“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 chimera dire,’ and yet so wondrously fitted
for its work, that we must needs endure for our own instruction to
handle and look at it. Its name I know not (though it lurks here under
every stone), and should be glad to know. It seems some very ‘low’
Ascarid or Planarian worm. You see it? That black, slimy, 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 strip of
dead 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 its 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-rod 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 trout. The victim is tired now; and slowly, yet
dexterously, his blind assailent 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 into a pulp long before he has reached the opposite extremity
of his cave of doom. Once safe down, the black murderer contracts
again into a knotted heap, and lies like a boa with a stag inside him,
motionless and blest.”[65]