If we could roam at pleasure over the bottom of the sea, with the
privilege of using all our senses as effectually and as comfortably as
in the air, we should doubtless see some wonderful things. We might
not, indeed, find all the useful and ornamental articles that drowning
Clarence saw in his dream, but doubtless we might substitute for them
things that he never dreamed of, things that the eye of man was not
as yet cultivated to see. What opportunities for enlarging the bounds
of science are possessed by the engineers that have been working many
hours a day, for years past, at the great Breakwater in that prolific
field of marine life, Weymouth Bay!--working in a capacious diving-bell
at the bottom of the sea. But there are many reasons why we can expect
nothing in the way of natural history from them. Perhaps not one of
them has ever been taught to think upon any of the strange forms that
might occur, which do not commonly minister to the pocket of man in
the market, as anything but mere rubbish not worth a second glance,
or something hurtful or nasty to be crushed beneath the heel. Or if,
perchance, an observer of nature’s beauties be engaged in such an
occupation, his time would be so fully taken up with his urgent duties,
as to preclude attention to such amenities. Besides which, the loads
of enormous blocks of stone already shot down on the sea-floor, which
he is there to arrange and settle, must pretty well have smashed and
covered everything which had revelled in dull enjoyment there, before
his arrival. Still I fancy I should like to borrow his diving-bell on a
holiday, and roam a little beyond those wildernesses of broken stone,
picking up treasures here and there such as the scraper of the dredge
has never yet been able to gather out of the crevices and crannies of
those deep-water rocks.
But such a desire is at present hopeless; and we must be satisfied
with such resources as are at our command, thankful that the dredge,
and the trawl, and the keer-drag, the fisherman’s deep-sea line,
the lobster-pot, and the sounding-lead--are all contributing to
our acquaintance with the curious, the uncouth, the wondrous, the
beautiful, that lurk far down _in profundis_.
Let us then go back to the results of our dredging day that we so
much enjoyed a few weeks ago. A portion of its produce yet remains
in buckets and pans, waiting for a further overhauling; and it
will doubtless yield us some objects worthy of an hour or two’s
investigation.