, that when he draws it in, he turns mouth, tentacles and all, inwards,
and so down into his stomach, just as if you were to turn the finger of a
glove inward from the tip till it passed into the hand; and so performs,
every time he eats, the clown’s as yet ideal feat, of jumping down his
own throat. {72}
[Picture: Plate 1: Flustra Lineata etc.]
So much have we seen on one little shell. But there is more to see close
to it. Those yellow plants which I likened to squirrels’ tails and
lobsters’ horns, and what not, are zoophytes of different kinds. Here is
Sertularia argentea (true squirrel’s tail); here, S. filicula, as
delicate as tangled threads of glass; here, abietina; here, rosacea. The
lobsters’ horns are Antennaria antennina; and mingled with them are
Plumulariæ, always to be distinguished from Sertulariæ by polypes growing
on one side of the branch, and not on both. Here is falcata, with its
roots twisted round a sea-weed. Here is cristata, on the same weed; and
here is a piece of the beautiful myriophyllum, which has been battered in
its long journey out of the deep water about the ore rock. For all these
you must consult Johnson’s “Zoophytes,” and for a dozen smaller species,
which you would probably find tangled among them, or parasitic on the
sea-weed. Here are Flustræ, or sea-mats. This, which smells very like
Verbena, is Flustra coriacea (Pl. I. Fig. 2). That scurf on the frond of
ore-weed is F. lineata (Pl. Fig. 1). The glass bells twined about this
Sertularia are Campanularia syringa (Pl. I. Fig. 9); and here is a tiny
plant of Cellularia ciliata (Pl. I. Fig. 8). Look at it through the
field-glass; for it is truly wonderful. Each polype cell is edged with
whip-like spines, and on the back of some of them is—what is it, but a
live vulture’s head, snapping and snapping—what for?
Nay, reader, I am here to show you what can be seen: but as for telling
you what can be known, much more what cannot, I decline; and refer you to
Johnson’s “Zoophytes,” wherein you will find that several species of
polypes carry these same birds’ heads: but whether they be parts of the
polype, and of what use they are, no man living knoweth.
Next, what are the striped pears? They are sea-anemones, and of a
species only lately well known, Sagartia viduata, the snake-locked
anemone (Pl. V. Fig. 3 {74}). They have been washed off the loose stones
to which they usually adhere by the pitiless roll of the ground-swell;
however, they are not so far gone, but that if you take one of them home,
and put it in a jar of water, it will expand into a delicate compound
flower, which can neither be described nor painted, of long pellucid
tentacles, hanging like a thin bluish cloud over a disk of mottled brown
and grey.
Here, adhering to this large whelk, is another, but far larger and
coarser. It is Sagartia parasitica, one of our largest British species;
and most singular in this, that it is almost always (in Torbay, at
least,) found adhering to a whelk: but never to a live one; and for this
reason. The live whelk (as you may see for yourself when the tide is
out) burrows in the sand in chase of hapless bivalve shells, whom he
bores through with his sharp tongue (always, cunning fellow, close to the
hinge, where the fish is), and then sucks out their life. Now, if the
anemone stuck to him, it would be carried under the sand daily, to its
own disgust. It prefers, therefore, the dead whelk, inhabited by a
soldier crab, Pagurus Bernhardi (Pl. II. Fig. 2), of which you may find
a dozen anywhere as the tide goes out; and travels about at the crab’s
expense, sharing with him the offal which is his food. Note, moreover,
that the soldier crab is the most hasty and blundering of marine animals,
as active as a monkey, and as subject to panics as a horse; wherefore the
poor anemone on his back must have a hard life of it; being knocked about
against rocks and shells, without warning, from morn to night and night
to morn. Against which danger, kind Nature, ever _maxima in minimis_,
has provided by fitting him with a stout leather coat, which she has
given, I believe, to no other of his family.
Next, for the babies’ heads, covered with prickles, instead of hair.
They are sea-urchins, Amphidotus cordatus, which burrow by thousands in
the sand. These are of that Spatangoid form, which you will often find
fossil in the chalk, and which shepherd boys call snakes’ heads. We
shall soon find another sort, an Echinus, and have time to talk over
these most strange (in my eyes) of all living animals.
There are a hundred more things to be talked of here: but we must defer
the examination of them till our return; for it wants an hour yet of the
dead low spring-tide; and ere we go home, we will spend a few minutes at
least on the rocks at Livermead, where awaits us a strong-backed
quarryman, with a strong-backed crowbar, as is to be hoped (for he
snapped one right across there yesterday, falling miserably on his back
into a pool thereby), and we will verify Mr. Gosse’s observation, that—
“When once we have begun to look with curiosity 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, suspicious-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 mystery; 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.
“‘O sea! old sea! who yet knows half
Of thy wonders or thy pride!’”
GOSSE’S _Aquarium_, pp. 226, 227.
These words have more than fulfilled themselves since they were written.
Those Deep-Sea dredgings, of which a detailed account will be found in
Dr. Wyville Thomson’s new and most beautiful book, “The Depths of the
Sea,” have disclosed, of late years, wonders of the deep even more
strange and more multitudinous than the wonders of the shore. The time
is past when we thought ourselves bound to believe, with Professor Edward
Forbes, that only some hundred fathoms down, the inhabitants of the
sea-bottom “become more and more modified, and fewer and fewer,
indicating our approach towards an abyss where life is either
extinguished, or exhibits but a few sparks to mark it’s lingering
presence.”
Neither now need we indulge in another theory which had a certain
grandeur in it, and was not so absurd as it looks at first sight,—namely,
that, as Dr. Wyville Thomson puts it, picturesquely enough, “in going
down the sea water became, under the pressure, gradually heavier and
heavier, and that all the loose things floated at different levels,
according to their specific weight,—skeletons of men, anchors and shot
and cannon, and last of all the broad gold pieces lost in the wreck of
many a galleon off the Spanish Main; the whole forming a kind of ‘false
bottom’ to the ocean, beneath which there lay all the depth of clear
still water, which was heavier than molten gold.”
The facts are; first that water, being all but incompressible, is hardly
any heavier, and just as liquid, at the greatest depth, than at the
surface; and that therefore animals can move as freely in it in deep as
in shallow water; and next, that as the fluids inside the body of a sea
animal must be at the same pressure as that of the water outside it, the
two pressures must balance each other; and the body, instead of being
crushed in, may be unconscious that it is living under a weight of two or
three miles of water. But so it is; as we gather our curiosities at
low-tide mark, or haul the dredge a mile or two out at sea, we may allow
our fancy to range freely out to the westward, and down over the
subaqueous cliffs of the hundred-fathom line, which mark the old shore of
the British Isles, or rather of a time when Britain and Ireland were part
of the continent, through water a mile, and two, and three miles deep,
into total darkness, and icy cold, and a pressure which, in the open air,
would crush any known living creature to a jelly; and be certain that we
shall find the ocean-floor teeming everywhere with multitudinous life,
some of it strangely like, some strangely unlike, the creatures which we
see along the shore.
Some strangely like. You may find, for instance, among the sea-weed,
here and there, a little black sea-spider, a Nymphon, who has this
peculiarity, that possessing no body at all to speak of, he carries his
needful stomach in long branches, packed inside his legs. The specimens
which you will find will probably be half an inch across the legs. An
almost exactly similar Nymphon has been dredged from the depths of the
Arctic and Antarctic oceans, nearly two feet across.
[Picture: Nymphon Abyssorum, Norman]
You may find also a quaint little shrimp, _Caprella_, clinging by its
hind claws to sea-weed, and waving its gaunt grotesque body to and fro,
while it makes mesmeric passes with its large fore claws,—one of the most
ridiculous of Nature’s many ridiculous forms. Those which you will find
will be some quarter of an inch in length; but in the cold area of the
North Atlantic, their cousins, it is now found, are nearly three inches
long, and perch in like manner, not on sea-weeds, for there are none so
deep, but on branching sponges.
These are but two instances out of many of forms which were supposed to
be peculiar to shallow shores repeating themselves at vast depths: thus
forcing on us strange questions about changes in the distribution and
depth of the ancient seas; and forcing us, also, to reconsider the old
rules by which rocks were distinguished as deep-sea or shallow-sea
deposits according to the fossils found in them.
[Picture: Caprella spinosissima, Norman]
As for the new forms, and even more important than them, the ancient
forms, supposed to have been long extinct, and only known as fossils,
till they were lately rediscovered alive in the nether darkness,—for them
you must consult Dr. Wyville Thomson’s book, and the notices of the
“Challenger’s” dredgings which appear from time to time in the columns of
“Nature;” for want of space forbids my speaking of them here.
But if you have no time to read “The Depths of the Sea,” go at least to
the British Museum, or if you be a northern man, to the admirable public
museum at Liverpool; ask to be shown the deep-sea forms; and there feast
your curiosity and your sense of beauty for an hour. Look at the
Crinoids, or stalked star-fishes, the “Lilies of living stone,” which
swarmed in the ancient seas, in vast variety, and in such numbers that
whole beds of limestone are composed of their disjointed fragments; but
which have vanished out of our modern seas, we know not why, till, a few
years since, almost the only known living species was the exquisite and
rare Pentacrinus asteria, from deep water off the Windward Isles of the
West Indies.
[Picture: Pentacrinus asteria, Linnæus]
Of this you will see a specimen or two both at Liverpool and in the
British Museum; and near them, probably, specimens of the new-old
Crinoids, discovered of late years by Professor Sars, Mr. Gwyn Jeffreys,
Dr. Carpenter, Dr. Wyville Thomson, and the other deep-sea disciples of
the mythic Glaucus, the fisherman, who, enamoured of the wonders of the
sea, plunged into the blue abyss once and for all, and became himself
“the blue old man of the sea.”
Next look at the corals, and Gorgonias, and all the sea-fern tribe of
branching polypidoms, and last, but not least, at the glass sponges;
first at the Euplectella, or Venus’s flower-basket, which lives embedded
in the mud of the seas of the Philippines, supported by a glass frill
“standing up round it like an Elizabethan ruff.” Twenty years ago there
was but one specimen in Europe: now you may buy one for a pound in any
curiosity shop. I advise you to do so, and to keep—as I have seen
done—under a glass case, as a delight to your eyes, one of the most
exquisite, both for form and texture, of natural objects.
Then look at the Hyalonemas, or glass-rope ocean floor by a twisted wisp
of strong flexible flint needles, somewhat on the principle of a
screw-pile. So strange and complicated is their structure, that
naturalists for a long while could literally make neither head nor tail
of them, as long as they had only Japanese specimens to study, some of
which the Japanese dealers had, of malice prepense, stuck upside down
into Pholas-borings in stones. Which was top and which bottom; which the
thing itself, and which special parasites growing on it; whether it was a
sponge, or a zoophyte, or something else; at one time even whether it was
natural, or artificial and a make-up,—could not be settled, even till a
year or two since. But the discovery of the same, or a similar, species
in abundance from the Butt of the Lows down to Setubal on the Portuguese
coast, where the deep-water shark fishers call it “sea-whip,” has given
our savants specimens enough to make up their minds—that they really know
little or nothing about it, and probably will never know.
And do not forget, lastly, to ask, whether at Liverpool or at the British
Museum, for the Holtenias and their congeners,—hollow sponges built up of
glassy spicules, and rooted in the mud by glass hairs, in some cases
between two and three feet long, as flexible and graceful as tresses of
snow-white silk.
Look at these, and a hundred kindred forms, and then see how nature is
not only “maxima in minimis”—greatest in her least, but often
“pulcherrima in abditis”—fairest in her most hidden works; and how the
Creative Spirit has lavished, as it were, unspeakable artistic skill on
lowly-organized creature, never till now beheld by man, and buried, not
only in foul mud, but in their own unsightly heap of living jelly.
But so it was from the beginning;—and this planet was not made for man
alone. Countless ages before we appeared on earth the depths of the old
chalk-ocean teemed with forms as beautiful and perfect as those, their
lineal descendants, which the dredge now brings up from the Atlantic
sea-floor; and if there were—as my reason tells me that there must have
been—final moral causes for their existence, the only ones which we have
a right to imagine are these—that all, down to the lowest Rhizopod, might
delight themselves, however dimly, in existing; and that the Lord might
delight Himself in them.
Thus, much—alas! how little—about the wonders of the deep. We, who are
no deep-sea dredgers, must return humbly to the wonders of the shore.
And first, as after descending the gap in the sea-wall we walk along the
ribbed floor of hard yellow sand, let me ask you to give a sharp look-out
for a round grey disc, about as big as a penny-piece, peeping out on the
surface. No; that is not it, that little lump: open it, and you will
find within one of the common little Venus gallina.—The closet collectors
have given it some new name now, and no thanks to them: they are always
changing the names, instead of studying the live animals where Nature has
put them, in which case they would have no time for word-inventing. Nay,
I verify 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 depression what we seek. Touch it,
and out poke a pair of astonished and inquiring horns: it is a long-armed
crab, who saw us coming, and wisely shovelled himself into the sand by
means of his nether-end. Corystes Cassivelaunus is his name, which he is
said to have acquired from the marks on his back, which are somewhat like
a human face. “Those long antennæ,” says my friend, Mr. Lloyd {90}—I
have not verified the fact, but believe it, as he knows a great deal
about crabs, and I know next to nothing—“form a tube through which a
current of water passes into the crab’s gills, free from the surrounding
sand.” Moreover, it is only the male who has those strangely long
fore-arms and claws; the female contenting herself with limbs of a more
moderate length. 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,
Peachia hastata (Pl. XII. Fig. 1), which differs from most other British
Actiniæ in this, that instead of having like them a walking disc, it has
a free open lower end, with which (I know not how) it buries itself
upright in the sand, with its mouth just above the surface. The figure
on the left of the plate represents a curious cluster of papillæ which
project from one side of the mouth, and are the opening of the oviduct.
But his value consists, not merely in his beauty (though that, really, is
not small), but in his belonging to what the long word-makers call an
“interosculant” group,—a party of genera and species which connect
families scientifically far apart, filling up a fresh link in the great
chain, or rather the great network, of zoological classification. For
here we have a simple, and, as it were, crude form; of which, if we dared
to indulge in reveries, we might say that the Creative Mind realized it
before either Actiniæ or Holothurians, and then went on to perfect the
idea contained in it in two different directions; dividing it into two
different families, and making on its model, by adding new organs, and
taking away old ones, in one direction the whole family of Actiniæ
(sea-anemones), and in a quite opposite one the Holothuriæ, those strange
sea-cucumbers, with their mouth-fringe of feathery gills, of which you
shall see some anon. Thus there has been, in the Creative Mind, as it
gave life to new species, a development of the idea on which older
species were created, in order—we may fancy—that every mesh of the great
net might gradually be supplied, and there should be no gaps in the
perfect variety of Nature’s forms. This development is one which we must
believe to be at least possible, if we allow that a Mind presides over
the universe, and not a mere brute necessity, a Law (absurd misnomer)
without a Lawgiver; and to it (strangely enough coinciding here and there
with the Platonic doctrine of Eternal Ideas existing in the Divine Mind)
all fresh inductive discovery seems to point more and more.
[Picture: 1. Peachia Hastata. 2. Uraster Rubens]
Let me speak freely a few words on this important matter. Geology has
disproved the old popular belief that the universe was brought into being
as it now exists by a single fiat. We know that the work has been
gradual; that the earth
“In tracts of fluent heat began,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
The home of seeming random forms,
Till, at the last, arose the man.”
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 on
the whole one of progress,—lower animals (though we cannot yet say, the
lowest) appearing first, and man, the highest mammal, “the roof and crown
of things,” one of the latest in the series. We have no more right, let
it be observed, to say that man, the highest, appeared last, than that
the lowest appeared first. It was probably so, in both cases; but there
is as yet no positive proof of either; and as we know that species of
animals lower than those which already existed appeared again and again
during the various eras, so it is quite possible that they may be
appearing now, and may appear hereafter: and that for every extinct Dodo
or Moa, a new species may be created, to keep up the equilibrium of the
whole. This is but a surmise: but it may be wise, perhaps, just now, to
confess boldly, even to insist on, its possibility, lest any should
fancy, from our unwillingness to allow it, that there would be ought in
it, if proved, contrary to sound religion.
I am, I must honestly confess, more and more unable to perceive anything
which an orthodox Christian may not hold, in those physical theories of
“evolution,” which are gaining more and more the assent of our best
zoologists and botanists. All that they ask us to believe is, that
“species” and “families,” and indeed the whole of organic nature, have
gone through, and may still be going through, some such development from
a lowest germ, as we know that every living individual, from the lowest
zoophyte to man himself, does actually go through. They apply to the
whole of the living world, past, present, and future, the law which is
undeniably at work on each individual of it. They may be wrong, or they
may be right: but what is there in such a conception contrary to any
doctrine—at least of the Church of England? To say that this cannot be
true; that species cannot vary, because God, at the beginning, created
each thing “according to its kind,” is really to beg the question; which
is—Does the idea of “kind” include variability or not? and if so, how
much variability? Now, “kind,” or “species,” as we call it, is defined
nowhere in the Bible. What right have we to read our own definition into
the word?—and that against the certain fact, that some “kinds” do vary,
and that widely,—mankind, for instance, and the animals and plants which
he domesticates. Surely that latter fact should be significant, to those
who believe, as I do, that man was created in the likeness of God. For
if man has the power, not only of making plants and animals vary, but of
developing them into forms of higher beauty and usefulness than their
wild ancestors possessed, why should not the God in whose image he is
made possess the same power? If the old theological rule be true—“There
is nothing in man which was not first in God” (sin, of course,
excluded)—then why should not this imperfect creative faculty in man be
the very guarantee that God possesses it in perfection?
Such at least is the conclusion of one who, studying certain families of
plants, which indulge in the most fantastic varieties of shape and size,
and yet through all their vagaries retain—as do the Palms, the Orchids,
the Euphorbiaceæ—one organ, or form of organs, peculiar and highly
specialized, yet constant throughout the whole of each family, has been
driven to the belief that each of these three families, at least, has
“sported off” from one common ancestor—one archetypal Palm, one
archetypal Orchid, one archetypal Euphorbia, simple, it may be, in
itself, but endowed with infinite possibilities of new and complex
beauty, to be developed, not in it, but in its descendants. He has asked
himself, sitting alone amid the boundless wealth of tropic forests,
whether even then and there the great God might not be creating round
him, slowly but surely, new forms of beauty? If he chose to do it, could
He not do it? That man found himself none the worse Christian for the
thought. He has said—and must be allowed to say again, for he sees no
reason to alter his words—in speaking of the wonderful variety of forms
in the Euphorbiaceæ, from the weedy English Euphorbias, the Dog’s
Mercuries, and the Box, to the prickly-stemmed Scarlet Euphorbia of
Madagascar, the succulent Cactus-like Euphorbias of the Canaries and
elsewhere; the Gale-like Phyllanthus; the many-formed Crotons; the
Hemp-like Maniocs, Physic-nuts, Castor-oils, the scarlet Poinsettia, the
little pink and yellow Dalechampia, the poisonous Manchineel, and the
gigantic Hura, or sandbox tree, of the West Indies,—all so different in
shape and size, yet all alike in their most peculiar and complex
fructification, and in their acrid milky juice,—“What if all these forms
are the descendants of one original form? Would that be one whit the
more wonderful than the theory that they were, each and all, with the
minute, and often imaginary, shades of difference between certain cognate
species among them, created separately and at once? But if it be
so—which I cannot allow—what would the theologian have to say, save that
God’s works are even more wonderful than he always believed them to be?
As for the theory being impossible—that is to be decided by men of
science, on strict experimental grounds. As for us theologians, who are
we, that we should limit, à priori, the power of God? ‘Is anything too
hard for the Lord?’ asked the prophet of old; and we have a right to ask
it as long as the world shall last. If it be said that ‘natural
selection,’ or, as Mr. Herbert Spencer better defines it, the ‘survival
of the fittest,’ is too simple a cause to produce such fantastic
variety—that, again, is a question to be settled exclusively by men of
science, on their own grounds. We, meanwhile, always knew that God works
by very simple, or seemingly simple, means; that the universe, as far as
we could discern it, was one organization of the most simple means. It
was wonderful—or should have been—in our eyes, that a shower of rain
should make the grass grow, and that the grass should become flesh, and
the flesh food for the thinking brain of man. It was—or ought to have
been—more wonderful yet to us that a child should resemble its parents,
or even a butterfly resemble, if not always, still usually, its parents
likewise. Ought God to appear less or more august in our eyes if we
discover that the means are even simpler than we supposed? We held Him
to be Almighty and All-wise. Are we to reverence Him less or more if we
find Him to be so much mightier, so much wiser, than we dreamed, that He
can not only make all things, but—the very perfection of creative
power—_make all things make themselves_? We believed that His care was
over all His works; that His providence worked perpetually over the
universe. We were taught—some of us at least—by Holy Scripture, that
without Him not a sparrow fell to the ground, and that the very hairs of
our head were all numbered; that the whole history of the universe was
made up, in fact, of an infinite network of special providences. If,
then, that should be true which a great naturalist writes, ‘It may be
metaphorically said that natural selection is daily and hourly
scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest;
rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good;
silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity
offers, at the improvement of each organic being, in relation to its
organic and inorganic conditions of life,’—if this, I say, were proved to
be true, ought God’s care and God’s providence to seem less or more
magnificent in our eyes? Of old it was said by Him without whom nothing
is made—‘My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.’ Shall we quarrel with
physical science, if she gives us evidence that those words are true?”
And—understand it well—the grand passage I have just quoted need not be
accused of substituting “natural selection for God.” In any case natural
selection would be only the means or law by which God works, as He does
by other natural laws. We do not substitute gravitation for God, when we
say that the planets are sustained in their orbits by the law of
gravitation. The theory about natural selection may be untrue, or
imperfect, as may the modern theories of the “evolution and progress” of
organic forms: let the man of science decide that. But if true, the
theories seem to me perfectly to agree 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, concealing, from those who utter
them, blank Materialism: but One who works in all things which have
obeyed Him to will and to do of His good pleasure, keeping His abysmal
and self-perfect purpose, yet altering the methods by which that purpose
is attained, from æon to æon, 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 His primæval Mind; and yet never throwing away
a conception to which He has once given actual birth in time and space,
(but to compare reverently small things and great) lovingly repeating it,
re-applying 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
instance, necessary to connect the bimana and the quadrumana) to be
filled up perhaps hereafter when the world needs them; the handiwork, in
short, of a living and loving Mind, perfect in His own eternity, but
stooping to work in time and space, and there rejoicing Himself in the
work of His own hands, and in His eternal Sabbaths ceasing in rest
ineffable, that He may look on that which He hath made, and behold it is
very good.
I speak, of course, under correction; for this conclusion is emphatically
matter of induction, and must be verified or modified by ever-fresh
facts: but I meet with many a Christian passage in scientific books,
which seems to me to go, not too far, but rather not far enough, in
asserting the God of the Bible, as Saint Paul says, “not to have left
Himself without witness,” in nature itself, that He is the God of grace.
Why speak of the God of nature and the God of grace as two antithetical
terms? The Bible never, in a single instance, makes the distinction; and
surely, if God be (as He is) the Eternal and Unchangeable One, and if (as
we all confess) the universe bears the impress of His signet, we have no
right, in the present infantile state of science, to put arbitrary limits
of our own to the revelation which He may have thought good to make of
Himself in nature. Nay, rather, let us believe that, if our eyes were
opened, we should fulfil the requirement of Genius, to “see the universal
in the particular,” by seeing God’s whole likeness, His whole glory,
reflected as in a mirror even in the meanest flower; and that nothing but
the dulness of our own 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.”
To me it seems (to sum up, in a few words, what I have tried to say) that
such development and progress as have as yet been actually discovered in
nature, 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 I confess I have been all along tending) probably capable,
without violence to its properties, of becoming, like the human mind,
incarnate.
But to descend from these perhaps too daring speculations, there is
another, and more human, source of interest about the animal who is
writhing feebly in the glass jar of salt water; for he is one of the many
curiosities which have been added to our fauna by that humble hero Mr.
Charles Peach, the self-taught naturalist, of whom, as we walk on toward
the rocks, something should be said, or rather read; for Mr. Chambers, in
an often-quoted passage from his Edinburgh Journal, which I must have the
pleasure of quoting once again, has told the story better than we can
tell it:—
“But who is that little intelligent-looking man in a faded naval uniform,
who is so invariably to be 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 (preventive service) at an obscure part of the Cornwall coast, with
four shillings a day, and a wife and nine children, most of whose
education he has himself to conduct. He never tastes the luxuries which
are so common in the middle ranks of life, and even amongst a large
portion of the working classes. He has to mend with his own hands every
sort of thing that can break or wear in his house. Yet Mr. Peach is a
votary of Natural History; not a student of the science in books, for he
cannot afford books; but an investigator by sea and shore, a collector of
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, accompanied by illustrative papers and drawings:
thus, under circumstances the very opposite of those of such men as Lord
Enniskillen, adding, in like manner, to the general stock of knowledge.
On the present occasion he is unusually elated, for he has made the
discovery of a Holothuria with twenty tentacula, a species of the
Echinodermata which Professor Forbes, in his book on Star-Fishes, has
said was never yet observed in the British seas. It may be of small
moment to you, who, mayhap, know nothing of Holothurias: but it is a
considerable 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 strong anew by
the kind notice taken of him by the masters of the science, to similar
inquiries, difficult as it may be to prosecute them, under such a
complication of duties, professional and domestic. 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 consider 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’ Edin. Journ._, Nov. 23, 1844.
Mr. Peach has been since rewarded in part for his long labours in the
cause of science, by having been removed to a more lucrative post on the
north coast of Scotland; the earnest, it is to be hoped, of still further
promotion.
I mentioned just now Synapta; or, as Montagu called it, Chirodota: a much
better name, and, I think, very uselessly changed; for Chirodota
expresses the peculiarity of the beast, which consists in—start not,
reader—twelve hands, like human hands, while Synapta expresses merely its
power of clinging to the fingers, which it possesses in common with many
other animals. It is, at least, a beast worth talking about; as for
finding one, I fear that we have no chance of such good fortune.
[Picture: Plate 4: Synapta Digitata etc.]
Colonel Montagu found them here some forty years ago; and after him, Mr.
Alder, in 1845. I found hundreds of them, but only once, in 1854 after a
heavy south-eastern gale, washed up among the great Lutrariæ in a cove
near Goodrington; but all my dredging outside failed to procure a
specimen—Mr. Alder, however, and Mr. Cocks (who find everything, and will
at last certainly catch Midgard, the great sea-serpent, as Thor did, by
baiting for him with a bull’s head), have dredged them in great numbers;
the former, at Helford in Cornwall, the latter on the west coast of
Scotland. It seems, however, to be a southern monster, probably a
remnant, like the great cockle, of the Mediterranean fauna; for Mr.
MacAndrew finds them plentifully in Vigo Bay, and J. Müller in the
Adriatic, off Trieste.
But what is it like? Conceive a very fat short earth-worm; not ringed,
though, like the earth-worm, but smooth and glossy, dappled with darker
spots, especially on one side, which may be the upper one. Put round its
mouth twelve little arms, on each a hand with four ragged fingers, and on
the back of the hand a stump of a thumb, and you have Synapta Digitata
(Plates IV. and V., from my drawings of the live animal). These hands it
puts down to its mouth, generally in alternate pairs, but how it obtains
its food by them is yet a mystery, for its intestines are filled, like an
earth-worm’s, with the mud in which it lives, and from which it probably
extracts (as does the earth-worm) all organic matters.
You will find it stick to your fingers by the whole skin, causing, if
your hand be delicate, a tingling sensation; and if you examine the skin
under the microscope, you will find the cause. The whole skin is studded
with minute glass anchors, some hanging freely from the surface, but most
imbedded in the skin. Each of these anchors is jointed at its root into
one end of a curious cribriform plate,—in plain English, one pierced like
a sieve, which lies under the skin, and reminds one of the similar plates
in the skin of the White Cucumaria, which I will show you presently; and
both of these we must regard as the first rudiments of an Echinoderm’s
outside skeleton, such as in the Sea-urchins covers the whole body of the
animal. (See on Echinus Millaris, p. 89.) {111} Somewhat similar
anchor-plates, from a Red Sea species, Synapta Vittata, may be seen in
any collection of microscopic objects.
The animal, when caught, has a strange habit of self-destruction,
contracting its skin at two or three different points, and writhing till
it snaps itself into “junks,” as the sailors would say, and then dies.
My specimens, on breaking up, threw out from the wounded part long
“ovarian filaments” (whatsoever those may be), similar to those thrown
out by many of the Sagartian anemones, especially S. parasitica. Beyond
this, I can tell you nothing about Synapta, and only ask you to consider
its hands, as an instance of that fantastic play of Nature which repeats,
in families widely different, organs of similar form, though perhaps of
by no means similar use; nay, sometimes (as in those beautiful clear-wing
hawk-moths which you, as they hover round the rhododendrons, mistake for
bumble-bees) repeats the outward form of a whole animal, for no
conceivable reason save her—shall we not say honestly His?—own good
pleasure.
But here we are at the old bank of boulders, the ruins of an antique pier
which the monks of Tor Abbey built for their convenience, while Torquay
was but a knot of fishing huts within a lonely limestone cove. To get to
it, though, we have passed many a hidden treasure; for every ledge of
these flat New-red-sandstone rocks, if torn up with the crowbar,
discloses in its cracks and crannies nests of strange forms which shun
the light of day; beautiful Actiniæ fill the tiny caverns with living
flowers; great Pholades (Plate X. figs. 3, 4) bore by hundreds in the
softer strata; and wherever a thin layer of muddy sand intervenes between
two slabs, long Annelid worms of quaintest forms and colours have their
horizontal burrows, among those of that curious and rare radiate animal,
the Spoonworm, {113} 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.