Laminariæ, like fan-palms, droop and wave gracefully in the retiring
ripples, a great boulder which will serve our purpose. Its upper side is
a whole forest of sea-weeds, large and small; and that forest, if you
examined it closely, as full of inhabitants as those of the Amazon or the
Gambia. To “beat” that dense cover would be an endless task: but on the
under side, where no sea-weeds grow, we shall find full in view enough to
occupy us till the tide returns. For the slab, see, is such a one as
sea-beasts love to haunt. Its weed-covered surface shows that the surge
has not shifted it for years past. It lies on other boulders clear of
sand and mud, so that there is no fear of dead sea-weed having lodged and
decayed under it, destructive to animal life. We can see dark crannies
and caves beneath; yet too narrow to allow the surge to wash in, and keep
the surface clean. It will be a fine menagerie of Nereus, if we can but
turn it.
Now the crowbar is well under it; heave, and with a will; and so, after
five minutes’ tugging, propping, slipping, and splashing, the boulder
gradually tips over, and we rush greedily upon the spoil.
A muddy dripping surface it is, truly, full of cracks and hollows,
uninviting enough at first sight: let us look it round leisurely, to see
if there are not materials enough there for an hour’s lecture.
[Picture: Plate 9: Cucumaria Hyndmanni etc.]
The first object which strikes the eye is probably a group of milk-white
slugs, from two to six inches long, cuddling snugly together (Plate IX.
fig. 1). You try to pull them off, and find that they give you some
trouble, such a firm hold have the delicate white sucking arms, which
fringe each of their five edges. You see at the head nothing but a
yellow dimple; for eating and breathing are suspended till the return of
tide; but once settled in a jar of salt-water, each will protrude a large
chocolate-coloured head, tipped with a ring of ten feathery gills,
looking very much like a head of “curled kale,” but of the loveliest
white and primrose; in the centre whereof lies perdu a mouth with sturdy
teeth—if indeed they, as well as the whole inside of the beast, have not
been lately got rid of, and what you see be not a mere bag, without
intestine or other organ: but only for the time being. For hear it,
worn-out epicures, and old Indians who bemoan your livers, this little
Holothuria knows a secret which, if he could tell it, you would be glad
to buy of him for thousands sterling. To him blue pill and muriatic acid
are superfluous, and travels to German Brunnen a waste of time. Happy
Holothuria! who possesses really the secret of everlasting youth, which
ancient fable bestowed on the serpent and the eagle. For when his teeth
ache, or his digestive organs trouble him, all he has to do is just to
cast up forthwith his entire inside, and, faisant maigre for a month or
so, grow a fresh set, and then eat away as merrily as ever. His name, if
you wish to consult so triumphant a hygeist, is Cucumaria Pentactes: but
he has many a stout cousin round the Scotch coast, who knows the
antibilious panacea as well as he, and submits, among the northern
fishermen, to the rather rude and undeserved name of sea-puddings; one of
which grows in Shetland to the enormous length of three feet, rivalling
there his huge congeners, who display their exquisite plumes on every
tropic coral reef. {116}
[Picture: Plate 5: Balanophyllea Regia etc.]
Next, what are those bright little buds, like salmon-coloured Banksia
roses half expanded, sitting closely on the stone? Touch them; the soft
part is retracted, and the orange flower of flesh is transformed into a
pale pink flower of stone. That is the Madrepore, Caryophyllia Smithii
(Plate V. fig. 2); one of our south coast rarities: and see, on the lip
of the last one, which we have carefully scooped off with the chisel, two
little pink towers of stone, delicately striated; drop them into this
small bottle of sea-water, and from the top of each tower issues every
half-second—what shall we call it?—a hand or a net of finest hairs,
clutching at something invisible to our grosser sense. That is the
Pyrgoma, parasitic only (as far as we know) on the lip of this same rare
Madrepore; a little “cirrhipod,” the cousin of those tiny barnacles which
roughen every rock (a larger sort whereof I showed you on the
Turritella), and of those larger ones also who burrow in the thick hide
of the whale, and, borne about upon his mighty sides, throw out their
tiny casting nets, as this Pyrgoma does, to catch every passing
animalcule, and sweep them into the jaws concealed within its shell. And
this creature, rooted to one spot through life and death, was in its
infancy a free swimming animal, hovering from place to place upon
delicate ciliæ, till, having sown its wild oats, it settled down in life,
built itself a good stone house, and became a landowner, or rather a
glebæ adscriptus, for ever and a day. Mysterious destiny!—yet not so
mysterious as that of the free medusoid young of every polype and coral,
which ends as a rooted tree of horn or stone, and seems to the eye of
sensuous fancy to have literally degenerated into a vegetable. Of them
you must read for yourself in Mr. Gosse’s book; in the meanwhile he shall
tell you something of the beautiful Madrepores themselves. His
description, {118} by far the best yet published, should be read in full;
we must content ourselves with extracts.
“Doubtless you are familiar with the stony skeleton of our Madrepore, as
it appears in museums. It consists of a number of thin calcareous plates
standing up edgewise, and arranged in a radiating manner round a low
centre. A little below the margin their individuality is lost in the
deposition of rough calcareous matter. . . . The general form is more or
less cylindrical, commonly wider at top than just above the bottom. . . .
This is but the skeleton; and though it is a very pretty object, those
who are acquainted with it alone, can form but a very poor idea of the
beauty of the living animal. . . . Let it, after being torn from the
rock, recover its equanimity; then you will see a pellucid gelatinous
flesh emerging from between the plates, and little exquisitely formed and
coloured tentacula, with white clubbed tips fringing the sides of the
cup-shaped cavity in the centre, across which stretches the oval disc
marked with a star of some rich and brilliant colour, surrounding the
central mouth, a slit with white crenated lips, like the orifice of one
of those elegant cowry shells which we put upon our mantelpieces. The
mouth is always more or less prominent, and can be protruded and expanded
to an astonishing extent. The space surrounding the lips is commonly
fawn colour, or rich chestnut-brown; the star or vandyked circle rich
red, pale vermilion, and sometimes the most brilliant emerald green, as
brilliant as the gorget of a humming-bird.”
And what does this exquisitely delicate creature do with its pretty
mouth? Alas for fact! It sips no honey-dew, or fruits from paradise.—“I
put a minute spider, as large as a pin’s head, into the water, pushing it
down to the coral. The instant it touched the tip of a tentacle, it
adhered, and was drawn in with the surrounding tentacles between the
plates. With a lens I saw the small mouth slowly open, and move over to
that side, the lips gaping unsymmetrically; while with a movement as
imperceptible as that of the hour hand of a watch, the tiny prey was
carried along between the plates to the corner of the mouth. The mouth,
however, moved most, and at length reached the edges of the plates,
gradually closed upon the insect, and then returned to its usual place in
the centre.”
Mr. Gosse next tried the fairy of the walking mouth with a house-fly, who
escaped only by hard fighting; and at last the gentle creature, after
swallowing and disgorging various large pieces of shell-fish, found
viands to its taste in “the lean of cooked meat and portions of
earthworms,” filling up the intervals by a perpetual dessert of
microscopic animalcules, whirled into that lovely avernus, its mouth, by
the currents of the delicate ciliæ which clothe every tentacle. The fact
is, that the Madrepore, like those glorious sea-anemones whose living
flowers stud every pool, is by profession a scavenger and a feeder on
carrion; and being as useful as he is beautiful, really comes under the
rule which he seems at first to break, that handsome is who handsome
does.
Another species of Madrepore {121} was discovered on our Devon coast by
Mr. Gosse, more gaudy, though not so delicate in hue as our Caryophyllia.
Mr. Gosse’s locality, for this and numberless other curiosities, is
Ilfracombe, on the north coast of Devon. My specimens came from Lundy
Island, in the mouth of the Bristol Channel, or more properly from that
curious “Rat Island” to the south of it, where still lingers the black
long-tailed English rat, exterminated everywhere else by his sturdier
brown cousin of the Hanoverian dynasty.
Look, now, at these tiny saucers of the thinnest ivory, the largest not
bigger than a silver threepence, which contain in their centres a
milk-white crust of stone, pierced, as you see under the magnifier, into
a thousand cells, each with its living architect within. Here are two
kinds: in one the tubular cells radiate from the centre, giving it the
appearance of a tiny compound flower, daisy or groundsel; in the other
they are crossed with waving grooves, giving the whole a peculiar fretted
look, even more beautiful than that of the former species. They are
Tubulipora patina and Tubulipora hispida;—and stay—break off that tiny
rough red wart, and look at its cells also under the magnifier: it is
Cellepora pumicosa; and now, with the Madrepore, you hold in your hand
the principal, at least the commonest, British types of those famed coral
insects, which in the tropics are the architects of continents, and the
conquerors of the ocean surge. All the world, since the publication of
Darwin’s delightful “Voyage of the Beagle,”‘ and of Williams’ “Missionary
Enterprises,” knows, or ought to know, enough about them: for those who
do not, there are a few pages in the beginning of Dr. Landsborough’s
“British Zoophytes,” well worth perusal.
There are a few other true cellepore corals round the coast. The largest
of all, Cervicornis, may be dredged a few miles outside on the Exmouth
bank, with a few more Tubulipores: but all tiny things, the lingering
and, as it were, expiring remnants of that great coral-world which,
through the abysmal depths of past ages, formed here in Britain our
limestone hills, storing up for generations yet unborn the materials of
agriculture and architecture. Inexpressibly interesting, even solemn, to
those who will think, is the sight of those puny parasites which, as it
were, connect the ages and the æons: yet not so solemn and full of
meaning as that tiny relic of an older world, the little pear-shaped
Turbinolia (cousin of the Madrepores and Sea-anemones), found fossil in
the Suffolk Crag, and yet still lingering here and there alive in the
deep water of Scilly and the west coast of Ireland, possessor of a
pedigree which dates, perhaps, from ages before the day in which it was
said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” To think that
the whole human race, its joys and its sorrows, its virtues and its sins,
its aspirations and its failures, has been rushing out of eternity and
into eternity again, as Arjoon in the Bhagavad Gita beheld the race of
men issuing from Kreeshna’s flaming mouth, and swallowed up in it again,
“as the crowds of insects swarm into the flame, as the homeless streams
leap down into the ocean bed,” in an everlasting heart-pulse whose blood
is living souls—and all that while, and ages before that mystery began,
that humble coral, unnoticed on the dark sea-floor, has been “continuing
as it was at the beginning,” and fulfilling “the law which cannot be
broken,” while races and dynasties and generations have been
“Playing such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make the angels weep.”
Yes; it is this vision of the awful permanence and perfection of the
natural world, beside the wild flux and confusion, the mad struggles, the
despairing cries of the world of spirits which man has defiled by sin,
which would at moments crush the naturalist’s heart, and make his brain
swim with terror, were it not that he can see by faith, through all the
abysses and the ages, not merely
“Hands,
From out the darkness, shaping man;”
but above them a living loving countenance, human and yet Divine; and can
hear a voice which said at first, “Let us make man in our image;” and
hath said since then, and says for ever and for ever, “Lo, I am with you
alway, even to the end of the world.”
But now, friend, who listenest, perhaps instructed, and at least
amused—if, as Professor Harvey well says, the simpler animals represent,
as in a glass, the scattered organs of the higher races, which of your
organs is represented by that “sca’d man’s head,” which the Devon
children more gracefully, yet with less adherence to plain likeness, call
“mermaid’s head,” {126a} which we picked up just now on Paignton Sands?
Or which, again, by its more beautiful little congener, {126b} five or
six of which are adhering tightly to the slab before us, a ball covered
with delicate spines of lilac and green, and stuck over (cunning
fellows!) with stripes of dead sea-weed to serve as improvised parasols?
One cannot say that in him we have the first type of the human skull: for
the resemblance, quaint as it is, is only sensuous and accidental, (in
the logical use of that term,) and not homological, _i.e._ a lower
manifestation of the same idea. Yet how is one tempted to say, that this
was Nature’s first and lowest attempt at that use of hollow globes of
mineral for protecting soft fleshy parts, which she afterwards developed
to such perfection in the skulls of vertebrate animals! But even that
conceit, pretty as it sounds, will not hold good; for though Radiates
similar to these were among the earliest tenants of the abyss, yet as
early as their time, perhaps even before them, had been conceived and
actualized, in the sharks, and in Mr. Hugh Miller’s pets the old red
sandstone fishes, that very true vertebrate skull and brain, of which
this is a mere mockery. {127} Here the whole animal, with his
extraordinary feeding mill, (for neither teeth nor jaws is a fit word for
it,) is enclosed within an ever-growing limestone castle, to the
architecture of which the Eddystone and the Crystal Palace are bungling
heaps; without arms or legs, eyes or ears, and yet capable, in spite of
his perpetual imprisonment, of walking, feeding, and breeding, doubt it
not, merrily enough. But this result has been attained at the expense of
a complication of structure, which has baffled all human analysis and
research into final causes. As much concerning this most miraculous of
families as is needful to be known, and ten times more than you are
likely to understand, may be read in Harvey’s “Sea-Side Book,” pp.
142–148,—pages from which you will probably arise with a sense of the
infinity and complexity of Nature, even in what we are pleased to call
her “lower” forms, and the simplest and, as it were, easiest forms of
life. Conceive a Crystal Palace, (for mere difference in size, as both
the naturalist and the metaphysician know, has nothing to do with the
wonder,) whereof each separate joist, girder, and pane grows continually
without altering the shape of the whole; and you have conceived only one
of the miracles embodied in that little sea-egg, which the Creator has,
as it were, to justify to man His own immutability, furnished with a
shell capable of enduring fossil for countless ages, that we may confess
Him to have been as great when first His Spirit brooded on the deep, as
He is now and will be through all worlds to come.
But we must make haste; for the tide is rising fast, and our stone will
be restored to its eleven hours’ bath, long before we have talked over
half the wonders which it holds. Look though, ere you retreat, at one or
two more.
What is that little brown thing whom you have just taken off the rock to
which it adhered so stoutly by his sucking-foot? A limpet? Not at all:
he is of quite a different family and structure; but, on the whole, a
limpet-like shell would suit him well enough, so he had one given him:
nevertheless, owing to certain anatomical peculiarities, he needed one
aperture more than a limpet; so one, if you will examine, has been given
him at the top of his shell. {129} This is one instance among a thousand
of the way in which a scientific knowledge of objects must not obey, but
run counter to, the impressions of sense; and of a custom in nature which
makes this caution so necessary, namely, the repetition of the same form,
slightly modified, in totally different animals, sometimes as if to avoid
waste, (for why should not the same conception be used in two different
cases, if it will suit in both?) and sometimes (more marvellous by far)
when an organ, fully developed and useful in one species, appears in a
cognate species but feeble, useless, and, as it were, abortive; and
gradually, in species still farther removed, dies out altogether; placed
there, it would seem, at first sight, merely to keep up the family
likeness. I am half jesting; that cannot be the only reason, perhaps not
the reason at all; but the fact is one of the most curious, and notorious
also, in comparative anatomy.
[Picture: Plate 10: Serpula Contortuplicata etc.]
Look, again, at those sea-slugs. One, some three inches long, of a
bright lemon-yellow, clouded with purple; another of a dingy grey; {130a}
another exquisite little creature of a pearly French White, {130b} furred
all over the back with what seem arms, but are really gills, of ringed
white and grey and black. Put that yellow one into water, and from his
head, above the eyes, arise two serrated horns, while from the after-part
of his back springs a circular Prince-of-Wales’s-feather of gills,—they
are almost exactly like those which we saw just now in the white
Cucumaria. Yes; here is another instance of the same custom of
repetition. The Cucumaria is a low radiate animal—the sea-slug a far
higher mollusc; and every organ within him is formed on a different type;
as indeed are those seemingly identical gills, if you come to examine
them under the microscope, having to oxygenate fluids of a very different
and more complicated kind; and, moreover, the Cucumaria’s gills were put
round his mouth, the Doris’s feathers round the other extremity; that
grey Eolis’s, again, are simple clubs, scattered over his whole back, and
in each of his nudibranch congeners these same gills take some new and
fantastic form; in Melibæa those clubs are covered with warts; in
Scyllæa, with tufted bouquets; in the beautiful Antiopa they are
transparent bags; and in many other English species they take every
conceivable form of leaf, tree, flower, and branch, bedecked with every
colour of the rainbow, as you may see them depicted in Messrs. Alder and
Hancock’s unrivalled Monograph on the Nudibranch Mollusca.
And now, worshipper of final causes and the mere useful in nature, answer
but one question,—Why this prodigal variety? All these Nudibranchs live
in much the same way: why would not the same mould have done for them
all? And why, again, (for we must push the argument a little further,)
why have not all the butterflies, at least all who feed on the same
plant, the same markings? Of all unfathomable triumphs of design, (we
can only express ourselves thus, for honest induction, as Paley so well
teaches, allows us to ascribe such results only to the design of some
personal will and mind,) what surpasses that by which the scales on a
butterfly’s wing are arranged to produce a certain pattern of artistic
beauty beyond all painter’s skill? What a waste of power, on any
utilitarian theory of nature! And once more, why are those strange
microscopic atomies, the Diatomaceæ and Infusoria, which fill every
stagnant pool; which fringe every branch of sea-weed; which form banks
hundreds of miles long on the Arctic sea-floor, and the strata of whole
moorlands; which pervade in millions the mass of every iceberg, and float
aloft in countless swarms amid the clouds of the volcanic dust;—why are
their tiny shells of flint as fantastically various in their quaint
mathematical symmetry, as they are countless beyond the wildest dreams of
the Poet? Mystery inexplicable on the conceited notion which, making man
forsooth the centre of the universe, dares to believe that this variety
of forms has existed for countless ages in abysmal sea-depths and
untrodden forests, only that some few individuals of the Western races
might, in these latter days, at last discover and admire a corner here
and there of the boundless realms of beauty. Inexplicable, truly, if man
be the centre and the object of their existence; explicable enough to him
who believes that God has created all things for Himself, and rejoices in
His own handiwork, and that the material universe is, as the wise man
says, “A platform whereon His Eternal Spirit sports and makes melody.”
Of all the blessings which the study of nature brings to the patient
observer, let none, perhaps, be classed higher than this: that the
further he enters into those fairy gardens of life and birth, which
Spenser saw and described in his great poem, the more he learns the awful
and yet most comfortable truth, that they do not belong to him, but to
One greater, wiser, lovelier than he; and as he stands, silent with awe,
amid the pomp of Nature’s ever-busy rest, hears, as of old, “The Word of
the Lord God walking among the trees of the garden in the cool of the
day.”
One sight more, and we have done. I had something to say, had time
permitted, on the ludicrous element which appears here and there in
nature. There are animals, like monkeys and crabs, which seem made to be
laughed at; by those at least who possess that most indefinable of
faculties, the sense of the ridiculous. As long as man possesses muscles
especially formed to enable him to laugh, we have no right to suppose
(with some) that laughter is an accident of our fallen nature; or to find
(with others) the primary cause of the ridiculous in the perception of
unfitness or disharmony. And yet we shrink (whether rightly or wrongly,
we can hardly tell) from attributing a sense of the ludicrous to the
Creator of these forms. It may be a weakness on my part; at least I will
hope it is a reverent one: but till we can find something corresponding
to what we conceive of the Divine Mind in any class of phenomena, it is
perhaps better not to talk about them at all, but observe a stoic
“epoche,” waiting for more light, and yet confessing that our own
laughter is uncontrollable, and therefore we hope not unworthy of us, at
many a strange creature and strange doing which we meet, from the highest
ape to the lowest polype.
But, in the meanwhile, there are animals in which results so strange,
fantastic, even seemingly horrible, are produced, that fallen man may be
pardoned, if he shrinks from them in disgust. That, at least, must be a
consequence of our own wrong state; for everything is beautiful and
perfect in its place. It may be answered, “Yes, in its place; but its
place is not yours. You had no business to look at it, and must pay the
penalty for intermeddling.” I doubt that answer; for surely, if man have
liberty to do anything, he has liberty to search out freely his heavenly
Father’s works; and yet every one seems to have his antipathic animal;
and I know one bred from his childhood to zoology by land and sea, and
bold in asserting, and honest in feeling, that all without exception is
beautiful, who yet cannot, after handling and petting and admiring all
day long every uncouth and venomous beast, avoid a paroxysm of horror at
the sight of the common house-spider. At all events, whether we were
intruding or not, in turning this stone, we must pay a fine for having
done so; for there lies an animal as foul and monstrous to the eye as
“hydra, gorgon, or chimæra dire,” and yet so wondrously fitted to its
work, that we must needs endure for our own instruction to handle and to
look at it. Its name, if you wish for it, is Nemertes; probably N.
Borlasii; {136} a worm of very “low” organization, though well fitted
enough for its own work. You see it? That black, shiny, knotted lump
among the gravel, small enough to be taken up in a dessert spoon. Look
now, as it is raised and its coils drawn out. Three feet—six—nine, at
least: with a capability of seemingly endless expansion; a slimy tape of
living caoutchouc, some eighth of an inch in diameter, a dark
chocolate-black, with paler longitudinal lines. Is it alive? It hangs,
helpless and motionless, a mere velvet string across the hand. Ask the
neighbouring Annelids and the fry of the rock fishes, or put it into a
vase at home, and see. It lies motionless, trailing itself among the
gravel; you cannot tell where it begins or ends; it may be a dead strip
of sea-weed, Himanthalia lorea, perhaps, or Chorda filum; or even a
tarred string. So thinks the little fish who plays over and over it,
till he touches at last what is too surely a head. In an instant a
bell-shaped sucker mouth has fastened to his side. In another instant,
from one lip, a concave double proboscis, just like a tapir’s (another
instance of the repetition of forms), has clasped him like a finger; and
now begins the struggle: but in vain. He is being “played” with such a
fishing-line as the skill of a Wilson or a Stoddart never could invent; a
living line, with elasticity beyond that of the most delicate fly-rod,
which follows every lunge, shortening and lengthening, slipping and
twining round every piece of gravel and stem of sea-weed, with a tiring
drag such as no Highland wrist or step could ever bring to bear on salmon
or on trout. The victim is tired now; and slowly, and yet dexterously,
his blind assailant is feeling and shifting along his side, till he
reaches one end of him; and then the black lips expand, and slowly and
surely the curved finger begins packing him end-foremost down into the
gullet, where he sinks, inch by inch, till the swelling which marks his
place is lost among the coils, and he is probably macerated to a pulp
long before he has reached the opposite extremity of his cave of doom.
Once safe down, the black murderer slowly contracts again into a knotted
heap, and lies, like a boa with a stag inside him, motionless and blest.
{138}
[Picture: Nemerties Borlasii etc.: Plate 3]
There; we must come away now, for the tide is over our ankles; but touch,
before you go, one of those little red mouths which peep out of the
stone. A tiny jet of water shoots up almost into your face. The bivalve
{139a} who has burrowed into the limestone knot (the softest part of the
stone to his jaws, though the hardest to your chisel) is scandalized at
having the soft mouths of his siphons so rudely touched, and taking your
finger for some bothering Annelid, who wants to nibble him, is defending
himself; shooting you, as naturalists do humming-birds, with water. Let
him rest in peace; it will cost you ten minutes’ hard work, and much
dirt, to extract him; but if you are fond of shells, secure one or two of
those beautiful pink and straw-coloured scallops (Hinnites pusio, Plate
X. fig. 1), who have gradually incorporated the layers of their lower
valve with the roughnesses of the stone, destroying thereby the beautiful
form which belongs to their race, but not their delicate colour. There
are a few more bivalves too, adhering to the stone, and those rare ones,
and two or three delicate Mangeliæ and Nassæ {139b} are trailing their
graceful spires up and down in search of food. That little bright red
and yellow pea, too, touch it—the brilliant coloured cloak is withdrawn,
and, instead, you have a beautiful ribbed pink cowry, {140a} our only
European representative of that grand tropical family. Cast one
wondering glance, too, at the forest of zoophytes and corals, Lepraliæ
and Flustræ, and those quaint blue stars, set in brown jelly, which are
no zoophytes, but respectable molluscs, each with his well-formed mouth
and intestines, {140b} but combined in a peculiar form of Communism, of
which all one can say is, that one hopes they like it; and that, at all
events, they agree better than the heroes and heroines of Mr. Hawthorne’s
“Blithedale Romance.”
Now away, and as a specimen of the fertility of the water-world, look at
this rough list of species, {140c} the greater part of which are on this
very stone, and all of which you might obtain in an hour, would the rude
tide wait for zoologists: and remember that the number of individuals of
each species of polype must be counted by tens of thousands; and also,
that, by searching the forest of sea-weeds which covers the upper
surface, we should probably obtain some twenty minute species more.
A goodly catalogue this, surely, of the inhabitants of three or four
large stones; and yet how small a specimen of the multitudinous nations
of the sea!
From the bare rocks above high-water mark, down to abysses deeper than
ever plummet sounded, is life, everywhere life; fauna after fauna, and
flora after flora, arranged in zones, according to the amount of light
and warmth which each species requires, and to the amount of pressure
which they are able to endure. The crevices of the highest rocks, only
sprinkled with salt spray in spring-tides and high gales, have their
peculiar little univalves, their crisp lichen-like sea-weed, in myriads;
lower down, the region of the Fuci (bladder-weeds) has its own tribes of
periwinkles and limpets; below again, about the neap-tide mark, the
region of the corallines and Algæ furnishes food for yet other species
who graze on its watery meadows; and beneath all, only uncovered at low
spring-tide, the zone of the Laminariæ (the great tangles and ore-weeds)
is most full of all of every imaginable form of life. So that as we
descend the rocks, we may compare ourselves (likening small things to
great) to those who, descending the Andes, pass in a single day from the
vegetation of the Arctic zone to that of the Tropics. And here and
there, even at half-tide level, deep rock-basins, shaded from the sun and
always full of water, keep up in a higher zone the vegetation of a lower
one, and afford in nature an analogy to those deep “barrancos” which
split the high table-land of Mexico, down whose awful cliffs, swept by
cool sea-breezes, the traveller looks from among the plants and animals
of the temperate zone, and sees far below, dim through their everlasting
vapour-bath of rank hot steam, the mighty forms and gorgeous colours of a
tropic forest.
“I do not wonder,” says Mr. Gosse, in his charming “Naturalist’s Rambles
on the Devonshire Coast” (p. 187), “that when Southey had an opportunity
of seeing some of those beautiful quiet basins hollowed in the living
rock, and stocked with elegant plants and animals, having all the charm
of novelty to his eye, they should have moved his poetic fancy, and found
more than one place in the gorgeous imagery of his Oriental romances.
Just listen to him
“It was a garden still beyond all price,
Even yet it was a place of paradise;
* * * * * *
And here were coral bowers,
And grots of madrepores,
And banks of sponge, as soft and fair to eye
As e’er was mossy bed
Whereon the wood-nymphs lie
With languid limbs in summer’s sultry hours.
Here, too, were living flowers,
Which, like a bud compacted,
Their purple cups contracted;
And now in open blossom spread,
Stretch’d, like green anthers, many a seeking head.
And arborets of jointed stone were there,
And plants of fibres fine as silkworm’s thread;
Yea, beautiful as mermaid’s golden hair
Upon the waves dispread.
Others that, like the broad banana growing,
Raised their long wrinkled leaves of purple hue,
Like streamers wide outflowing.’—_Kehama_, xvi. 5.
“A hundred times you might fancy you saw the type, the very original of
this description, tracing, line by line, and image by image, the details
of the picture; and acknowledging, as you proceed, the minute
truthfulness with which it has been drawn. For such is the loveliness of
nature in these secluded reservoirs, that the accomplished poet, when
depicting the gorgeous scenes of Eastern mythology—scenes the wildest and
most extravagant that imagination could paint—drew not upon the resources
of his prolific fancy for imagery here, but was well content to jot down
the simple lineaments of Nature as he saw her in plain, homely England.
“It is a beautiful and fascinating sight for those who have never seen it
before, to see the little shrubberies of pink coralline—‘the arborets of
jointed stone’—that fringe those pretty pools. It is a charming sight to
see the crimson banana-like leaves of the Delesseria waving in their
darkest corners; and the purple fibrous tufts of Polysiphonia and
Ceramia, ‘fine as silkworm’s thread.’ But there are many others which
give variety and impart beauty to these tide-pools. The broad leaves of
the Ulva, finer than the finest cambric, and of the brightest
emerald-green, adorn the hollows at the highest level, while, at the
lowest, wave tiny forests of the feathery Ptilota and Dasya, and large
leaves, cut into fringes and furbelows, of rosy Rhodymeniæ. All these
are lovely to behold; but I think I admire as much as any of them, one of
the commonest of our marine plants, Chondrus crispus. It occurs in the
greatest profusion on this coast, in every pool between tide-marks; and
everywhere—except in those of the highest level, where constant exposure
to light dwarfs the plant, and turns it of a dull umber-brown tint—it is
elegant in form and brilliant in colour. The expanding fan-shaped
fronds, cut into segments, cut, and cut again, make fine bushy tufts in a
deep pool, and every segment of every frond reflects a flush of the most
lustrous azure, like that of a tempered sword-blade.”—GOSSE’S _Devonshire
Coast_, pp. 187–189.
And the sea-bottom, also, has its zones, at different depths, and its
peculiar forms in peculiar spots, affected by the currents and the nature
of the ground, the riches of which have to be seen, alas! rather by the
imagination than the eye; for such spoonfuls of the treasure as the
dredge brings up to us, come too often rolled and battered, torn from
their sites and contracted by fear, mere hints to us of what the populous
reality below is like. Often, standing on the shore at low tide, has one
longed to walk on and in under the waves, as the water-ousel does in the
pools of the mountain burn, and see it all but for a moment; and a solemn
beauty and meaning has invested the old Greek fable of Glaucus the
fisherman: how eating of the herb which gave his fish strength to leap
back into their native element, he was seized on the spot with a strange
longing to follow them under the waves, and became for ever a companion
of the fair semi-human forms with which the Hellenic poets peopled their
sunny bays and firths, feeding “silent flocks” far below on the green
Zostera beds, or basking with them on the sunny ledges in the summer
noon, or wandering in the still bays on sultry nights amid the choir of
Amphitrite and her sea-nymphs:—
“Joining the bliss of the gods, as they waken the coves with their
laughter,”
in nightly revels, whereof one has sung,—
“So they came up in their joy; and before them the roll of the surges
Sank, as the breezes sank dead, into smooth green foam-flecked marble
Awed; and the crags of the cliffs, and the pines of the mountains,
were silent.
So they came up in their joy, and around them the lamps of the
sea-nymphs,
Myriad fiery globes, swam heaving and panting, and rainbows,
Crimson, and azure, and emerald, were broken in star-showers,
lighting,
Far in the wine-dark depths of the crystal, the gardens of Nereus,
Coral, and sea-fan, and tangle, the blooms and the palms of the
ocean.
So they went on in their joy, more white than the foam which they
scattered,
Laughing and singing and tossing and twining; while, eager, the
Tritons
Blinded with kisses their eyes, unreproved, and above them in worship
Fluttered the terns, and the sea-gulls swept past them on silvery
pinions,
Echoing softly their laughter; around them the wantoning dolphins
Sighed as they plunged, full of love; and the great sea-horses which
bore them
Curved up their crests in their pride to the delicate arms of their
riders,
Pawing the spray into gems, till a fiery rainfall, unharming,
Sparkled and gleamed on the limbs of the maids, and the coils of the
mermen.
So they went on in their joy, bathed round with the fiery coolness,
Needing nor sun nor moon, self-lighted, immortal: but others,
Pitiful, floated in silence apart; on their knees lay the sea-boys
Whelmed by the roll of the surge, swept down by the anger of Nereus;
Hapless, whom never again upon quay or strand shall their mothers
Welcome with garlands and vows to the temples; but, wearily pining,
Gaze over island and main for the sails which return not; they,
heedless,
Sleep in soft bosoms for ever, and dream of the surge and the
sea-maids.
So they passed by in their joy, like a dream, on the murmuring
ripple.”
Such a rhapsody may be somewhat out of order, even in a popular
scientific book; and yet one cannot help at moments envying the old Greek
imagination, which could inform the soulless sea-world with a human life
and beauty. For, after all, star-fishes and sea-anemones are dull
substitutes for Sirens and Tritons; the lamps of the sea-nymphs, those
glorious phosphorescent medusæ whose beauty Mr. Gosse sets forth so well
with pen and pencil, are not as attractive as the sea-nymphs themselves
would be; and who would not, like Menelaus, take the grey old man of the
sea himself asleep upon the rocks, rather than one of his seal-herd,
probably too with the same result as the world-famous combat in the
Antiquary, between Hector and Phoca? And yet—is there no human interest
in these pursuits, more humanity and more divine, than there would be
even in those Triton and Nereid dreams, if realized to sight and sense?
Heaven forbid that those should say so, whose wanderings among rock and
pool have been mixed up with holiest passages of friendship and of love,
and the intercommunion of equal minds and sympathetic hearts, and the
laugh of children drinking in health from every breeze and instruction at
every step, running ever and anon with proud delight to add their little
treasure to their parents’ stock, and of happy friendly evenings spent
over the microscope and the vase, in examining, arranging, preserving,
noting down in the diary the wonders and the labours of the happy, busy
day. No; such short glimpses of the water-world as our present
appliances afford us are full enough of pleasure; and we will not envy
Glaucus: we will not even be over-anxious for the success of his only
modern imitator, the French naturalist who is reported to have fitted
himself with a waterproof dress and breathing apparatus, in order to walk
the bottom of the Mediterranean, and see for himself how the world goes
on at the fifty-fathom line: we will be content with the wonders of the
shore and of the sea-floor, as far as the dredge will discover them to
us. We shall even thus find enough to occupy (if we choose) our
lifetime. For we must recollect that this hasty sketch has hardly
touched on that vegetable water-world, which is as wonderful and as
various as the animal one. A hint or two of the beauty of the sea-weeds
has been given; but space has allowed no more. Yet we might have spent
our time with almost as much interest and profit, had we neglected
utterly the animals which we have found, and devoted our attention
exclusively to the flora of the rocks. Sea-weeds are no mere playthings
for children; and to buy at a shop some thirty pretty kinds, pasted on
paper, with long names (probably mis-spelt) written under each, is not by
any means to possess a collection of them. Putting aside the number and
the obscurity of their species, the questions which arise in studying
their growth, reproduction, and organic chemistry are of the very deepest
and most important in the whole range of science; and it will need but a
little study of such a book as Harvey’s “Algæ,” to show the wise man that
he who has comprehended (which no man yet does) the mystery of a single
spore or tissue-cell, has reached depths in the great “Science of Life”
at which an Owen would still confess himself “blind by excess of light.”
“Knowest thou how the bones grow in the womb?” asks the Jewish sage,
sadly, half self-reprovingly, as he discovers that man is not the measure
of all things, and that in much learning may be vanity and vexation of
spirit, and in much study a weariness of the flesh; and all our deeper
physical science only brings the same question more awfully near.
“Vilior algâ,” more worthless than the very sea-weed, says the old Roman:
and yet no torn scrap of that very sea-weed, which to-morrow may manure
the nearest garden, but says to us, “Proud man! talking of spores and
vesicles, if thou darest for a moment to fancy that to have seen spores
and vesicles is to have seen _me_, or to know what I am, answer this.
Knowest thou how the bones do grow in the womb? Knowest thou even how
one of these tiny black dots, which thou callest spores, grow on my
fronds?” And to that question what answer shall we make? We see tissues
divide, cells develop, processes go on—but How and Why? These are but
phenomena; but what are phenomena save effects? Causes, it may be, of
other effects; but still effects of other causes. And why does the cause
cause that effect? Why should it not cause something else? Why should
it cause anything at all? Because it obeys a law. But why does it obey
the law? and how does it obey the law? And, after all, what is a law? A
mere custom of Nature. We see the same phenomenon happen a great many
times; and we infer from thence that it has a custom of happening; and
therefore we call it a law: but we have not seen the law; all we have
seen is the phenomenon which we suppose to indicate the law. We have
seen things fall: but we never saw a little flying thing pulling them
down, with “gravitation” labelled on its back; and the question, _why_
things fall, and _how_, is just where it was before Newton was born, and
is likely to remain there. All we can say is, that Nature has her
customs, and that other customs ensue, when those customs appear: but
that as to what connects cause and effect, as to what is the reason, the
final cause, or even the _causa causans_, of any phenomenon, we know not
more but less than ever; for those laws or customs which seem to us
simplest (“endosmose,” for instance, or “gravitation”), are just the most
inexplicable, logically unexpected, seemingly arbitrary, certainly
supernatural—miraculous, if you will; for no natural and physical cause
whatsoever can be assigned for them; while if anyone shall argue against
their being miraculous and supernatural on the ground of their being so
common, I can only answer, that of all absurd and illogical arguments,
this is the most so. For what has the number of times which the miracle
occurs to do with the question, save to increase the wonder? Which is
more strange, that an inexplicable and unfathomable thing should occur
once and for all, or that it should occur a million times every day all
the world over?
Let those, however, who are too proud to wonder, do as seems good to
them. Their want of wonder will not help them toward the required
explanation: and to them, as to us, as soon as we begin asking, “_How_?”
and “_Why_?” the mighty Mother will only reply with that magnificent
smile of hers, most genial, but most silent, which she has worn since the
foundation of all worlds; that silent smile which has tempted many a man
to suspect her of irony, even of deceit and hatred of the human race; the
silent smile which Solomon felt, and answered in “Ecclesiastes;” which
Goethe felt, and did not answer in his “Faust;” which Pascal felt, and
tried to answer in his “Thoughts,” and fled from into self-torture and
superstition, terrified beyond his powers of endurance, as he found out
the true meaning of St. John’s vision, and felt himself really standing
on that fragile and slippery “sea of glass,” and close beneath him the
bottomless abyss of doubt, and the nether fires of moral retribution. He
fled from Nature’s silent smile, as that poor old King Edward (mis-called
the Confessor) fled from her hymns of praise, in the old legend of
Havering-atte-bower, when he cursed the nightingales because their songs
confused him in his prayers: but the wise man need copy neither, and fear
neither the silence nor the laughter of the mighty mother Earth, if he
will be but wise, and hear her tell him, alike in both—“Why call me
mother? Why ask me for knowledge which I cannot teach, peace which I
cannot give or take away? I am only your foster-mother and your
nurse—and I have not been an unkindly one. But you are God’s children,
and not mine. Ask Him. I can amuse you with my songs; but they are but
a nurse’s lullaby to the weary flesh. I can awe you with my silence; but
my silence is only my just humility, and your gain. How dare I pretend
to tell you secrets which He who made me knows alone? I am but inanimate
matter; why ask of me things which belong to living spirit? In God I
live and move, and have my being; I know not how, any more than you know.
Who will tell you what life is, save He who is the Lord of life? And if
He will not tell you, be sure it is because you need not to know. At
least, why seek God in nature, the living among the dead? He is not
here: He is risen.”
He is not here: He is risen. Good reader, you will probably agree that
to know that saying, is to know the key-note of the world to come.
Believe me, to know it, and all it means, is to know the keynote of this
world also, from the fall of dynasties and the fate of nations, to the
sea-weed which rots upon the beach.
It may seem startling, possibly (though I hope not, for my readers’ sake,
irreverent), to go back at once after such thoughts, be they true or
false, to the weeds upon the cliff above our heads. But He who is not
here, but is risen, yet is here, and has appointed them their services in
a wonderful order; and I wish that on some day, or on many days, when a
quiet sea and offshore breezes have prevented any new objects from coming
to land with the rising tide, you would investigate the flowers peculiar
to our sea-rocks and sandhills. Even if you do not find the delicate
lily-like Trichonema of the Channel Islands and Dawlish, or the almost as
beautiful Squill of the Cornish cliffs, or the sea-lavender of North
Devon, or any of those rare Mediterranean species which Mr. Johns has so
charmingly described in his “Week at the Lizard Point,” yet an average
cliff, with its carpeting of pink thrift and of bladder catchfly, and
Lady’s finger, and elegant grasses, most of them peculiar to the sea
marge, is often a very lovely flower-bed.
Not merely interesting, too, but brilliant in their vegetation are
sandhills; and the seemingly desolate dykes and banks of salt marshes
will yield many a curious plant, which you may neglect if you will: but
lay to your account the having to repent your neglect hereafter, when,
finding out too late what a pleasant study botany is, you search in vain
for curious forms over which you trod every day in crossing flats which
seemed to you utterly ugly and uninteresting, but which the good God was
watching as carefully as He did the pleasant hills inland: perhaps even
more carefully; for the uplands He has completed, and handed over to man,
that he may dress and keep them: but the tide-flats below are still
unfinished, dry land in the process of creation, to which every tide is
adding the elements of fertility, which shall grow food, perhaps in some
future state of our planet, for generations yet unborn.
But to return to the water-world, and to dredging; which of all sea-side
pursuits is perhaps the most pleasant, combining as it does fine weather
sailing with the discovery of new objects, to which, after all, the waifs
and strays of the beach, whether “flotsom jetsom, or lagand,” as the old
Admiralty laws define them, are few and poor. I say particularly fine
weather sailing; for a swell, which makes the dredge leap along the
bottom, instead of scraping steadily, is as fatal to sport as it is to
some people’s comfort. But dredging, if you use a pleasure boat and the
small naturalist’s dredge, is an amusement in which ladies, if they will,
may share, and which will increase, and not interfere with, the
amusements of a water-party.
The naturalist’s dredge, of which Mr. Gosse’s “Aquarium” gives a detailed
account, should differ from the common oyster dredge in being smaller;
certainly not more than four feet across the mouth; and instead of having
but one iron scraping-lip like the oyster dredge, it should have two, one
above and one below, so that it will work equally well on whichsoever
side it falls, or how often soever it may be turned over by rough ground.
The bag-net should be of strong spunyarn, or (still better) of hide “such
as those hides of the wild cattle of the Pampas, which the tobacconists
receive from South America,” cut into thongs, and netted close. It
should be loosely laced together with a thong at the tail edge in order
to be opened easily, when brought on board, without canting the net over,
and pouring the contents roughly out through the mouth. The
dragging-rope should be strong, and at least three times as long as the
perpendicular depth of the water in which you are working; if, indeed,
there is much breeze, or any swell at all, still more line should be
veered out. The inboard end should be made fast somewhere in the stern
sheets, the dredge hove to windward, the boat put before the wind; and
you may then amuse yourself as you will for the next quarter of an hour,
provided that you have got ready various wide-mouthed bottles for the
more delicate monsters, and a couple of buckets, to receive the large
lumps of oysters and serpulæ which you will probably bring to the
surface.
As for a dredging ground, one may be found, I suppose, off every
watering-place. The most fertile spots are in rough ground, in not less
than five fathoms water. The deeper the water, the rarer and more
interesting will the animals generally be: but a greater depth than
fifteen fathoms is not easily reached on this side of Plymouth; and, on
the whole, the beginner will find enough in seven or eight fathoms to
stock an aquarium rivalling any of those in the “Tank-house” at the
Zoological Gardens.
In general, the south coast of England, to the eastward of Portland,
affords bad dredging ground. The friable cliffs, of comparatively recent
formations, keep the sea shallow, and the bottom smooth and bare, by the
vast deposits of sand and gravel. Yet round the Isle of Wight,
especially at the back of the Needles, there ought to be fertile spots;
and Weymouth, according to Mr. Gosse and other well-known naturalists, is
a very garden of Nereus. Torbay, as may well be supposed, is an
admirable dredging spot; perhaps its two best points are round the
isolated Thatcher and Oare-rock, and from the mouth of Brixham harbour to
Berry Head; along which last line, for perhaps three hundred years, the
decks of all Brixham trawlers have been washed down ere running into
harbour, and the sea-bottom thus stored with treasures scraped up from
deeper water in every direction for miles and miles.
Hastings is, I fear, but a poor spot for dredging. Its friable cliffs
and strong tides produce a changeable and barren sea-floor. Yet the
immense quantities of Flustra thrown up after a storm indicate dredging
ground at no great distance outside; its rocks, uninteresting as they are
compared with our Devonians, have yielded to the industry and science of
M. Tumanowicz a vast number of sea-weeds and sponges. Those three
curious polypes, Valkeria cuscuta (Plate I. fig. 3), Notamia Bursaria,
and Serialaria Lendigera, abound within tide-marks; and as the place is
so much visited by Londoners, it may be worth while to give a few hints
as to what might be done, by anyone whose curiosity has been excited by
the salt-water tanks of the Zoological Gardens and the Crystal Palace.
[Picture: Plate 11: Syngnathus Lumbriciformis etc.]
An hour or two’s dredging round the rocks to the eastward, would probably
yield many delicate and brilliant little fishes; Gobies, brilliant Labri,
blue, yellow, and orange, with tiny rabbit mouths, and powerful
protruding teeth; pipe fishes (Syngnathi) {163} with strange snipe-bills
(which they cannot open) and snake-like bodies; small cuttlefish
(Sepiolæ) of a white jelly mottled with brilliant metallic hues, with a
ring of suckered arms round their tiny parrots’ beaks, who, put into a
jar, will hover and dart in the water, as the skylark does in air, by
rapid winnowings of their glassy side-fins, while they watch you with
bright lizard-eyes; the whole animal being a combination of the
vertebrate and the mollusc, so utterly fantastic and abnormal, that (had
not the family been amongst the commonest, from the earliest geological
epochs) it would have seemed, to man’s deductive intellect, a form almost
as impossible as the mermaid, far more impossible than the sea-serpent.
These, and perhaps a few handsome sea-slugs and bivalve shells, you will
be pretty sure to find: perhaps a great deal more.
Meanwhile, without dredging, you may find a good deal on the shore. In
the spring Doris bilineata comes to the rocks in thousands, to lay its
strange white furbelows of spawn upon their overhanging edges. Eolides
of extraordinary beauty haunt the same spots. The great Eolis papillosa,
of a delicate French grey; Eolis pellucida (?) (Plate X. fig. 4), in
which each papilla on the back is beautifully coloured with a streak of
pink, and tipped with iron blue; and a most fantastical yellow little
creature, so covered with plumes and tentacles that the body is
invisible, which I believe to be the Idalia aspersa of Alder and Hancock.
At the bottom of the rock pools, behind St. Leonard’s baths, may be found
hundreds of the snipe’s feather Anemone (Sagartia troglodytes), of every
line; from the common brown and grey snipe’s feather kind, to the
white-horned Hesperus, the orange-horned Aurora, and a rich lilac and
crimson variety, which does not seem to agree with either the Lilacinia
or Rubicunda of Gosse. A more beautiful living bouquet could hardly be
seen, than might be made of the varieties of this single species, from
this one place.
On the outside sands between the end of the Marina and the Martello
tower, you may find, at very low tides, great numbers of a sand-tube,
about three inches long, standing up out of the sand. I do not mean the
tubes of the Terebella, so common in all sands, which are somewhat
flexible, and have their upper end fringed with a ragged ring of sandy
arms: those I speak of are straight and stiff, and ending in a point
upward. Draw them out of the sand—they will offer some resistance—and
put them into a vase of water; you will see the worm inside expand two
delicate golden combs, just like old-fashioned back-hair combs, of a
metallic lustre, which will astonish you. With these combs the worm
seems to burrow head downward into the sand; but whether he always
remains in that attitude I cannot say. His name is Pectinaria Belgica.
He is an Annelid, or true worm, connected with the Serpulea and Sabellæ
of which I have spoken already, and holds himself in his case like them,
by hooks and bristles set on each ring of his body. In confinement he
will probably come out of his case and die; when you may dissect him at
your leisure, and learn a great deal more about him thereby than (I am
sorry to say) I know.
But if you have courage to run out fifteen or twenty miles to the
Diamond, you may find really rare and valuable animals. There is a risk,
of course, of being blown over to the coast of France, by a change of
wind; there is a risk also of not being able to land at night on the
inhospitable Hastings beach, and of sleeping, as best you can, on board:
but in the long days and settled fine weather of summer, the trip, in a
stout boat, ought to be a safe and a pleasant one.
On the Diamond you will find many, or most of those gay creatures which
attract your eye in the central row of tanks at the Zoological Gardens:
great twisted masses of Serpulæ, {167} those white tubes of stone, from
the mouth of which protrude pairs of rose-coloured or orange fans,
flashing in, quick as light, the moment that your finger approaches them
or your shadow crosses the water.
You will dredge, too, the twelve-rayed sun-star (Solaster papposa), with
his rich scarlet armour; and more strange, and quite as beautiful, the
bird’s foot star (Palmipes membranaceus), which you may see crawling by
its thousand sucking-feet in the Crystal Palace tanks, a pentagonal
webbed bird’s foot, of scarlet and orange shagreen. With him, most
probably, will be a specimen of the great purple heart-urchin (Spatangus
purpureus), clothed in pale lilac horny spines, and other Echinoderms,
for which you must consult Forbes’s “British Star-fishes:” but perhaps
the species among them which will interest you most, will be the common
brittle-star (Ophiocoma rosula), of which a hundred or so, I can promise,
shall come up at a single haul of the dredge, entwining their long
spine-clad arms in a seemingly inextricable confusion of “kaleidoscope”
patterns (thanks to Mr. Gosse for the one right epithet), purple and
azure, fawn, brown, green, grey, white and crimson; as if a whole bed of
China-asters should have first come to life, and then gone mad, and
fallen to fighting. But pick out, one by one, specimens from the tangled
mass, and you will agree that no China-aster is so fair as this living
stone-flower of the deep, with its daisy-like disc, and fine long prickly
arms, which never cease their graceful serpentine motion, and its colours
hardly alike in any two specimens. Handle them not, meanwhile, too
roughly, lest, whether modesty or in anger, they begin a desperate course
of gradual suicide, and, breaking off arm after arm piecemeal, fling them
indignantly at their tormentor. Along with these you will certainly
obtain a few of that fine bivalve, the great Scallop, which you have seen
lying on every fishmonger’s counter in Hastings. Of these you must pick
out those which seem dirtiest and most overgrown with parasites, and
place them carefully in a jar of salt water, where they may not be
rubbed; for they are worth your examination, not merely for the sake of
that ring of gem-like eyes which borders their “cloak,” lying along the
extreme out edge of the shell as the valves are half open, but for the
sake of the parasites outside: corallines of exquisite delicacy,
Plumulariæ and Sertulariæ, dead men’s hands (Alcyonia), lumps of white or
orange jelly, which will protrude a thousand star-like polypes, and the
Tubularia indivisa, twisted tubes of fine straw, which ought already to
have puzzled you; for you may pick them up in considerable masses on the
Hastings beach after a south-west gale, and think long over them before
you determine whether the oat-like stems and spongy roots belong to an
animal, or a vegetable. Animals they are, nevertheless, though even now
you will hardly guess the fact, when you see at the mouth of each tube a
little scarlet flower, connected with the pink pulp which fills the tube.
For a further description of this largest and handsomest of our Hydroid
Polypes, I must refer you to Johnston, or, failing him, to Landsborough;
and go on, to beg you not to despise those pink, or grey, or white lumps
of jelly, which will expand in salt water into exquisite sea-anemones, of
quite different forms from any which we have found along the rocks. One
of them will certainly be the Dianthus, {170} which will open into a
furbelowed flower, furred with innumerable delicate tentacula; and in the
centre a mouth of the most delicate orange, the size of the whole animal
being perhaps eight inches high and five across. Perhaps it will be of a
satiny grey, perhaps pale rose, perhaps pure white; whatever its colour,
it is the very maiden queen of all the beautiful tribe, and one of the
loveliest gems with which it has pleased God to bedeck this lower world.
[Picture: Plate 7: Echinus Miliaris etc.]
These and much more you will find on the scallops, or even more
plentifully on any lump of ancient oysters; and if you do not dredge, it
would be well worth your while to make interest with the fish-monger for
a few oyster lumps, put into water the moment they are taken out of the
trawl. Divide them carefully, clear out the oysters with a knife, and
put the shells into your aquarium, and you will find that an oyster at
home is a very different thing from an oyster on a stall.
You ought, besides, to dredge many handsome species of shells, which you
would never pick up along the beach; and if you are conchologizing in
earnest, you must not forget to bring home a tin box of shell sand, to be
washed and picked over in a dish at your leisure, or forget either to
wash through a fine sieve, over the boat’s side, any sludge and ooze
which the dredge brings up. Many—I may say, hundreds—rare and new shells
are found in this way, and in no other.
But if you cannot afford the expense of your own dredge and boat, and the
time and trouble necessary to follow the occupation scientifically, yet
every trawler and oyster-boat will afford you a tolerable satisfaction.
Go on board one of these; and while the trawl is down, spend a pleasant
hour or two in talking with the simple, honest, sturdy fellows who work
it, from whom (if you are as fortunate as I have been for many a year
past) you may get many a moving story of danger and sorrow, as well as
many a shrewd practical maxim, and often, too, a living recognition of
God, and the providence of God, which will send you home, perhaps, a
wiser and more genial man. And when the trawl is hauled, wait till the
fish are counted out, and packed away, and then kneel down and inspect
(in a pair of Mackintosh leggings, and your oldest coat) the crawling
heap of shells and zoophytes which remains behind about the decks, and
you will find, if a landsman, enough to occupy you for a week to come.
Nay, even if it be too calm for trawling, condescend to go out in a
dingy, and help to haul some honest fellow’s deep-sea lines and
lobster-pots, and you will find more and stranger things about them than
even fish or lobsters: though they, to him who has eyes to see, are
strange enough.
I speak from experience; for it was not so very long ago that, in the
north of Devon, I found sermons, not indeed in stones, but in a creature
reputed among the most worthless of sea-vermin. I had been lounging
about all the morning on the little pier, waiting, with the rest of the
village, for a trawling breeze which would not come. Two o’clock was
past, and still the red mainsails of the skiffs hung motionless, and
their images quivered head downwards in the glassy swell,
“As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.”
It was neap-tide, too, and therefore nothing could be done among the
rocks. So, in despair, finding an old coast-guard friend starting for
his lobster-pots, I determined to save the old man’s arms, by rowing him
up the shore; and then paddled homeward again, under the high green
northern wall, five hundred feet of cliff furred to the water’s edge with
rich oak woods, against whose base the smooth Atlantic swell died
whispering, as if curling itself up to sleep at last within that
sheltered nook, tired with its weary wanderings. The sun sank lower and
lower behind the deer-park point; the white stair of houses up the glen
was wrapped every moment deeper and deeper in hazy smoke and shade, as
the light faded; the evening fires were lighted one by one; the soft
murmur of the waterfall, and the pleasant laugh of children, and the
splash of homeward oars, came clearer and clearer to the ear at every
stroke: and as we rowed on, arose the recollection of many a brave and
wise friend, whose lot was cast in no such western paradise, but rather
in the infernos of this sinful earth, toiling even then amid the
festering alleys of Bermondsey and Bethnal Green, to palliate death and
misery which they had vainly laboured to prevent, watching the strides of
that very cholera which they had been striving for years to ward off, now
re-admitted in spite of all their warnings, by the carelessness, and
laziness, and greed of sinful man. And as I thought over the whole
hapless question of sanitary reform, proved long since a moral duty to
God and man, possible, easy, even pecuniarily profitable, and yet left
undone, there seemed a sublime irony, most humbling to man, in some of
Nature’s processes, and in the silent and unobtrusive perfection with
which she has been taught to anticipate, since the foundation of the
world, some of the loftiest discoveries of modern science, of which we
are too apt to boast as if we had created the method by discovering its
possibility. Created it? Alas for the pride of human genius, and the
autotheism which would make man the measure of all things, and the centre
of the universe! All the invaluable laws and methods of sanitary reform
at best are but clumsy imitations of the unseen wonders which every
animalcule and leaf have been working since the world’s foundation; with
this slight difference between them and us, that they fulfil their
appointed task, and we do not.
The sickly geranium which spreads its blanched leaves against the cellar
panes, and peers up, as if imploringly, to the narrow slip of sunlight at
the top of the narrow alley, had it a voice, could tell more truly than
ever a doctor in the town, why little Bessy sickened of the scarlatina,
and little Johnny of the hooping-cough, till the toddling wee things who
used to pet and water it were carried off each and all of them one by one
to the churchyard sleep, while the father and mother sat at home, trying
to supply by gin that very vital energy which fresh air and pure water,
and the balmy breath of woods and heaths, were made by God to give; and
how the little geranium did its best, like a heaven-sent angel, to right
the wrong which man’s ignorance had begotten, and drank in, day by day,
the poisoned atmosphere, and formed it into fair green leaves, and
breathed into the children’s faces from every pore, whenever they bent
over it, the life-giving oxygen for which their dulled blood and festered
lungs were craving in vain; fulfilling God’s will itself, though man
would not, too careless or too covetous to see, after thousands of years
of boasted progress, why God had covered the earth with grass, herb, and
tree, a living and life-giving garment of perpetual health and youth.
It is too sad to think long about, lest we become very Heraclituses. Let
us take the other side of the matter with Democritus, try to laugh man
out of a little of his boastful ignorance and self-satisfied clumsiness,
and tell him, that if the House of Commons would but summon one of the
little Paramecia from any Thames’ sewer-mouth, to give his evidence
before their next Cholera Committee, sanitary blue-books, invaluable as
they are, would be superseded for ever and a day; and sanitary reformers
would no longer have to confess, that they know of no means of stopping
the smells which in past hot summers drove the members out of the House,
and the judges out of Westminster Hall.
Nay, in the boat at the minute of which I have been speaking, silent and
neglected, sat a fellow-passenger, who was a greater adept at removing
nuisances than the whole Board of Health put together; and who had done
his work, too, with a cheapness unparalleled; for all his good deeds had
not as yet cost the State one penny. True, he lived by his business; so
do other inspectors of nuisances: but Nature, instead of paying Maia
Squinado, Esquire, some five hundred pounds sterling per annum for his
labour, had contrived, with a sublime simplicity of economy which Mr.
Hume might have envied and admired afar off, to make him do his work
gratis, by giving him the nuisances as his perquisites, and teaching him
how to eat them. Certainly (without going the length of the Caribs, who
upheld cannibalism because, they said, it made war cheap, and precluded
entirely the need of a commissariat), this cardinal virtue of cheapness
ought to make Squinado an interesting object in the eyes of the present
generation; especially as he was at that moment a true sanitary martyr,
having, like many of his human fellow-workers, got into a fearful scrape
by meddling with those existing interests, and “vested rights which are
but vested wrongs,” which have proved fatal already to more than one
Board of Health. For last night, as he was sitting quietly under a stone
in four fathoms water, he became aware (whether by sight, smell, or that
mysterious sixth sense, to us unknown, which seems to reside in his
delicate feelers) of a palpable nuisance somewhere in the neighbourhood;
and, like a trusty servant of the public, turned out of his bed instantly
and went in search; till he discovered, hanging among what he judged to
be the stems of ore-weed (Laminaria), three or four large pieces of stale
thornback, of most evil savour, and highly prejudicial to the purity of
the sea, and the health of the neighbouring herrings. Happy Squinado!
He needed not to discover the limits of his authority, to consult any
lengthy Nuisances’ Removal Act, with its clauses, and counter-clauses,
and explanations of interpretations, and interpretations of explanations.
Nature, who can afford to be arbitrary, because she is perfect, and to
give her servants irresponsible powers, because she has trained them to
their work, had bestowed on him and on his forefathers, as general health
inspectors, those very summary powers of entrance and removal in the
watery realms for which common sense, public opinion, and private
philanthropy are still entreating vainly in the terrestrial realms; so
finding a hole, in he went, and began to remove the nuisance, without
“waiting twenty-four hours,” “laying an information,” “serving a notice,”
or any other vain delay. The evil was there,—and there it should not
stay; so having neither cart nor barrow, he just began putting it into
his stomach, and in the meanwhile set his assistants to work likewise.
For suppose not, gentle reader, that Squinado went alone; in his train
were more than a hundred thousand as good as he, each in his office, and
as cheaply paid; who needed no cumbrous baggage train of force-pumps,
hose, chloride of lime packets, whitewash, pails or brushes, but were
every man his own instrument; and, to save expense of transit, just grew
on Squinado’s back. Do you doubt the assertion? Then lift him up
hither, and putting him gently into that shallow jar of salt water, look
at him through the hand-magnifier, and see how Nature is maxima in
minimis.
There he sits, twiddling his feelers (a substitute, it seems, with
crustacea for biting their nails when they are puzzled), and by no means
lovely to look on in vulgar eyes;—about the bigness of a man’s fist; a
round-bodied, spindle-shanked, crusty, prickly, dirty fellow, with a
villanous squint, too, in those little bony eyes, which never look for a
moment both the same way. Never mind: many a man of genius is ungainly
enough; and Nature, if you will observe, as if to make up to him for his
uncomeliness, has arrayed him as Solomon in all his glory never was
arrayed, and so fulfilled one of the proposals of old Fourier—that
scavengers, chimney-sweeps, and other workers in disgusting employments,
should be rewarded for their self-sacrifice in behalf of the public weal
by some peculiar badge of honour, or laurel crown. Not that his crown,
like those of the old Greek games, is a mere useless badge; on the
contrary, his robe of state is composed of his fellow-servants. His
whole back is covered with a little grey forest of branching hairs, fine
as a spider’s web, each branchlet carrying its little pearly ringed club,
each club its rose-coloured polype, like (to quote Mr. Gosse’s
comparison) the unexpanded birds of the acacia. {181a}
On that leg grows, amid another copse of the grey polypes, a delicate
straw-coloured Sertularia, branch on branch of tiny double combs, each
tooth of the comb being a tube containing a living flower; on another leg
another Sertularia, coarser, but still beautiful; and round it again has
trained itself, parasitic on the parasite, plant upon plant of glass ivy,
bearing crystal bells, {181b} each of which, too, protrudes its living
flower; on another leg is a fresh species, like a little heather-bush of
whitest ivory, {182} and every needle leaf a polype cell—let us stop
before the imagination grows dizzy with the contemplation of those
myriads of beautiful atomies. And what is their use? Each living
flower, each polype mouth is feeding fast, sweeping into itself, by the
perpetual currents caused by the delicate fringes upon its rays (so
minute these last, that their motion only betrays their presence), each
tiniest atom of decaying matter in the surrounding water, to convert it,
by some wondrous alchemy, into fresh cells and buds, and either build up
a fresh branch in their thousand-tenanted tree, or form an egg-cell, from
whence when ripe may issue, not a fixed zoophyte, but a free swimming
animal.
And in the meanwhile, among this animal forest grows a vegetable one of
delicatest sea-weeds, green and brown and crimson, whose office is, by
their everlasting breath, to reoxygenate the impure water, and render it
fit once more to be breathed by the higher animals who swim or creep
around.
Mystery of mysteries! Let us jest no more,—Heaven forgive us if we have
jested too much on so simple a matter as that poor spider-crab, taken out
of the lobster-pots, and left to die at the bottom of the boat, because
his more aristocratic cousins of the blue and purple armour will not
enter the trap while he is within.
I am not aware whether the surmise, that these tiny zoophytes help to
purify the water by exhaling oxygen gas, has yet been verified. The
infusorial animalcules do so, reversing the functions of animal life, and
instead of evolving carbonic acid gas, as other animals do, evolve pure
oxygen. So, at least, says Liebig, who states that he found a small
piece of matchwood, just extinguished, burst out again into a flame on
being immersed in the bubbles given out by these living atomies.
I myself should be inclined to doubt that this is the case with
zoophytes, having found water in which they were growing (unless, of
course, sea-weeds were present) to be peculiarly ready to become foul;
but it is difficult to say whether this is owing to their deoxygenating
the water while alive, like other animals, or to the fact that it is very
rare to get a specimen of zoophyte in which a large number of the polypes
have not been killed in the transit home, or at least so far knocked
about, that (in the Anthozoa, which are far the most abundant) the
polype—or rather living mouth, for it is little more—is thrown off to
decay, pending the growth of a fresh one in the same cell.
But all the sea-weeds, in common with other vegetables, perform this
function continually, and thus maintain the water in which they grow in a
state fit to support animal life.
This fact—first advanced by Priestley and Ingenhousz, and though doubted
by the great Ellis, satisfactorily ascertained by Professor Daubeny, Mr.
Ward, Dr. Johnston, and Mr. Warrington—gives an answer to the question,
which I hope has ere now arisen in the minds of some of my readers,—
How is it possible to see these wonders at home? Beautiful and
instructive as they may be, can they be meant for any but dwellers by the
sea-side? Nay more, even to them, must not the glories of the
water-world be always more momentary than those of the rainbow, a mere
Fata Morgana which breaks up and vanishes before the eyes? If there were
but some method of making a miniature sea-world for a few days; much more
of keeping one with us when far inland.—
This desideratum has at last been filled up; and science has shown, as
usual, that by simply obeying Nature, we may conquer her, even so far as
to have our miniature sea, of artificial salt-water, filled with living
plants and sea-weeds, maintaining each other in perfect health, and each
following, as far as is possible in a confined space, its natural habits.
To Dr. Johnston is due, as far as is known, the honour of the first
accomplishment of this as of a hundred other zoological triumphs. As
early as 1842, he proved to himself the vegetable nature of the common
pink Coralline, which fringes every rock-pool, by keeping it for eight
weeks in unchanged salt-water, without any putrefaction ensuing. The
ground, of course, on which the proof rested in this case was, that if
the coralline were, as had often been thought, a zoophyte, the water
would become corrupt, and poisonous to the life of the small animals in
the same jar; and that its remaining fresh argued that the coralline had
re-oxygenated it from time to time, and was therefore a vegetable.
In 1850, Mr. Robert Warrington communicated to the Chemical Society the
results of a year’s experiments, “On the Adjustment of the Relations
between the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms, by which the Vital Functions
of both are permanently maintained.” The law which his experiments
verified was the same as that on which Mr. Ward, in 1842, founded his
invaluable proposal for increasing the purity of the air in large towns,
by planting trees and cultivating flowers in rooms, _that the animal and
vegetable respirations might counterbalance each other_; the animal’s
blood being purified by the oxygen given off by the plants, the plants
fed by the carbonic acid breathed out by the animals.
On the same principle, Mr. Warrington first kept, for many months, in a
vase of unchanged water, two small gold fish and a plant of Vallisneria
spiralis; and two years afterwards began a similar experiment with
sea-water, weeds, and anemones, which were, at last, as successful as the
former ones. Mr. Gosse had, in the meanwhile, with tolerable success
begun a similar method, unaware of what Mr. Warrington had done; and now
the beautiful and curious exhibition of fresh and salt water tanks in the
Zoological Gardens in London, bids fair to be copied in every similar
institution, and we hope in many private houses, throughout the kingdom.
To this subject Mr. Gosse’s book, “The Aquarium,” is principally devoted,
though it contains, besides, sketches of coast scenery, in his usual
charming style, and descriptions of rare sea-animals, with wise and
goodly reflections thereon. One great object of interest in the book is
the last chapter, which treats fully of the making and stocking these
salt-water “Aquaria;” and the various beautifully coloured plates, which
are, as it were, sketches from the interior of tanks, are well fitted to
excite the desire of all readers to possess such gorgeous living
pictures, if as nothing else, still as drawing-room ornaments,
flower-gardens which never wither, fairy lakes of perpetual calm which no
storm blackens,—
οὐτ’ ἐν θέρει, οὐτ’ ἐν ὁπώρῃ.
Those who have never seen one of them can never imagine (and neither Mr.
Gosse’s pencil nor my clumsy words can ever describe to them) the
gorgeous colouring and the grace and delicacy of form which these
subaqueous landscapes exhibit.
As for colouring,—the only bit of colour which I can remember even
faintly resembling them (for though Correggio’s Magdalene may rival them
in greens and blues, yet even he has no such crimsons and purples) is the
Adoration of the Shepherds, by that “prince of colorists”—Palma Vecchio,
which hangs on the left-hand side of Lord Ellesmere’s great gallery. But
as for the forms,—where shall we see their like? Where, amid miniature
forests as fantastic as those of the tropics, animals whose shapes outvie
the wildest dreams of the old German ghost painters which cover the walls
of the galleries of Brussels or Antwerp? And yet the uncouthest has some
quaint beauty of its own, while most—the star-fishes and anemones, for
example—are nothing but beauty. The brilliant plates in Mr. Gosse’s
“Aquarium” give, after all, but a meagre picture of the reality, as it
may be seen in the tank-house at the Zoological Gardens; and as it may be
seen also, by anyone who will follow carefully the directions given at
the end of his book, stock a glass vase with such common things as he may
find in an hour’s search at low tide, and so have an opportunity of
seeing how truly Mr. Gosse says, in his valuable preface, that—
“The habits” (and he might well have added, the marvellous beauty) “of
animals will never be thoroughly known till they are observed in detail.
Nor is it sufficient to mark them with attention now and then; they must
be closely watched, their various actions carefully noted, their
behaviour under different circumstances, and especially those movements
which seem to us mere vagaries, undirected by any suggestible motive or
cause, well examined. A rich fruit of result, often new and curious and
unexpected, will, I am sure, reward anyone who studies living animals in
this way. The most interesting parts, by far, of published Natural
History are those minute, but graphic particulars, which have been
gathered up by an attentive watching of individual animals.”
Mr. Gosse’s own books, certainly, give proof enough of this. We need
only direct the reader to his exquisitely humorous account of the ways
and works of a captive soldier-crab, {190} to show them how much there is
to be seen, and how full Nature is also of that ludicrous element of
which we spoke above. And, indeed, it is in this form of Natural
History: not in mere classification, and the finding out of means, and
quarrellings as to the first discovery of that beetle or this
buttercup,—too common, alas! among mere closet-collectors,—“endless
genealogies,” to apply St. Paul’s words by no means irreverently or
fancifully, “which do but gender strife;”—not in these pedantries is that
moral training to be found, for which we have been lauding the study of
Natural History: but in healthful walks and voyages out of doors, and in
careful and patient watching of the living animals and plants at home,
with an observation sharpened by practice, and a temper calmed by the
continual practice of the naturalist’s first virtues—patience and
perseverance.
Practical directions for forming an “Aquarium” may be found in Mr.
Gosse’s book bearing that name, at pp. 101, 255, _et seq._; and those who
wish to carry out the notion thoroughly, cannot do better than buy his
book, and take their choice of the many different forms of vase, with
rockwork, fountains, and other pretty devices which he describes.
But the many, even if they have Mr. Gosse’s book, will be rather inclined
to begin with a small attempt; especially as they are probably half
sceptical of the possibility of keeping sea-animals inland without
changing the water. A few simple directions, therefore, will not come
amiss here. They shall be such as anyone can put into practice, who goes
down to stay in a lodging-house at the most cockney of watering-places.
Buy at any glass-shop a cylindrical glass jar, some six inches in
diameter and ten high, which will cost you from three to four shillings;
wash it clean, and fill it with clean salt-water, dipped out of any pool
among the rocks, only looking first to see that there is no dead fish or
other evil matter in the said pool, and that no stream from the land runs
into it. If you choose to take the trouble to dip up the water over a
boat’s side, so much the better.
So much for your vase; now to stock it.
Go down at low spring-tide to the nearest ledge of rocks, and with a
hammer and chisel chip off a few pieces of stone covered with growing
sea-weed. Avoid the common and coarser kinds (fuci) which cover the
surface of the rocks; for they give out under water a slime which will
foul your tank: but choose the more delicate species which fringe the
edges of every pool at low-water mark; the pink coralline, the dark
purple ragged dulse (Rhodymenia), the Carrageen moss (Chondrus), and
above all, the commonest of all, the delicate green Ulva, which you will
see growing everywhere in wrinkled fan-shaped sheets, as thin as the
finest silver-paper. The smallest bits of stone are sufficient, provided
the sea-weeds have hold of them; for they have no real roots, but adhere
by a small disc, deriving no nourishment from the rock, but only from the
water. Take care, meanwhile, that there be as little as possible on the
stone, beside the weed itself. Especially scrape off any small sponges,
and see that no worms have made their twining tubes of sand among the
weed-stems; if they have, drag them out; for they will surely die, and as
surely spoil all by sulphuretted hydrogen, blackness, and evil smells.
Put your weeds into your tank, and settle them at the bottom; which last,
some say, should be covered with a layer of pebbles: but let the beginner
leave it as bare as possible; for the pebbles only tempt cross-grained
annelids to crawl under them, die, and spoil all by decaying: whereas if
the bottom of the vase is bare, you can see a sickly or dead inhabitant
at once, and take him out (which you must do) instantly. Let your weeds
stand quietly in the vase a day or two before you put in any live
animals; and even then, do not put any in if the water does not appear
perfectly clear: but lift out the weeds, and renew the water ere you
replace them.
This is Mr. Gosse’s method. But Mr. Lloyd, in his “Handbook to the
Crystal Palace Aquarium,” advises that no weed should be put into the
tank. “It is better,” he says, “to depend only on those which gradually
and naturally appear on the rocks of the aquarium by the action of light,
and which answer every chemical purpose.” I should advise anyone
intending to set up an aquarium, however small, to study what Mr. Lloyd
says on this matter in pp. 17–19, and also in page 30, of his pamphlet;
and also to go to the Crystal Palace Aquarium, and there see for himself
the many beautiful species of sea-weeds which have appeared spontaneously
in the tanks from unsuspected spores floating in the sea-water. On the
other hand, Mr. Lloyd lays much stress on the necessity of aërating the
water, by keeping it in perpetual motion; a process not easy to be
carried out in small aquaria; at least to that perfection which has been
attained at the Crystal Palace, where the water is kept in continual
circulation by steam-power. For a jar-aquarium, it will be enough to
drive fresh air through the water every day, by means of a syringe.
Now for the live stock. In the crannies of every rock you will find
sea-anemones (Actiniæ); and a dozen of these only will be enough to
convert your little vase into the most brilliant of living
flower-gardens. There they hang upon the under side of the ledges,
apparently mere rounded lumps of jelly: one is of dark purple dotted with
green; another of a rich chocolate; another of a delicate olive; another
sienna-yellow; another all but white. Take them from their rock; you can
do it easily by slipping under them your finger-nail, or the edge of a
pewter spoon. Take care to tear the sucking base as little as possible
(though a small rent they will darn for themselves in a few days, easily
enough), and drop them into a basket of wet sea-weed; when you get home
turn them into a dish full of water and leave them for the night, and go
to look at them to-morrow. What a change! The dull lumps of jelly have
taken root and flowered during the night, and your dish is filled from
side to side with a bouquet of chrysanthemums; each has expanded into a
hundred-petalled flower, crimson, pink, purple, or orange; touch one, and
it shrinks together like a sensitive plant, displaying at the root of the
petals a ring of brilliant turquoise beads. That is the commonest of all
the Actiniæ (Mesembryanthemum); you may have him when and where you will:
but if you will search those rocks somewhat closer, you will find even
more gorgeous species than him. See in that pool some dozen large ones,
in full bloom, and quite six inches across, some of them. If their
cousins whom we found just now were like Chrysanthemums, these are like
quilled Dahlias. Their arms are stouter and shorter in proportion than
those of the last species, but their colour is equally brilliant. One is
a brilliant blood-red; another a delicate sea-blue striped with pink; but
most have the disc and the innumerable arms striped and ringed with
various shades of grey and brown. Shall we get them? By all means if we
can. Touch one. Where is he now? Gone? Vanished into air, or into
stone? Not quite. You see that knot of sand and broken shell lying on
the rock, where your Dahlia was one moment ago. Touch it, and you will
find it leathery and elastic. That is all which remains of the live
Dahlia. Never mind; get your finger into the crack under him, work him
gently but firmly out, and take him home, and he will be as happy and as
gorgeous as ever to-morrow.
Let your Actiniæ stand for a day or two in the dish, and then, picking
out the liveliest and handsomest, detach them once more from their hold,
drop them into your vase, right them with a bit of stick, so that the
sucking base is downwards, and leave them to themselves thenceforth.
These two species (Mesembryanthemum and Crassicornis) are quite beautiful
enough to give a beginner amusement: but there are two others which are
not uncommon, and of such exceeding loveliness, that it is worth while to
take a little trouble to get them. The one is Dianthus, which I have
already mentioned; the other Bellis, the sea-daisy, of which there is an
excellent description and plates in Mr. Gosse’s “Rambles in Devon,” pp.
24 to 32.
It is common at Ilfracombe, and at Torquay; and indeed everywhere where
there are cracks and small holes in limestone or slate rock. In these
holes it fixes its base, and expands its delicate brown-grey star-like
flowers on the surface: but it must be chipped out with hammer and
chisel, at the expense of much dirt and patience; for the moment it is
touched it contracts deep into the rock, and all that is left of the
daisy flower, some two or three inches across, is a blue knot of half the
size of a marble. But it will expand again, after a day or two of
captivity, and will repay all the trouble which it has cost. Troglodytes
may be found, as I have said already, in hundreds at Hastings, in similar
situations to that of Bellis; its only token, when the tide is down,
being a round dimple in the muddy sand which firs the lower cracks of
rocks.
But you will want more than these anemones, both for your own amusement,
and for the health of your tank. Microscopic animals will breed, and
will also die; and you need for them some such scavenger as our poor
friend Squinado, to whom you were introduced a few pages back. Turn,
then, a few stones which lie piled on each other at extreme low-water
mark, and five minutes’ search will give you the very animal you want,—a
little crab, of a dingy russet above, and on the under side like smooth
porcelain. His back is quite flat, and so are his large angular fringed
claws, which, when he folds them up, lie in the same plane with his
shell, and fit neatly into its edges. Compact little rogue that he is,
made especially for sidling in and out of cracks and crannies, he carries
with him such an apparatus of combs and brushes as Isidor or Floris never
dreamed of; with which he sweeps out of the sea-water at every moment
shoals of minute animalcules, and sucks them into his tiny mouth. Mr.
Gosse will tell you more of this marvel, in his “Aquarium,” p. 48.
Next, your sea-weeds, if they thrive as they ought to do, will sow their
minute spores in millions around them; and these, as they vegetate, will
form a green film on the inside of the glass, spoiling your prospect: you
may rub it off for yourself, if you will, with a rag fastened to a stick;
but if you wish at once to save yourself trouble, and to see how all
emergencies in nature are provided for, you will set three or four live
shells to do it for you, and to keep your sub-aqueous lawn close mown.
That last word is no figure of speech. Look among the beds of sea-weed
for a few of the bright yellow or green sea-snails (Nerita), or Conical
Tops (Trochus), especially that beautiful pink one spotted with brown
(Ziziphinus), which you are sure to find about shaded rock-ledges at dead
low tide, and put them into your aquarium. For the present, they will
only nibble the green ulvæ; but when the film of young weed begins to
form, you will see it mown off every morning as fast as it grows, in
little semicircular sweeps, just as if a fairy’s scythe had been at work
during the night.
[Picture: Plate 8: Littorina Littorea etc.]
And a scythe has been at work; none other than the tongue of the little
shell-fish; a description of its extraordinary mechanism (too long to
quote here, but which is well worth reading) may be found in Gosse’s
“Aquarium.” {201}
A prawn or two, and a few minute star-fish, will make your aquarium
complete; though you may add to it endlessly, as one glance at the
salt-water tanks of the Zoological Gardens, and the strange and beautiful
forms which they contain, will prove to you sufficiently.
You have two more enemies to guard against, dust, and heat. If the
surface of the water becomes clogged with dust, the communication between
it and the life-giving oxygen of the air is cut off; and then your
animals are liable to die, for the very same reason that fish die in a
pond which is long frozen over, unless a hole be broken in the ice to
admit the air. You must guard against this by occasional stirring of the
surface, or, as I have already said, by syringing and by keeping on a
cover. A piece of muslin tied over will do; but a better defence is a
plate of glass, raised on wire some half-inch above the edge, so as to
admit the air. I am not sure that a sheet of brown paper laid over the
vase is not the best of all, because that, by its shade, also guards
against the next evil, which is heat. Against that you must guard by
putting a curtain of muslin or oiled paper between the vase and the sun,
if it be very fierce, or simply (for simple expedients are best) by
laying a handkerchief over it till the heat is past. But if you leave
your vase in a sunny window long enough to let the water get tepid, all
is over with your pets. Half an hour’s boiling may frustrate the care of
weeks. And yet, on the other hand, light you must have, and you can
hardly have too much. Some animals certainly prefer shade, and hide in
the darkest crannies; and for them, if your aquarium is large enough, you
must provide shade, by arranging the bits of stone into piles and
caverns. But without light, your sea-weeds will neither thrive nor keep
the water sweet. With plenty of light you will see, to quote Mr. Gosse
once more, {203} “thousands of tiny globules forming on every plant, and
even all over the stones, where the infant vegetation is beginning to
grow; and these globules presently rise in rapid succession to the
surface all over the vessel, and this process goes on uninterruptedly as
long as the rays of the sun are uninterrupted.
“Now these globules consist of _pure oxygen_, given out by the plants
under the stimulus of light; and to this oxygen the animals in the tank
owe their life. The difference between the profusion of oxygen-bubbles
produced on a sunny day, and the paucity of those seen on a dark cloudy
day, or in a northern aspect, is very marked.” Choose, therefore, a
south or east window, but draw down the blind, or throw a handkerchief
over all if the heat become fierce. The water should always feel cold to
your hand, let the temperature outside be what it may.
Next, you must make up for evaporation by _fresh_ water (a very little
will suffice), as often as in summer you find the water in your vase sink
below its original level, and prevent the water from getting too salt.
For the salts, remember, do not evaporate with the water; and if you left
the vase in the sun for a few weeks, it would become a mere brine-pan.
But how will you move your treasures up to town?
The simplest plan which I have found successful is an earthen jar. You
may buy them with a cover which screws on with two iron clasps. If you
do not find such, a piece of oilskin tied over the mouth is enough. But
do not fill the jar full of water; leave about a quarter of the contents
in empty air, which the water may absorb, and so keep itself fresh. And
any pieces of stone, or oysters, which you send up, hang by a string from
the mouth, that they may not hurt tender animals by rolling about the
bottom. With these simple precautions, anything which you are likely to
find will well endure forty-eight hours of travel.
What if the water fails, after all?
Then Mr. Gosse’s artificial sea-water will form a perfect substitute.
You may buy the requisite salts (for there are more salts than “salt” in
sea-water) from any chemist to whom Mr. Gosse has entrusted his
discovery, and, according to his directions, make sea-water for yourself.
One more hint before we part. If, after all, you are not going down to
the sea-side this year, and have no opportunities of testing “the wonders
of the shore,” you may still study Natural History in your own
drawing-room, by looking a little into “the wonders of the pond.”
I am not jesting; a fresh-water aquarium, though by no means as beautiful
as a salt-water one, is even more easily established. A glass jar,
floored with two or three inches of pond-mud (which should be covered
with fine gravel to prevent the mud washing up); a specimen of each of
two water-plants which you may buy now at any good shop in Covent Garden,
Vallisneria spiralis (which is said to give to the Canvas-backed duck of
America its peculiar richness of flavour), and Anacharis alsinastrum,
that magical weed which, lately introduced from Canada among timber, has
multiplied, self-sown, to so prodigious an extent, that it bid fair, a
few years since, to choke the navigation not only of our canals and
fen-rivers, but of the Thames itself: {206} or, in default of these, some
of the more delicate pond-weeds; such as Callitriche, Potamogeton
pusillum, and, best of all, perhaps, the beautiful Water-Milfoil
(Myriophyllium), whose comb-like leaves are the haunts of numberless rare
and curious animalcules:—these (in themselves, from the transparency of
their circulation, interesting microscopic objects) for oxygen-breeding
vegetables; and for animals, the pickings of any pond; a minnow or two,
an eft; a few of the delicate pond-snails (unless they devour your plants
too rapidly): water-beetles, of activity inconceivable, and that wondrous
bug the Notonecta, who lies on his back all day, rowing about his
boat-shaped body, with one long pair of oars, in search of animalcules,
and the moment the lights are out, turns head over heels, rights himself,
and opening a pair of handsome wings, starts to fly about the dark room
in company with his friend the water-beetle, and (I suspect) catch flies;
and then slips back demurely into the water with the first streak of
dawn. But perhaps the most interesting of all the tribes of the
Naiads,—(in default, of course, of those semi-human nymphs with which our
Teutonic forefathers, like the Greeks, peopled each “sacred
fountain,”)—are the little “water-crickets,” which may be found running
under the pebbles, or burrowing in little galleries in the banks: and
those “caddises,” which crawl on the bottom in the stiller waters,
enclosed, all save the head and legs, in a tube of sand or pebbles,
shells or sticks, green or dead weeds, often arranged with quaint
symmetry, or of very graceful shape. Their aspect in this state may be
somewhat uninviting, but they compensate for their youthful ugliness by
the strangeness of their transformations, and often by the delicate
beauty of the perfect insects, as the “caddises,” rising to the surface,
become flying Phryganeæ (caperers and sand-flies), generally of various
shades of fawn-colour; and the water-crickets (though an unscientific eye
may be able to discern but little difference in them in the “larva,” or
imperfect state) change into flies of the most various shapes;—one,
perhaps, into the great sluggish olive “Stone-fly” (Perla bicaudata);
another into the delicate lemon-coloured “Yellow Sally” (Chrysoperla
viridis); another into the dark chocolate “Alder” (Sialis lutaria): and
the majority into duns and drakes (Ephemeræ); whose grace of form, and
delicacy of colour, give them a right to rank among the most exquisite of
God’s creations, from the tiny “Spinners” (Baëtis or Chloron) of
incandescent glass, with gorgeous rainbow-coloured eyes, to the great
Green Drake (Ephemera vulgata), known to all fishermen as the prince of
trout-flies. These animals, their habits, their miraculous
transformations, might give many an hour’s quiet amusement to an invalid,
laid on a sofa, or imprisoned in a sick-room, and debarred from reading,
unless by some such means, any page of that great green book outside,
whose pen is the finger of God, whose covers are the fire kingdoms and
the star kingdoms, and its leaves the heather-bells, and the polypes of
the sea, and the gnats above the summer stream.
I said just now, that happy was the sportsman who was also a naturalist.
And, having once mentioned these curious water-flies, I cannot help going
a little farther, and saying, that lucky is the fisherman who is also a
naturalist. A fair scientific knowledge of the flies which he imitates,
and of their habits, would often ensure him sport, while other men are
going home with empty creels. One would have fancied this a self-evident
fact; yet I have never found any sound knowledge of the natural
water-flies which haunt a given stream, except among cunning old
fishermen of the lower class, who get their living by the gentle art, and
bring to indoors baskets of trout killed on flies, which look as if they
had been tied with a pair of tongs, so rough and ungainly are they; but
which, nevertheless, kill, simply because they are (in _colour_, which is
all that fish really care for) exact likenesses of some obscure local
species, which happen to be on the water at the time. Among
gentlemen-fishermen, on the other hand, so deep is the ignorance of the
natural fly, that I have known good sportsmen still under the delusion
that the great green May-fly comes out of a caddis-bait; the gentlemen
having never seen, much less fished with, that most deadly bait the
“Water-cricket,” or free creeping larva of the May-fly, which may be
found in May under the river-banks. The consequence of this ignorance is
that they depend for good patterns of flies on mere chance and
experiment; and that the shop patterns, originally excellent, deteriorate
continually, till little or no likeness to their living prototype
remains, being tied by town girls, who have no more understanding of what
the feathers and mohair in their hands represent than they have of what
the National Debt represents. Hence follows many a failure at the
stream-side; because the “Caperer,” or “Dun,” or “Yellow Sally,” which is
produced from the fly-book, though, possibly, like the brood which came
out three years since on some stream a hundred miles away, is quite
unlike the brood which is out to-day on one’s own river. For not only do
most of these flies vary in colour in different soils and climates, but
many of them change their hue during life; the Ephemeræ, especially, have
a habit of throwing off the whole of their skins (even, marvellously
enough, to the skin of the eyes and wings, and the delicate “whisks” at
their tail), and appearing in an utterly new garb after ten minutes’
rest, to the discomfiture of the astonished angler.
The natural history of these flies, I understand from Mr. Stainton (one
of our most distinguished entomologists), has not yet been worked out, at
least for England. The only attempt, I believe, in that direction is one
made by a charming book, “The Fly-fisher’s Entomology,” which should be
in every good angler’s library; but why should not a few fishermen
combine to work out the subject for themselves, and study for the
interests both of science and their own sport, “The Wonders of the Bank?”
The work, petty as it may seem, is much too great for one man, so
prodigal is Nature of her forms, in the stream as in the ocean; but what
if a correspondence were opened between a few fishermen—of whom one
should live, say, by the Hampshire or Berkshire chalk streams; another on
the slates and granites of Devon; another on the limestones of Yorkshire
or Derbyshire; another among the yet earlier slates of Snowdonia, or some
mountain part of Wales; and more than one among the hills of the Border
and the lakes of the Highlands? Each would find (I suspect), on
comparing his insects with those of the others, that he was exploring a
little peculiar world of his own, and that with the exception of a
certain number of typical forms, the flies of his county were unknown a
hundred miles away, or, at least, appeared there under great differences
of size and colour; and each, if he would take the trouble to collect the
caddises and water-crickets, and breed them into the perfect fly in an
aquarium, would see marvels in their transformations, their instincts,
their anatomy, quite as great (though not, perhaps, as showy and
startling) as I have been trying to point out on the sea-shore.
Moreover, each and every one of the party, I will warrant, will find his
fellow-correspondents (perhaps previously unknown to him) men worth
knowing; not, it may be, of the meditative and half-saintly type of dear
old Izaak Walton (who, after all, was no fly-fisher, but a sedentary
“popjoy” guilty of float and worm), but rather, like his fly-fishing
disciple Cotton, good fellows and men of the world, and, perhaps,
something better over and above.
The suggestion has been made. Will it ever be taken up, and a “Naiad
Club” formed, for the combination of sport and science?
And, now, how can this desultory little treatise end more usefully than
in recommending a few books on Natural History, fit for the use of young
people; and fit to serve as introductions to such deeper and larger works
as Yarrell’s “Birds and Fishes,” Bell’s “Quadrupeds” and “Crustacea,”
Forbes and Hanley’s “Mollusca,” Owen’s “Fossil Mammals and Birds,” and a
host of other admirable works? Not that this list will contain all the
best; but simply the best of which the writer knows; let, therefore, none
feel aggrieved, if, as it may chance, opening these pages, they find
their books omitted.
First and foremost, certainly, come Mr. Gosse’s books. There is a
playful and genial spirit in them, a brilliant power of word-painting
combined with deep and earnest religious feeling, which makes them as
morally valuable as they are intellectually interesting. Since White’s
“History of Selborne,” few or no writers on Natural History, save Mr.
Gosse, Mr. G. H. Lewes, and poor Mr. E. Forbes, have had the power of
bringing out the human side of science, and giving to seemingly dry
disquisitions and animals of the lowest type, by little touches of pathos
and humour, that living and personal interest, to bestow which is
generally the special function of the poet: not that Waterton and Jesse
are not excellent in this respect, and authors who should be in every
boy’s library: but they are rather anecdotists than systematic or
scientific inquirers; while Mr. Gosse, in his “Naturalist on the Shores
of Devon,” his “Tour in Jamaica,” his “Tenby,” and his “Canadian
Naturalist,” has done for those three places what White did for Selborne,
with all the improved appliances of a science which has widened and
deepened tenfold since White’s time. Mr. Gosse’s “Manual of the Marine
Zoology of the British Isles” is, for classification, by far the
completest handbook extant. He has contrived in it to compress more
sound knowledge of vast classes of the animal kingdom than I ever saw
before in so small a space. {215}
Miss Anne Pratt’s “Things of the Sea-coast” is excellent; and still
better is Professor Harvey’s “Sea-side Book,” of which it is impossible
to speak too highly; and most pleasant it is to see a man of genius and
learning thus gathering the bloom of his varied knowledge, to put it into
a form equally suited to a child and a _savant_. Seldom, perhaps, has
there been a little book in which so vast a quantity of facts have been
told so gracefully, simply, without a taint of pedantry or
cumbrousness—an excellence which is the sure and only mark of a perfect
mastery of the subject. Mr. G. H. Lewes’s “Sea-shore Studies” are also
very valuable; hardly perhaps a book for beginners, but from his
admirable power of description, whether of animals or of scenes, is
interesting for all classes of readers.
Two little “Popular” Histories—one of British Zoophytes, the other of
British Sea-weeds, by Dr. Landsborough (since dead of cholera, at
Saltcoats, the scene of his energetic and pious ministry)—are very
excellent; and are furnished, too, with well-drawn and coloured plates,
for the comfort of those to whom a scientific nomenclature (as liable as
any other human thing to be faulty and obscure) conveys but a vague
conception of the objects. These may serve well for the beginner, as
introductions to Professor Harvey’s large work on British Algæ, and to
the new edition of Professor Johnston’s invaluable “British Zoophytes,”
Miss Gifford’s “Marine Botanist,” third edition, and Dr. Cocks’s
“Sea-weed Collector’s Guide,” have also been recommended by a high
authority.
For general Zoology the best books for beginners are, perhaps, as a
general introduction, the Rev. J. A. L. Wood’s “Popular Zoology,” full of
excellent plates; and for systematic Zoology, Mr. Gosse’s four little
books, on Mammals, Birds, Reptiles, and Fishes, published with many
plates, by the Christian Knowledge Society, at a marvellously cheap rate.
For miscroscopic animalcules, Miss Agnes Catlow’s “Drops of Water” will
teach the young more than they will ever remember, and serve as a good
introduction to those teeming abysses of the unseen world, which must be
afterwards traversed under the guidance of Hassall and Ehrenberg.
For Ornithology, there is no book, after all, like dear old Bewick,
_passé_ though he may be in a scientific point of view. There is a good
little British ornithology, too, published in Sir W. Jardine’s
“Naturalist’s Library,” and another by Mr. Gosse. And Mr. Knox’s
“Ornithological Rambles in Sussex,” with Mr. St. John’s “Highland
Sports,” and “Tour in Sutherlandshire,” are the monographs of
naturalists, gentlemen, and sportsmen, which remind one at every page
(and what higher praise can one give?) of White’s “History of Selborne.”
These last, with Mr. Gosse’s “Canadian Naturalist,” and his little book
“The Ocean,” not forgetting Darwin’s delightful “Voyage of the Beagle and
Adventure,” ought to be in the hands of every lad who is likely to travel
to our colonies.
For general Geology, Professor Ansted’s Introduction is excellent; while,
as a specimen of the way in which a single district may be thoroughly
worked out, and the universal method of induction learnt from a narrow
field of objects, what book can, or perhaps ever will, compare with Mr.
Hugh Miller’s “Old Red Sandstone”?
For this last reason, I especially recommend to the young the Rev. C. A.
Johns’s “Week at the Lizard,” as teaching a young person how much there
is to be seen and known within a few square miles of these British Isles.
But, indeed, all Mr. Johns’s books are good (as they are bound to be,
considering his most accurate and varied knowledge), especially his
“Flowers of the Field,” the best cheap introduction to systematic botany
which has yet appeared. Trained, and all but self-trained, like Mr. Hugh
Miller, in a remote and narrow field of observation, Mr. Johns has
developed himself into one of our most acute and persevering botanists,
and has added many a new treasure to the Flora of these isles; and one
person, at least, owes him a deep debt of gratitude for first lessons in
scientific accuracy and patience,—lessons taught, not dully and dryly at
the book and desk, but livingly and genially, in adventurous rambles over
the bleak cliffs and ferny woods of the wild Atlantic shore,—
“Where the old fable of the guarded mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona’s hold.”
Mr. Henfrey’s “Rudiments of Botany” might accompany Mr. Johns’s books.
Mr. Babington’s “Manual of British Botany” is also most compact and
highly finished, and seems the best work which I know of from which a
student somewhat advanced in English botany can verify species; while for
ferns, Moore’s “Handbook” is probably the best for beginners.
For Entomology, which, after all, is the study most fit for boys (as
Botany is for girls) who have no opportunity for visiting the sea-shore,
Catlow’s “Popular British Entomology,” having coloured plates (a delight
to young people), and saying something of all the orders, is, probably,
still a good work for beginners.
Mr. Stainton’s “Entomologist’s Annual for 1855” contains valuable hints
of that gentleman’s on taking and arranging moths and butterflies; as
well as of Mr. Wollaston’s on performing the same kind office for that
far more numerous, and not less beautiful class, the beetles. There is
also an admirable “Manual of British Butterflies and Moths,” by Mr.
Stainton, in course of publication; but, perhaps, the most interesting of
all entomological books which I have seen (and for introducing me to
which I must express my hearty thanks to Mr. Stainton), is “Practical
Hints respecting Moths and Butterflies, forming a Calendar of
Entomological Operations,” {220} by Richard Shield, a simple London
working-man.
I would gladly devote more space than I can here spare to a review of
this little book, so perfectly does it corroborate every word which I
have said already as to the moral and intellectual value of such studies.
Richard Shield, making himself a first-rate “lepidopterist,” while
working with his hands for a pound a week, is the antitype of Mr. Peach,
the coast-guardsman, among his Cornish tide-rocks. But more than this,
there is about Shield’s book a tone as of Izaak Walton himself, which is
very delightful; tender, poetical, and religious, yet full of quiet
quaintness and humour; showing in every page how the love for Natural
History is in him only one expression of a love for all things beautiful,
and pure, and right. If any readers of these pages fancy that I
over-praise the book, let them buy it, and judge for themselves. They
will thus help the good man toward pursuing his studies with larger and
better appliances, and will be (as I expect) surprised to find how much
there is to be seen and done, even by a working-man, within a day’s walk
of smoky Babylon itself; and how easily a man might, if he would, wash
his soul clean for a while from all the turmoil and intrigue, the vanity
and vexation of spirit of that “too-populous wilderness,” by going out to
be alone a while with God in heaven, and with that earth which He has
given to the children of men, not merely for the material wants of their
bodies, but as a witness and a sacrament that in Him they live and move,
and have their being, “not by bread alone, but by _every_ word that
proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”
* * * * *
Thus I wrote some twenty years ago, when the study of Natural History was
confined mainly to several scientific men, or mere collectors of shells,
insects, and dried plants.
Since then, I am glad to say, it has become a popular and common pursuit,
owing, I doubt not, to the impulse given to it by the many authors whose
works I then recommended. I recommend them still; though a swarm of
other manuals and popular works have appeared since, excellent in their
way, and almost beyond counting. But all honour to those, and above all
to Mr. Gosse and Mr. Johns, who first opened people’s eyes to the wonders
around them all day long. Now, we have, in addition to amusing books on
special subjects, serials on Natural History more or less profound, and
suited to every kind of student and every grade of knowledge. I mention
the names of none. For first, they happily need no advertisement from
me; and next, I fear to be unjust to any one of them by inadvertently
omitting its name. Let me add, that in the advertising columns of those
serials, will be found notices of all the new manuals, and of all
apparatus, and other matters, needed by amateur naturalists, and of many
who are more than amateurs. Microscopy, meanwhile, and the whole study
of “The Wonders of the Little,” have made vast strides in the last twenty
years; and I was equally surprised and pleased, to find, three years ago,
in each of two towns of a few thousand inhabitants, perhaps a dozen good
microscopes, all but hidden away from the public, worked by men who knew
how to handle them, and who knew what they were looking at; but who
modestly refrained from telling anybody what they were doing so well.
And it was this very discovery of unsuspected microscopists which made me
more desirous than ever to see—as I see now in many places—scientific
societies, by means of which the few, who otherwise would work apart, may
communicate their knowledge to each other, and to the many. These
“Microscopic,” “Naturalist,” “Geological,” or other societies, and the
“Field Clubs” for excursions into the country, which are usually
connected with them, form a most pleasant and hopeful new feature in
English Society; bringing together, as they do, almost all ranks, all
shades of opinion; and it has given me deep pleasure to see, in the case
at least of the Country Clubs with which I am acquainted, the clergy of
the Church of England taking an active, and often a leading, interest in
their practical work. The town clergy are, for the most part, too
utterly overworked to follow the example of their country brethren. But
I have reason to know that they regard such societies, and Natural
History in general, with no unfriendly eyes; and that there is less fear
than ever that the clergy of the Church of England should have to
relinquish their ancient boast—that since the formation of the Royal
Society in the seventeenth century, they have done more for sound
physical science than any other priesthood or ministry in the world. Let
me advise anyone who may do me the honour of reading these pages, to
discover whether such a Club or Society exists in his neighbourhood, and
to join it forthwith, certain that—if his experience be at all like
mine—he will gain most pleasant information and most pleasant
acquaintances, and pass most pleasant days and evenings, among people
whom he will be glad to know, and whom he never would have known save for
the new—and now, I hope, rapidly spreading—freemasonry of Natural
History.
Meanwhile, I hope—though I dare not say I trust—to see the day when the
boys of each of our large schools shall join—like those of Marlborough
and Clifton—the same freemasonry; and have their own Naturalists’ Clubs;
nay more; when our public schools and universities shall awake to the
real needs of the age, and—even to the curtailing of the time usually
spent in not learning Latin and Greek—teach boys the rudiments at least
of botany, zoology, geology, and so forth; and when the public opinion,
at least of the refined and educated, shall consider it as ludicrous—to
use no stronger word—to be ignorant of the commonest facts and laws of
this living planet, as to be ignorant of the rudiments of two dead
languages. All honour to the said two languages. Ignorance of them is a
serious weakness; for it implies ignorance of many things else; and
indeed, without some knowledge of them, the nomenclature of the physical
sciences cannot be mastered. But I have got to discover that a boy’s
time is more usefully spent, and his intellect more methodically trained,
by getting up Ovid’s Fasti with an ulterior hope of being able to write a
few Latin verses, than in getting up Professor Rolleston’s “Forms of
Animal Life,” or any other of the excellent Scientific Manuals for
beginners, which are now, as I said, happily so numerous.
May that day soon come; and an old dream of mine, and of my scientific
friends, be fulfilled at last.
And so I end this little book, hoping, even praying, that it may
encourage a few more labourers to go forth into a vineyard, which those
who have toiled in it know to be full of ever-fresh health, and wonder
and simple joy, and the presence and the glory of Him whose name is LOVE.