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CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT 
 FUND GIVEN IN 1 89 1 BY 
 
 HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE 
 
Glaucus: 
 
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Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
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GLAUCUS; 
 
 OR, 
 
 THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 
 
GLAUOUS 
 
 OB, 
 
 THE WONDEBS OF THE SHOEE. 
 
 CHARLES j;jNGSLEY, F.S.A., F.L.S., etc., 
 
 AUTHOR OF ''WESTWARD HO ! " " HYPATIA,*' ETC 
 
 FIFTH EDITION, CORRECTED AND ENLARGED i 
 WITH COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 Itonbon : 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1873. 
 
 [The Right of Translation and Repradudimi ts reserved^} 
 
Losros : 
 
 R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PBISTKM, 
 BREAD STREET HILL. 
 
^^bkalion. 
 
 My deab Miss Geenfell, 
 
 I CANNOT forego the pleasure of dedicating 
 this little hook to you; excepting of course the 
 
 •opening exhortation (needless enough in your case) 
 to those who have not yet discovered the value of 
 Natural History. Accept it as a memorial of 
 
 'pleasant hours spent by us already, and as an 
 earnest, I trust, of pleasant hours to be spent 
 hereafter (perhaps, too, beyond this life in the 
 nobler world to come), in examining together the 
 works of our Father in heaven. 
 
 Your grateful and faithful brother-in-law, 
 
 C. KINGSLEY. 
 
 ClDEFOKD, 
 
 April 24, 1855. 
 
The basis of this little hook was an Article which appeared i 
 North British Review for Noveniher 1854. 
 
BeYOXD the shadow of the ship, 
 I watch'd the water snakes : 
 They moved in tracks of shining white, 
 And when they rear'd, the elfish light 
 Fell off in hoary flakes. 
 
 O happy living things ! no tongue 
 Their beauty might declare : 
 A spring of love gush'd from my heart, 
 And I bless'd them unaware. 
 
 Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTEATIONS. 
 
 WOOD ENGRAVINGS. 
 
 Fl". P40E 
 
 1. Nymphon Abyssorum, Norman 81 
 
 2. Oaprella spinosissima, Noeman 83 
 
 3. Pentaorinus asteria, LiNNiEua 85 
 
 COLOURED PLATES. 
 
 PLATE 
 
 1. 1. Flustra Linbata ; [a) enlarged witli poljrpes pro- 
 
 truding. 2. Flttstra Foliacba. 3. Valkkkia 
 CuscuTA ; (a) natural size ; (6) two tentacles ; (c) 
 tentacles bent inwards ; (d) enlarged, stowing the 
 gradual eversion of the animal. 4. Cbisia Den- 
 TicuLATA ; {a) natural size. 5. Gbmbllaeia Loei- 
 CATA ; («) natural size. 6. Sbetttlaeia Rosea ; 
 (a) natural size. 7. Celltjlaeia Ciliata; (a) 
 natural size ; (J) one of the bird's heads ; (c) cell 
 and bird's head, much enlarged. 8. CAMPAinr- 
 LAEIA Syeinga; (os) natural size. 9. Campantt- 
 LAEIA VoLtJBiLis, enlarged. 10. Sbeialaeia 
 Lendigeea. 11. NoTAMiA BuBSAKiA; (a) natural 
 size ; (S) two pairs of polype cells with the tobacco 
 pipe appendages 73 
 
 2. 1. CAEDITTM RuSTICUM, (xUBBECtrLATTTM). 2. Pagf- 
 
 Btrs Beenhaedi, in a Periwinkle Shell .... 65 
 
 b 
 
X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 PLATE PAGE 
 
 3. 1. Nembetibs Boklasii. 2. Sabblla ? 3. Sand-tube 
 
 of Tebbbblla Cokchilega [See Plate 8) . . . 136 
 
 4. 1. Synapta Disitata ; (os) Ditto separating and 
 
 throwing out capsuliferoua threads. 2. Thalas- 
 
 SIMA ITEPTtTNI 109 
 
 5. 1. BALAiropHTLLBA Regia, expanded ; (a) Ditto, con- 
 
 tracted ; (6) Ditto coral ; (c) Ditto, tentacle en- 
 larged ; 2. Caetophtllba Smithii partly ex- 
 panded ; (a) Ditto, section of tony plates ; (S) Ditto, 
 tentacle. 3. Sagaetia Angttiooma closed ; (a) 
 Ditto, basal disc showing radiating septa. 4. 
 Synapta Digitata (See Plate 4) ; (a, h) Ditto, 
 fingered tentacles enlarged ; (c) Ditto, Spicule ; 
 
 (d) Ditto, anchor lying on its transparent anchor- 
 plate. 5. S. Vittata ? perforated anchor-plate ; 
 
 (a) Spicula 117 
 
 6. 1. Actinia Mbsembeyanthemum, partially expanded ; 
 
 (a) Ditto, closed. 2. Bunodbs Ceassicoenis. 
 
 3. Caeyophyllea Smithii Front. 135 
 
 7. 1. EoHiNtrs MiLiAErs, creeping over Modiola barbata. 
 
 2. Ditto, creeping up the glass. 3. Hiding under 
 stones . . ' 168 
 
 8. 1. Littoeina Littoeba {See Plate 9) ; (a) operculum ; 
 
 (S) pallet ; (c) ipart of pallet, magnified. 2. Nassa 
 Eetioulata (See Plate 11) ; (o) egg capsules ; (J, c) 
 fry ; [d) shell of fry ; (e) pallet, magnified. 3. 
 Patblia Vulgaeis ; (a) palate, natural size ; 
 (6, c) Ditto, enlarged. 4. Eohintts Miliakis {See 
 Plate 7) ; (a) teeth and digesting mill ; (d) suckers, 
 enlarged ; (o) spine and socket; {d) shell denuded; 
 
 (e) Pedicellaria. 5. Nembktes Boelasii {See Plate 
 3) ; (a) head, enlarged ; (J) head expanded swallow- 
 ing a Terebella 201 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xi 
 
 PLATE PAGK 
 
 9. 1. CuouMAEiA Hyndmanni. 2. Littoeina Littokea. 
 3. SlPHUNouLUS Bbenhaedus in shell of TuEEi- 
 TELLA, with living Balani 114 
 
 10. 1. SeEPULA CoNTOETUPLICATA. 2. HiNNITES Pusio. 
 
 3. DoEis Eepanda. 4. EoLis Pblluoida. 5. 
 Pholadid^a Papteaoea. 6. Pholas Paeva. 
 7. Fissurella Gejboa . 129 
 
 11. 1. Stngnathus Lumbeioiformis. 2. Saxioava 
 
 EuGOSA ; (a) Shell of Saxicava Rugosa. 8. 
 Wassa Ketioulata 163 
 
 12. 1. Peachia Hastata. 2. Uraster Kubbns ... 92 
 
GLAUCUS; 
 
 OR, 
 
 THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEE. 
 
 fYoTJ are going down, perhaps, by railway, to pass 
 your usual six weeks at some watering-place along 
 the coast, and as you roll along think more than 
 once, and that not over-cheerfuUy, of what you 
 shall do when you get there. You are half-tired, 
 half-ashamed, of making one more in the ignoble 
 army of idlers, who saunter about the cliffs, and 
 sands, and quays ; to whom every wharf is but a 
 " wharf of Lethe," by which they rot " duU as the 
 oozy weed." You foreknow your doom by sad 
 experience. A great deal of dressing, a lounge in 
 the club-room, a stare out of the window with the 
 telescope, an attempt to take a bad sketch, a walk 
 
 B 
 
2 GLAUCITS; OK, 
 
 up one parade and down another, interminable 
 reading of the sUliest of novels, over which you fall 
 asleep on a bench in the sun, and probably have 
 your umbrella stolen ; a purposeless fine-weather 
 sail in a yacht, accompanied by many ineffectual 
 attempts to catch a mackerel, and the consumption 
 of many cigars ; while your boys deafen your ears, 
 and endanger your personal safety, by blazing away 
 at innocent gulls and wiUocks, who go off to die 
 slowly; a sport which you feel to be wanton, and 
 cowardly, and cruel, and yet cannot find in your 
 heart to stop, because " the lads have nothing else 
 to do, and at all events it keeps them out of the bil- 
 liard-room ; " and after all, and worst of all, at night 
 a souUess ricliauffd of third-rate London frivolity: 
 this is the life-in-death in which thousands spend 
 the golden weeks of summer, and in which you con- 
 fess with a sigh that you are going to spend them. 
 
 Now I will not be so rude as to apply to you 
 the old hymn-distich about one who 
 
 " finds some mischief still 
 
 For idle hands to do : " 
 
THE 'WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 3 
 
 but does it not seem to you, that there must surely 
 be many a thing worth looking at earnestly, and 
 thinking over earnestly, in a world like this, about 
 the making of the least part whereof God has em- 
 ployed ages and ages, further back than wisdom 
 can guess or imagination picture, and upholds that 
 least part every moment by laws and forces so com- 
 plex and so wonderful, that science, when it tries 
 to fathom them, can only learn how little it can 
 learn ? And does it not seem to you that six 
 weeks' rest, free from the cares of town business 
 and the whirlwind of town pleasure, could not be 
 better spent than in examining those wonders a 
 little, instead of wandering up and down like the 
 many, stiU wrapt up each in his little world of 
 vanity and self-interest, unconscious of what and 
 where they really are, as they gaze lazily around 
 at earth and sea and sky, and have 
 
 " ITo speculation in those eyes 
 Which they do glare withal"? 
 
 Why not, then, try to discover a few of the Won- 
 ders of the Shore? For wonders there are there 
 
 B 2 
 
4 GLAUCTJS; OE, 
 
 around you at every step, stranger than ever opium- 
 eater dreamed, and yet to be seen at no greater 
 expense than a very little time and trouble. 
 
 Perhaps you smile, in answer, at the notion of 
 becoming a " Naturalist : " and yet you cannot 
 deny that there must be a fascination in the study 
 of Natural History, though what it is is as yet 
 unknown to you. Your daughters, perhaps, have 
 been seized with the prevailing " Pteridomania," 
 and are collecting and buying ferns, with Ward's 
 cases wherein to keep them (for which you have to 
 pay), and wrangling over unpronounceable names of 
 species (which seem to be different in each new 
 Fern-book that they buy), till the Pteridomania 
 seems to you somewhat of a bore: and yet you 
 cannot deny that they find an enjoyment in it, and 
 are more active, more cheerful, more self-forgetful 
 over it, than they would have been over novels and 
 gossip, crochet and Berlin-wool. At least you will 
 confess that the abomination of "Fancy-work" — 
 that standing cloak for dreamy idleness (not to 
 mention the injury which it does to poor starving 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHORE. 5 
 
 needlewomen) — lias all but vanished from your 
 drawing-room since the "Lady-ferns" and "Venus's 
 hair " appeared ; and that you could not help your- 
 seK looking now and then at the said "Venus's 
 hair," and agreeing that Nature's real beauties were 
 somewhat superior to the ghastly woollen caricatures 
 which they had superseded. 
 
 You cannot deny, I say, that there is a fasci- 
 nation in this same Natural History. For do not 
 you, the London merchant, recollect how but last 
 summer your douce and portly head-clerk was 
 seized by two keepers in the act of wandering in 
 Epping Forest at dead of night, with a dark lan- 
 tern, a jar of strange sweet compound, and ianu- 
 merable pocketfuls of pill-boxes ; and found it very 
 diificult to make either his captors or you believe 
 that he was neither going to burn wheat-ricks, nor 
 poison pheasants, but was simply "sugaring the 
 trees for moths," as a blameless entomologist ? 
 And when, in self-justification, he took you to his 
 house in Islington, and showed you the glazed and 
 corked drawers full of delicate insects, which had 
 
6 GLAUCUS; OB, 
 
 evidently cost him in the collecting the spare hours 
 of many busy years, and many a pound, too, out of 
 his small salary, were you not a little puzzled to 
 make out what speU there could be in those " use- 
 less " moths, to draw out of his warm bed, twenty 
 miles down the Eastern Counties EaUway, and into 
 the damp forest like a deer-stealer, a sober white- 
 headed Tim Linkinwater like him, your very best 
 man of business, given to the reading of Scotch 
 political economy, and gifted with peculiarly clear 
 notions on the currency question? 
 
 It is puzzling, truly. I shall be very glad if these 
 pages help you somewhat toward solving the puzzle. 
 
 We shall agree at least that the study of Natural 
 History has become now-a-days an honourable one. 
 A Cromarty stonemason was till lately — God rest 
 his noble soul ! — the most important man in the 
 City of Edinburgh, by dint of a work on fossil 
 fishes ; and the siiccessful investigator of the 
 minutest animals takes place unquestioned among 
 men of genius, and, like the philosopher of old 
 Greece, is considered, by virtue of his science, fit 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOKE. 7 
 
 company for dukes and princes. Nay, the study 
 is now more than honourable ; it is (what to many 
 readers will he a far higher recommendation) even 
 fashionable. Every well-educated person is eager to 
 know something at least of the wonderful organic 
 forms which surround him in every sunbeam and 
 every pebble ; and books of Natural History are 
 finding their way more and more into drawing- 
 rooms and school-rooms, and exciting greater thirst 
 for a knowledge which, even twenty years ago, was 
 considered superfluous for all but the professional 
 student. 
 
 What a change from the temper of two genera- 
 tions since, when the naturalist was looked on as 
 a harmless enthusiast, who went " bug-hunting," 
 simply because he had not spirit to follow a fox ! 
 There are those alive who can recollect an amiable 
 man being literally bullied out of the- New Forest, 
 because he dared to make a collection (at this 
 moment, we believe, in some unknown abyss of that 
 great Avernus, the British Museum) of fossil shells 
 from those very HordweU Cliffs, for exploring which 
 
8 GLATTCUS; OE, 
 
 there is now established a society of subscribers 
 and correspondents. They can remember, too* 
 when, on the first appearance of Bewick's "British 
 Birds,'' the excellent sportsman who brought it 
 down to the Forest was asked, Why on earth he 
 had bought a book about " cock sparrows " ? and 
 had to justify himself again and again, simply by 
 lending the book to his brother sportsmen, to con- 
 vince them that there were rather more than a dozen 
 sorts of birds (as they then held) indigenous to 
 Hampshire. But the book, perhaps, which turned 
 the tide in favour of Natural History, among the 
 higher classes at least, in the south of England, was 
 White's "History of S^borne." A Hampshire gen- 
 tleman and sportsman, whom everybody knew, 
 had taken the trouble to write a book about the 
 birds and the weeds in his own parish, and the 
 every-day things which went on under his eyes, 
 and everyone else's. And all gentlemen, from the 
 Weald of Kent to the Vale of Blackmore, shrugged 
 their shoulders mysteriously, and said, "Poor fel- 
 low ! " till they opened the book itself, and dis- 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEE. 9 
 
 covered to their surprise tliat it read like any novel. 
 And then came a burst of confused, but honest 
 admiration ; from the young squire's " Bless me ! 
 who would have thought that there were so many 
 wonderful things to be seen in one's own park ! " 
 to the old squire's more morally valuable "Bless 
 me ! why, I have seen that and that a hundred 
 times, and never thought till now how wonderful 
 they were ! " 
 
 There were great exciises, though, of old, for the 
 contempt in which the naturalist was held ; great 
 excuses for the pitying tone of banter with which 
 the Spectator talks of "the ingenious" Don Sal- 
 tero (as no doubt the Neapolitan gentleman talked 
 of Terrante Imperato the apothecary, and his mu- 
 seum) ; great excuses for Voltaire, when he classes 
 the collection of butterflies among the other " bizar- 
 reries de I'esprit humain." For, in the last gene- 
 ration, the needs of the world were different. It 
 had no time for butterflies and fossils. While 
 Buonaparte was hovering on the Boulogne coast, 
 the pursuits and the education which were needed 
 
10 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 were such as would raise up men to fight him ; so 
 the coarse, fierce, hard-handed training of our grand- 
 fathers came when it was wanted, and did the work 
 which was required of it, else we had not been 
 here now. Let us be thankful that we have had 
 leisure for science ; and show now in war that our 
 science has at least not unmanned us. 
 
 Moreover, Natural History, if not fifty years ago, 
 certainly a hundred years ago, was hardly worthy 
 of men of practical common sense. After, indeed, 
 Linn^, by his invention of generic and specific 
 names, had made classification possible, and by his 
 own enormous labours had shown how much could 
 be done when once a method was established, the 
 science has grown rapidly enough. But before him 
 little or nothing had been put into form definite 
 enough to allure those who (as the many always 
 will) prefer to profit by others' discoveries, than to 
 discover for themselves; and Natural History was 
 attractive only to a few earnest seekers, .who found 
 too much trouble in disencumbering their own 
 minds of the dreams of bygone generations (whether 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 11 
 
 facts, like cockatrices, basilisks, and krakens, the 
 breeding of bees out of a dead ox, and of geese 
 from barnacles; or theories, like those of the four 
 elements, the vis plastrix in Nature, animal spirits, 
 and the other musty heirlooms of Aristotleism and 
 Neo-platonism), to try to make a science popular, 
 which as yet was not even a science at aU. Honour 
 to them, nevertheless. Honour to Eay and his 
 illustrious contemporaries in Holland and France. 
 Honour to Seba and Aldrovandus ; to Pomet, with 
 his " Historic of Drugges ; " even to the ingenious 
 Don Saltero, and his tavern-museum in Cheyne 
 Walk. Where aU was chaos, every man was useful 
 who could contribute a single spot of organized 
 standing ground in the shape of a fact or a speci- 
 men. But it is a question whether Natural History 
 would have ever attained its present honours, had 
 not Geology arisen, to connect every other branch 
 of Natural History with problems as vast and awful 
 as they are captivating to the imagination. Nay, 
 the very opposition with which Geology met was 
 of as great benefit to the sister sciences as to itsel£ 
 
12 GLAUCUS; OK, 
 
 For, -when questions belonging to the most sacred 
 hereditaiy beliefs of Christendom were supposed to 
 be affected by the verification of a fossil shell, or 
 the proving that the Maestricht "homo diluvii 
 testis " was, after all, a monstrous eft, it became 
 necessary to work upon Conchology, Botany, and 
 Comparative Anatomy, with a care and a reverence, 
 a caution and a severe induction, which had been 
 never before applied to them; and thus gradually, 
 in the last half-century, the whole choir of cosmical 
 sciences have acquired a soundness, severity, and 
 fulness, which render them, as mere intellectual 
 exercises, as valuable to a manly mind as Mathe- 
 matics and Metaphysics. 
 
 But how very lately have they attained that firm 
 and honourable standing ground ! It is a question 
 whether, even twenty years ago. Geology, as it then 
 stood, was worth troubling one's head about, so little 
 had been really proved. And heavy and uphill 
 was the work, even within the last fifteen years, 
 of those who stedfastly set themselves to the task 
 of proving and of asserting at all risks, that the 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHORE. 13 
 
 Maker of the coal seam and the diluvial cave could 
 not be a "Deus quidam deceptor," and that the 
 facts which the rock and the silt revealed were 
 sacred, not to be warped or trifled with for the sake 
 of any cowardly and hasty notion that they con- 
 tradicted His other messages. When a few more 
 years are past, Buckland and Sedgwick, Murchison 
 and Lyell, DelabSche and Phillips; Forbes and 
 Jamieson, and the group of brave men who accom- 
 panied and followed them, will be looked back 
 to as moral benefactors of their race; and almost 
 as martyrs, also, when it is remembered how much 
 misunderstanding, obloquy, and plausible foUy they 
 had to endure from well-meaning fanatics like 
 Fairholme or Granville Penn, and the respectable 
 mob at their heels who tried (as is the fashion 
 in such cases) to make a hollow compromise be- 
 tween fact and the Bible, by twisting facts just 
 enough to make them fit the fancied meaning 
 of the Bible, and the Bible just enough to make 
 it fit the fancied meaning of the facts. But 
 there were a few who would have no compromise ; 
 
14 GLAUCPS; OE, 
 
 who laboured on witH a noble recklessness, deter- 
 mined to speak the thing which they had seen, and 
 neither more nor less, sure that God could take 
 better care than they of His own everlasting truth. 
 And now they have conquered : the facts which 
 were twenty years ago denounced as contrary to 
 Revelation, are at last accepted not merely as con- 
 sonant with, but as corroborative thereof; and 
 sound practical geologists — ^like Hugh Miller, in 
 his "Footprints of the Creator," and Professor 
 Sedgwick, in the invaluable notes to his " Discourse 
 on the Studies of Cambridge" — have wielded in 
 defence of Christianity the very science which was 
 faithlessly and cowardly expected to subvert it. 
 
 But if you seek, reader, rather for pleasure than 
 for wisdom, you can find it in such studies, pure 
 and undefiled. 
 
 Happy, truly, is the naturalist. He has no time 
 for melancholy dreams. The earth becomes to him 
 transparent ; everywhere he sees significancies, har- 
 monies. Jaws, chains of cause and effect endlessly 
 interlinked, which draw him out of the narrow 
 
THE WONDERS OP THE SHORE. 15 
 
 sphere of self-interest and self-pleasing, into a pure 
 and wholesome region of solemn joy and wonder. 
 He goes up some Snowdon valley; to him it is a 
 solemn spot (though unnoticed by his companions), 
 where the stag's-horn cluhmoss ceases to straggle 
 across the turf, and the tufted alpine clubmoss takes 
 its place : for he is now in ■ a new world ; a region 
 whose climate is eternally influenced by some fresh 
 law (after which he vainly guesses with a sigh at 
 his own ignorance), which renders life impossible 
 to one species, possible to another. And it is a still 
 more solemn thought to him, that it was not always 
 so; that seons and ages back, that rock which he 
 passed a thousand feet below was fringed, not as 
 now with fern and blue bugle, and white bramble- 
 flowers, but perhaps with the alp-rose and the 
 " gemsen-kraut " of Mont Blanc, at least with 
 Alpine Saxifrages which have now retreated a 
 thousand feet up the mountain side, and with the 
 blue Snow-Gentian, and the Canadian Ledum, 
 which have all but vanished out of the British 
 Mes. And what is it which tells him that strange 
 
16 GLAUCUS; OK, 
 
 story? Yon smooth and rounded surface of rock, 
 polished, remark, across the strata and against the 
 grain ; and furrowed here and there, as if by iron 
 talons, with long parallel scratches. It was the 
 crawling of a glacier which polished that rock-face ; 
 the stones fallen from Snowdon peak into the half- 
 liquid lake of ice above, which ploughed those 
 furrows, ^ons and tbons ago, before the time when 
 Adam first 
 
 " Embraced Us Eve in happy hour. 
 And every bird in Eden burst 
 In carol, every bud in flower," 
 
 those marks were there ; the records of the " Age 
 of ice ; " slight, truly ; to be effaced by the next 
 farmer who needs to build a wall; but unmistake- 
 able, boundless in significance, like Crusoe's one 
 savage footprint on the sea-shore; and the natu- 
 ralist acknowledges the finger-mark of God, and 
 wonders, and worships. 
 
 Happy, especially, is the sportsman who is also 
 a naturalist : for as he roves in pursuit of his game, 
 over hills or up the beds of streams where no one 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 17 
 
 but a sportsman ever thinks of going, lie will be 
 certain to see things noteworthy, which the mere 
 naturalist would never find, simply because he could 
 never guess that they were there to be found. I 
 do not speak merely of the rare birds which may 
 be shot, the curious facts as to the habits of fish 
 which may be observed, great as these pleasures 
 are. I speak of the scenery, the weather, the geo- 
 logical formation of the country, its vegetation, and 
 the living habits of its denizens. A sportsman, out 
 in all weathers, and often dependent for success on 
 his knowledge of "what the sky is going to do," 
 has opportunities for becoming a meteorologist which 
 no one beside but a sailor possesses; and one has 
 often longed for a scientific gamekeeper or hunts- 
 man, who, by discovering a law for the mysterious 
 and seemingly capricious phenomena of "scent," 
 might perhaps throw light on a hundred dark 
 passages of hygrometry. The fisherman, too, — 
 what an inexhaustible treasury of wonder lies at 
 his feet, in the subaqueous world of the commonest 
 mountain burn ! All the laws which mould a 
 
 C 
 
18 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 ■VTorld are there busy, if he but knew it, fattening 
 his trout for him, and making them rise to the fly, 
 by strange electric influences, at one hour rather 
 than at another. Many a good geognostic lesson, 
 too, both as to the nature of a country's rocks, and 
 as to the laws by which strata are deposited, may 
 an observing man learn as he wades up the bed of 
 a trout-stream ; not to mention the strange forms 
 and habits of the tribes of water-insects. More- 
 over, no good fisherman but knows, to his sorrow, 
 that there are plenty of minutes, ay, hours, in each 
 day's fishing in which he would be right glad of 
 any employment better than trying to 
 
 "Call spirits from the vasty deep," 
 
 who will not 
 
 "Come when you do call for them." 
 
 What to do, then ? You are sitting, perhaps, in 
 your coracle, upon some mountain tarn, waiting 
 for a wind, and waiting in vain. 
 
 ' ' Keine luft an keiue seite, 
 Todes-stille furchterlich j " 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 19 
 
 as Gothe has it — 
 
 " ITnd der schiffer sieht bekummert 
 Glatte flaohe rings umlier." 
 
 You paddle to the shore on the side whence the 
 wind ought to come, if it had any spirit in it; 
 tie the coracle to a stone, light your cigar, lie 
 down on your back upon the grass, grumble, and 
 finally fall asleep. In the meanwhile, probably, 
 the breeze has come on, and there has been half- 
 an-hour's lively fishing curl; and you wake just 
 in time to see the last ripple of it sneaking off at 
 the other side of the lake, leaving all as dead-calm 
 as before. 
 
 Now how much better, instead of falling asleep, 
 to have walked quietly round the lake side, and 
 asked of your own brains and of Nature the ques- 
 tion, "How did this lake come here? What does 
 it mean?" 
 
 It is a hole in the earth. True, but how was 
 the hole made? There must have been huge 
 forces at work to form such a chasm. Probably 
 the mountain was actually opened from within by 
 
 c 2 
 
20 GLAUCUS ; , OR, 
 
 an earthquake; and when the strata fell together 
 again, the portion at either end of the chasm, 
 being perhaps crushed together with greater force, 
 remained higher than the centre, and so the water 
 lodged between them. Perhaps it was formed thus. 
 You will at least agree that its formation must 
 have been a grand sight enough, and one during 
 which a spectator would have had some difficulty 
 in keeping his footing. 
 
 And when you learn that this convulsion pro- 
 bably took place at the bottom of an ocean hun- 
 dreds of thousands of years ago, you have at least 
 a few thoughts over which to ruminate, which will 
 make you at once too busy to grumble, and ashamed 
 to grumble. 
 
 Yet, after all, I hardly think the lake was formed 
 in this way, and suspect that it may have been dry 
 for ages after it emerged from the primeval waves, 
 and Snowdonia was a pahn-fringed island in a 
 tropic sea. Let us look the place over, more care- 
 fuUy. 
 
 You see the lake is nearly circular ; on the side 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEE. 21 
 
 where we stand the pehhly beach is not six feet 
 above the water, and slopes away steeply into the 
 valley behind us, while before us it shelves gra- 
 dually into the lake ; forty yards out, as you know, 
 there is not ten feet water ; and then a steep bank, 
 the edge whereof we and the big trout know well, 
 sinks suddenly to unknown depths; On the oppo- 
 site side, that flat-topped wall of rock towers up 
 shoreless into the sky, seven hundred feet perpen- 
 dicular ; the deepest water of aU we know is at its 
 very foot. Eight and left, two shoulders of down 
 slope into the lake. Now turn round and look 
 down the gorge. Eemark that this pebble bank 
 on which we stand reaches some fifty yards down- 
 ward: you see the loose stones peeping out every- 
 where. We maj' fairly suppose that we stand on 
 a dam of loose stones, a hundred feet deep. 
 
 But why loose stones ? — and if so, what matter ? 
 and what wonder ? There are rocks cropping out 
 everywhere down the hill-side. 
 
 Because if you will take up one of these stones 
 and crack it across, you will see that it is not of 
 
22 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 the same stuff as those said rocks. Step into the 
 next field and see. That rock is the common 
 Snowdon slate, which we see everywhere. The two 
 shoulders of down, right and left, are slate, too ; 
 you can see that at a glance. But the stones of 
 the pebble bank are a close-grained, yellow-spotted 
 rock. They are Syenite; and (you may believe 
 me or not, as you will) they were once upon a 
 time in the condition of a hasty pudding heated to 
 some 800 degrees of Fahrenheit, and in that con- 
 dition shoved their way up somewhere or other 
 through these slates. But where ? whence on earth 
 did these Syenite pebbles come 1 Let us walk 
 round to the cliff on the opposite side and see. 
 It is worth while ; for even if my guess be wrong, 
 there is good spinning with a brass minnow round 
 the angles of the rocks. 
 
 Now see. Between the cUff-foot and the sloping 
 down is a crack, ending in a gully ; the nearer side 
 is of slate, and the further side, the cliff itself, is 
 — why, the whole cliff is composed of the very 
 same stone as the pebble ridge. 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHORE. 23 
 
 Now, my good friend, how did these pebbles get 
 three hundred yards across the lake? Hundreds 
 of tons, some of them three feet long : who carried 
 them across? The old Cymry were not likely to 
 amuse themselves by making such a breakwater up 
 here in No-man's-land, two thousand feet above the 
 sea : but somebody or something must have carried 
 them ; for stones do not fly, nor swim either. 
 
 Shot out of a volcano ? As you seem deter- 
 mined to have a prodigy, it may as well be a suffi- 
 ciently huge one. 
 
 Well — these stones lie altogether; and a volcano 
 would have hardly made so compact a shot, not 
 being in the habit of using Eley's wire cartridges. 
 Our next hope of a solution lies in John Jones, 
 who carried up the coracla Hail him, and ask 
 him what is on the top of that cliff ... So, 
 "Plainshe and pogshe, and another Llyn." Very 
 good. Now, does it not strike you that this whole 
 cliff has a remarkably smooth and plastered look, 
 like a hare's run up an earthbank? And do you 
 mot see that it is polished thus only over the lake ? 
 
24 GLAUCUS; OB, 
 
 that as soon as the cliff abuts on the downs right 
 and left, it forms pinnacles, caves, broken angular 
 boulders? Syenite usually does so in our damp 
 climate, from the "weathering" effect of frost and 
 rain: why has it not done so over the lake? On 
 that part something (giants perhaps) has been 
 scrambling up or down on a very large scale, and 
 so rubbed off every corner which was inclined to 
 come away, tUl the solid core of the rock was bared. 
 And may not those mysterious giants have had a 
 hand in carrying the stones across the lake? . . . 
 Eeally, I am not altogether jesting. Think a while 
 what agent could possibly have produced either 
 one or both of these effects ? 
 
 There is but one; and that, if you have been 
 an Alpine traveller — much more if you have been 
 a Chamois himter — you have seen many a time 
 (whether you knew it or not) at the very same work. 
 
 Ice ? Yes ; ice ; Hrymir the frost-giant, and no 
 one else. And if you will look at the facts, you 
 wiU see how ice may have done it. Our friend 
 John Jones's report of plains and bogs and a lake 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHOEE. 25 
 
 above makes it quite possible tbat in the " Ice age " 
 (Glacial Epoch, as the big-word-mongers call it) 
 there was above that cliff a great nev^, or snowfield, 
 such as you have seen often in the Alps at the 
 head of each glacier. Over the face of this cliff a 
 glacier has crawled down from that nev4, polishing 
 the face of the rock in its descent: but the snow, 
 having no large and deep outlet, has not slid down 
 in a suf&cient stream to reach the vale below, and 
 form a glacier of the first order ; and has therefore 
 stopped short on the other side of the lake, as a 
 glacier of the second order, which ends in an ice- 
 cliff hanging high up on the mountain side, and 
 kept from further progress by daUy melting. If 
 you has'e ever gone up the Mer de Glace to the 
 Tacul, you saw a magnificent specimen of this 
 sort on your right hand, just opposite the Tacul, 
 in the Glacier de Tr^laporte, which comes down 
 from the AiguiUe de Charmoz. 
 
 This explains our pebble-ridge. The stones which 
 the glacier rubbed off the cliff beneath it it carried 
 forward, slowly but surely, tiU they saw the light 
 
26 GLAUCUS; OK, 
 
 again in the face of the ice-cliff, and dropped out 
 of it under the melting of the summer sun, to form 
 a huge dam across the ravine ; tiU, the " Ice age " 
 past, a more genial climate succeeded, and nev6 
 and glacier melted away : but the " moraine " of 
 stones did not, and remains to this day, as ,the 
 dam which keeps up the waters of the lake. 
 
 There is my explanation. If you can find a 
 better, do : but remember always that it must in- 
 clude an answer to — "How did the stones get 
 across the lake ? " 
 
 Now, reader, we have had no abstruse science 
 here, no long words, not even a microscope or a 
 book: and yet we, as two plain sportsmen, have 
 gone back, or been led back by fact and common 
 sense, into the most awful and sublime depths, 
 into an epos of the destruction and re-creation of 
 a former world. 
 
 This is but a single instance ; I might give 
 hundreds. This one, nevertheless, may have some 
 effect in awakening you to the boundless world of 
 wonders which is aU around you, and make you 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHOEE. 27 
 
 ask yourself seriously, "What branch of Natural 
 History shall T begin to investigate, if it be but 
 for a few weeks, this summer?" 
 
 To which I answer. Try "the Wonders of the 
 Shore." There are along every sea-beach more 
 strange things to be seen, and* those to be seen 
 easily, than in any other field of observation which 
 you will find in these islands. And on the shore 
 only will you have the enjoyment of finding new 
 species, of adding your mite to the treasures of 
 science. 
 
 For not only the English ferns, but the natural 
 history of all our land species, are now well-nigh 
 exhausted. Our home botanists and ornithologists 
 are spending their time now, perforce, in verifying 
 a few obscure species, and bemoaning themselves, 
 like Alexander, that there are no more worlds lefl 
 to conquer. For the geologist, indeed, and the en- 
 tomologist, especially in the remoter districts, much 
 remains to be done, but only at a heavy outlay ol 
 time, labour, and study; and the dilettante (and 
 it is for dilettanti, like myself, that I principally 
 
28 GLA0CUS; OE, 
 
 write) must be content to tread in the tracks of 
 greater men wlio have preceded him, and accept 
 at second or third hand their foregone conclusions. 
 
 But this is most unsatisfactory ; for in giving up 
 discovery, one gives up one of the highest enjoy- 
 ments of Natural History. There is a mysterious 
 delight in the discovery of a new species, akin to 
 that of seeing for the first time, in their native 
 haunts, plants or animals of which one has till then 
 only read. Some, surely, who read these pages 
 have experienced that latter delight; and, though 
 they might find it hard to define whence the plea- 
 sure arose, know well that it was a solid pleasure, 
 the memory of which they would not give up for 
 hard cash. Some, surely, can recollect, at their first 
 sight of the Alpine SoldaneUa, the Ehododendron, 
 or the black Orchis, growing upon the edge of the 
 eternal snow, a thriU. of emotion not unmixed with 
 awe; a sense that they were, as it were, brought 
 face to face with the creatures of another world; 
 that Nature was independent of them, not merely 
 they of her; that trees were not merely made to 
 
THE WONDERS OP THE SHORE. 29 
 
 ■build their houses, or herbs to feed their cattle, as 
 they looked on those wild gardens amid the wreaths 
 of the untrodden snow, which had lifted their gay- 
 flowers to the sun year after year since the foun- 
 dation of the world, taking no heed of man, and all 
 the coil Vhich he keeps in the valleys far below. 
 
 And even, to take a simpler instance, there are 
 those who will excuse, or even approve of, a writer 
 for saying that, among the memories of a month's 
 eventful tour, those which stand out as beacon- 
 points, those round which all the others group 
 themselves, are the first wolf-track by the road-side 
 in the KyUwald ; the first sight of the blue and 
 green Eoller-bii'ds, walking behind the plough like 
 rooks in the tobacco-fields of Wittlich; the first 
 ball of Olivine scraped out of the volcanic slag- 
 heaps of the Dreisser-Weiher ; the first pair of 
 the Lesser Bustard flushed upon the downs of the 
 Mosel-kopf J the first sight of the cloud of white 
 Ephemerae, fluttering in the dusk like a summer 
 snowstorm between us and the black cliffs of 
 the Eheinstein, while the broad Ehine beneath 
 
30 GLAUOTS; OE, 
 
 flashed blood-red in the blaze of the lightning and 
 the fires of the Mausenthurm — a lurid Acheron 
 above which seemed- to hover ten thousand unburied 
 ghosts; and last, but not least, on the lip of the 
 vast Mosel-kopf crater — ^just above the point where 
 the weight of the fiery lake has burst the side of 
 the great slag-cup, and rushed forth between two 
 cliffs of clink-stone across the downs, in a clanging 
 stream of fire, damming up rivulets, and blasting 
 its path through forests, far away toward the vaUey 
 of the Moselle — the sight of an object for which 
 was forgotten for the moment that battle-field of 
 the Titans at our feet, and the glorious panorama, 
 Hundsruck and Taunus, Siebengebirge and Ar- 
 dennes, and all the crater peaks around; and which 
 was — smile not, reader — our first yellow foxglove. 
 
 But what is even this to the delight of findin" 
 a new species ? — of rescuing (as it seems to you) 
 one more thought of the Divine mind from Hela, 
 and the realms of the unknown, unclassified, un- 
 comprehended ? As it seems to you : though in 
 reality it only seems so, in a world wherein not 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 31 
 
 a sparrow falls to the ground unnoticed by our 
 Father who is in heaven. 
 
 The truth is, the pleasure of finding new species 
 is too great ; it is morally dangerous ; for it brings 
 with it the temptation to look on the thing found as 
 your own possession, all but your own creation ; to 
 pride yourself on it, as if God had not known it for 
 ages since ; even to squabble jealously for the right 
 of having it named after you, and of being recorded 
 in the Transactions of I-know-not-what Society as 
 its first discoverer: — as if all the angels in heaven 
 had not been admiring it, long before you were 
 born or thought of 
 
 But to be forewarned is to be forearmed; and 
 I seriously counsel you to try if you cannot find 
 something new this summer along the coast to 
 which you are going. There is no reason why you 
 should not be so successful as a friend of mine who, 
 with a very slight smattering of science, and very 
 desultory research, obtained in one winter from the 
 Torbay shores three entirely new species, beside 
 several rare animals which had escaped all natu- 
 
32 GLAUOUS; OE, 
 
 ralists since the, lynx-eye of Colonel Montagu dis- 
 cerned them forty years ago. 
 
 And do not despise the creatures because they 
 are minute. No douht we should most of us prefer 
 discovering monstrous apes in the tropical forests 
 of Borneo, or stumhling upon herds of gigantic 
 Ammon sheep amid the rhododendron thickets of the 
 Himalaya : hut it cannot be ; and " he is a fool," 
 says old Hesiod, " who knows not how much better 
 half is than the whole." Let us be content with 
 what is within our reach. And doubt not that in 
 these tiny creatures are mysteries more than we 
 shall ever fathom. 
 
 The zoophytes and microscopic animalcules which 
 people every shore and every drop of water, have 
 been now raised to a rank in the human mind more 
 important, perhaps, than even those gigantic mon- 
 sters whose models fill the lake at the Ciystal 
 Palace. The research which has been bestowed, 
 for the last century, upon these once unnoticed 
 atomies has well repaid itself; for from no branch 
 of physical science has more been learnt of the 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHOEE. 33 
 
 scientia scientiarum, the priceless art of learning ; 
 no brancli of science has more utterly confounded 
 the wisdom of the wise, shattered to pieces systems 
 and theories, and the idolatry of arbitrary names, 
 and taught man to be silent while his Maker speaks, 
 than this apparent pedantry of zoophytology, in 
 which our old distinctions of "animal," "vege- 
 table," and " mineral " are trembling in the balance, 
 seemingly ready to vanish like their fellows — " the 
 four elements" of fire, earth, air, and water. No 
 branch of science has helped so much to sweep away 
 that sensuous idolatry of mere size, which tempts 
 man to admire and respect objects in proportion to 
 the number of feet or inches which they occupy in 
 space. No branch of science, moreover, has been more 
 humbling to the boasted rapidity and omnipotence 
 of the human reason, or has more taught those who 
 have eyes to see, and hearts to understand, how 
 , weak and wayward, staggering and slow, are the 
 steps of our fallen race (rapid and triumphant 
 enough in that broad road of theories which leads 
 to intellectual destruction) whensoever they tread 
 
 D 
 
34 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 the narrow -path of true science, which leads (if I 
 may be allowed to transfer our Lord's great parable 
 from moral to intellectual matters) to life ; to the 
 living and permanent knowledge of living things 
 and of the laws of their existence. Humbliag, 
 truly, to one who looks back to the summer of 
 1754, when good Mr. EUis, the wise and benevolent 
 West Indian merchant, read before the Eoyal 
 Society his paper proving the animal nature of 
 corals, and followed it up the year after by that 
 " Essay toward a Natural History of the Corallines, 
 and other like Marine Productions of the British 
 Coasts," which forms the groundwork of all our 
 knowledge on the subject to this day. The chapter 
 in Dr. G. Johnston's " British Zoophytes," p. 407, or 
 the excellent little r4sum4 thereof in Dr. Lands- 
 borough's book on the same subject, is really a 
 saddening one, as one sees how loth were, not 
 merely dreamers like Marsigli or Bonnet, but 
 soimd-beaded men like Pallas and Linn^ to give up 
 the old sense-bound fancy, that these corals were 
 vegetables, and their polypes some sort of living 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHOEE. 35 
 
 flowers. Yet, after all, there are excuses for them. 
 Without our improved microscopes, and while the 
 sciences of comparative anatomy and chemistry 
 were yet infantile, it was difficult to beheve what 
 was the truth ; and for this simple reason : that, as 
 usual, the truth, when discovered, turned out far 
 more startling and prodigious than the dreams 
 which men had hastily substituted for it ; more 
 strange than Ovid's old story that the coral was 
 soft under the sea, and hardened by exposure to 
 air; than Marsigh's notion, that the coral-polypes 
 were its flowers; than Dr. Parsons' contemptuous 
 denial, that these complicated forms could be " the 
 operations of little, poor, helpless, jelly-like animals, 
 and not the work of more sure vegetation ;" than 
 Baker the microscopist's detailed theory of their 
 being produced by the crystallization of the mineral 
 salts in the sea-water, just as he had seen " the 
 particles of mercury and copper in aquafortis assume 
 tree-hke forms, or curious delineations of mosses 
 and minute shrubs on slates and stones, owing 
 to the shooting of salts intermixed with mineral 
 
 D 2 
 
36 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 particles:" — one smiles at it now: yet these men 
 were no less sensible than we ; and if we know 
 better, it is only because other men, and those few 
 and far between, have laboured amid disbelief, 
 ridicule, and error; needing again and again to 
 retrace their steps, and to unlearn more than they 
 learnt, seeming to go backwards when they were 
 really progressing most: and now we have entered 
 into their labours, and find them, as I have just 
 said, more wondrous than aR the poetic dreams 
 of a Bonnet or a Darwin. For who, after all, to 
 take a few broad instances (not to enlarge on 
 the great root-wonder of a number of distinct 
 individuals connected by a common life, and form- 
 ing a seeming plant invariable in each species), 
 would have dreamed of the " bizarreries " which 
 these very zoophytes present in their classifi- 
 cation ? 
 
 You go doM'n to any shore after a gale of wind, and 
 pick up a few delicate little sea-ferns. You have 
 two in your hand, which probably look to you, even 
 under a good pocket magnifier, identical or nearly 
 
THE -WONDERS OF THE SHORB. 37 
 
 so.^ But you are told to your surprise, tliat however 
 like the dead horny polypidoms which you hold may 
 be, the two species of animal which have formed 
 them are at least as far apart in the scale of creation 
 as a quadruped is from a fish. You see in some 
 Musselburgh dredger's boat the phosphorescent sea- 
 pen (unknown in England), a living feather, of the 
 look and consistency of a cock's comb ; or the stiU 
 stranger sea-rush (Virgularia mirabilis), a spine a 
 foot long, with hundreds of rosy flowerets arranged 
 in half-rings round it from end to end; and you 
 are told that these are the coiigeners of the great 
 stony Venus's fan which hangs in seamen's cottages, 
 brought home from the West Indies. And ere you 
 have done wondering, you hear that all three are 
 congeners of the ugly, shapeless, white " dead man's 
 hand," which you may pick up after a storm on 
 any shore. You have a beautiful madrepore or 
 brain-stone o-n your mantel-piece, brought home 
 
 1 StTlularia operculata and Gemellaria loriculata ; or any of the 
 small Sertularios, compared witli Grisice and Cellularm, are very- 
 good examples. For a fuller description of these, see Appendii 
 explaining Plate I. 
 
38 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 from some Pacific coral-reef. You are to believe 
 that its first cousins are the soft, slimy sea-anemones 
 which you see expanding their living flowers in 
 every rock-pool — hags of sea-water, without a trace 
 of bone or stone. You must believe it; for in 
 science, as in higher matters, he who will walk 
 surely, must "walk by faith and not by sight." 
 
 These are but a few of the wonders which the 
 classification of marine animals affords; and only 
 drawn from one class of them, though almost as 
 common among every other family of that sub- 
 marine world whereof Spenser sang — 
 
 " Oh, what an endless work have I in hand, 
 
 To count the sea's ahundant progeny ! 
 Wlose fruitful seed far passeth those in laud, 
 
 And also those which won in th' azure sky. 
 
 For much more earth to tell the stai-s on high^ 
 Albe they endless seem in estimation, 
 
 Than to recount the sea's posterity ; 
 So fertile be the flouds in generation. 
 So huge their numbers, and so numberless their nation." 
 
 But these few examples will be sufficient to 
 account both for the slow pace at which the know- 
 ledge of sea-animals has progressed, and for the 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 39 
 
 allurement which men of the highest attainments 
 have found, and still find, in it. And when to this 
 we add the marvels which meet us at every step 
 in the anatomy and the reproduction of these 
 creatures, and in the chemical and mechanical 
 functions which they fulfil in the great, economy 
 of our planet, we cannot wonder at finding that 
 books which treat of them carry with them a cer- 
 tain charm of romance, and feed the play of fancy, 
 and that love of the marvellous which is inherent 
 in man, at the same time that they lead the reader 
 to more solemn and lofty trains of thought, which 
 can find their full satisfaction only in self-forgetfid 
 worship, and that hymn of praise which goes up 
 ever from land and sea, as well as from saints and 
 martyrs and the heavenly host, " all ye works 
 of the Lord, and ye, too, spirits and souls of 
 the righteous, praise Him, and magnify Him for 
 ever ! " 
 
 I have said, that there were excuses for the old 
 contempt of the study of Natural History. I have 
 said, too, it may be hoped, enough to show that 
 
40 GLAT3CUS; OE, 
 
 contempt to be now ill-founded. But still, there 
 are those who regard it as a mere amusement, and 
 that as a somewhat effeminate one ; and think that 
 it can at best help to while away a leisure hour 
 harmlessly, and perhaps usefully, as a substitute for 
 coarser sports, or for the reading of novels. Those, 
 however, who have followed it out, especially on the 
 sea-shore, know better. They can tell from expe- 
 rience, that over and above its accessory charms of 
 pure sea-breezes, and wild rambles by cliff and loch, 
 the study itself has had a weighty moral effect upon 
 their hearts and spirits. There are those who can 
 well understand how the good and wise John Ellis, 
 amid all his philanthropic labours for the good of 
 the West Indies, while he was spending his intellect 
 and fortune in introducing into our tropic settle- 
 ments the bread-fruit, the mangosteen, and every 
 plant and seed which he hoped might be useful for 
 medicine, agriculture, and commerce, could yet feel 
 himself justified in devoting large portions of his 
 ever well-spent time to the fighting the battle of 
 the corallines against Parsons land the rest, and even 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHORE, 41 
 
 in measuring pens with Linn^, the prince of natu- 
 ralists. 
 
 There are those who can sympathise with 
 the gallant old Scotch officer mentioned by some 
 writer on sea-weeds, who, desperately wounded in 
 the breach at Badajos, and a sharer in all the toils 
 and triumphs of the Peninsular war, could in his 
 old age show a rare sea-weed with as much triumph 
 as his well-earned medals, and talk over a tiny 
 spore-capsule with as much zest as the records of 
 sieges and battles. Why not ? That temper which 
 made him a good soldier may very well have made 
 him a good naturalist also. The late illustrious 
 geologist, Sir Eoderick Murchison, was also an old 
 Peninsular officer. I doubt not that with him, too, 
 the experiences of war inay have helped to fit him 
 for the studies of peace. Certainly, the best natu- 
 ralist, as far as logical acumen, as weU as earnest 
 research, is concerned, whom England has ever 
 seen, was the Devonshire squire, Colonel George 
 Montagu, of whom the late E. Forbes well says, 
 that "had he been educated a physiologist" (and 
 
42 OLATJCUS; OE, 
 
 not, as he was, a soldier and 'a sportsman), "and 
 made the study of Nature his aim and not his 
 amusement, his would have been one of the greatest 
 names in the whole range of British science." I 
 question, nevertheless, whether he would not have 
 lost more than he would have gained by a different 
 training. It might have made him a more learned 
 systematizer ; but would it have quickened in him 
 that " seeing " eye of the true soldier and sportsman, 
 ■which makes Montagu's descriptions indelible word- 
 pictures, instinct with life and truth ? " There is 
 no question," says E. Forbes, after bewaiUng the 
 vagueness of most naturalists, "about the identity 
 of any animal Montagu described. . . . He was a 
 forward-looking philosopher; he spoke of every 
 creature as if one exceeding like it, yet different 
 from it, would be washed up by the waves next 
 tide. Consequently his descriptions are permanent." 
 Scientific men will recognize in this the highest 
 praise which can be bestowed, because it attri- 
 butes to him the highest faculty — The Art of 
 Seeing; but the study and the book would not 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOKE. 43 
 
 have given that. It is God's gift wheresoever 
 educated : but its true school-room is the camp and 
 the ocean, the prairie and the forest; active, self- 
 helping life, which can grapple with Nature her- 
 self: not merely with printed books about her. 
 Let no one think that this sarae Natural History is 
 ,a pursuit fitted only for effeminate or pedantic men. 
 I should say, rather, that the qualifications required 
 for a perfect naturalist are as many and as lofty 
 as were required, by old chivalrous writers, for the 
 perfect knight-errant of the Middle Ages : for (to 
 sketch an ideal, of which I am happy to say our 
 race now affords many a fair realization) our per- 
 fect naturalist should be strong in body; able to 
 haul a dredge, climb a rock, turn a boulder, walk 
 all day, uncertain where he shall eat or rest ; 
 ready to face sun and rain, wind and frost, and to 
 eat or drink thankfully anything, however coarse 
 or meagre; he should know how to swim for his 
 life, to pull an oar, sail a boat, and ride the first horse 
 which comes to hand ; and, finally, he should be 
 a thoroughly good shot, and a skilfid fisherman; 
 
44 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 and, if lie go far abroad, be able on occasion to 
 fight for his life. 
 
 Tor his moral character, he must, like a knight 
 of old, be first of all gentle and courteous, ready 
 and able to ingratiate himself with the poor, the 
 ignorant, and the savage ; not only because foreign 
 travel will be often otherwise impossible, but be- 
 cause he knows how much invaluable local informa- 
 tion can be only obtained from fishermen, miners, 
 hunters, and tillers of the soil. Next, he should 
 be brave and enterprising, and withal patient and 
 undaunted; not merely in travel, but in investi- 
 gation ; knowing (as Lord Bacon might have put it) 
 that the kingdom of Nature, like the kingdom of 
 Heaven, must be taken by violence, and that only 
 to those who knock long and earnestly does the 
 great mother open the doors of her sanctuary. He 
 must be of a reverent turn of mind also; not 
 rashly discrediting any reports, however vague and 
 fragmentary; giving man credit always for some 
 germ of truth, and giving Nature credit for an 
 inexhaustible fertility and variety, which will keep 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHOEE. 45 
 
 him his life long always reverent, yet never super- 
 stitious ; wondering at the commonest, but not sur- 
 prised by the most strange ; free from the idols of 
 size and sensuous loveliness ; able to see grandeur 
 in the minutest objects, beauty in the most un- 
 gainly ; estimating each thing not carnally, as the 
 vulgar do, by its size or its pleasantness to the 
 senses, but spiritually, by the amount of Divine 
 thought revealed to him therein; holding every 
 phenomenon worth the noting down ; believing that 
 every pebble holds a treasure, every bud a reve- 
 lation ; making it a point of conscience to pass 
 over nothing through laziness or hastiness, lest the 
 vision once offered and despised should be with- 
 drawn ; and looking at every object as if he were 
 never to behold it again. 
 
 Moreover, he must keep himself free from all 
 those perturbations of mind which not only weaken 
 energy, but darken and confuse the inductive 
 faculty ; from haste and laziness, from melancholy, 
 testiness, pride, and aU the passions which make 
 men see only what they wish to see. Of solemn 
 
46 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 and scTupuloTis reverence for trath ; of the habit 
 of mind which regards each fact and discovery, not 
 as our own possession, but as the possession of its 
 Creator, independent of us, our tastes, our needs, 
 or our vain-glory, I hardly need to speak ; for it is 
 the very essence of a naturalist's faculty — the very 
 tenure of his existence : and without truthfulness 
 science would be as impossible now as chivalry 
 would have been of old. 
 
 And last, but not least, the perfect naturalist 
 should have in him the very essence of true chivalry, 
 namely, self-devotion; the desire to advance, not 
 himself and his own fame or wealth, but knowledge 
 and mankind. He should have this great virtue; 
 and in spite of many shortcomings (for what man is 
 there who liveth and sinneth not ?), naturalists as a 
 class have it to a degree which makes them stand 
 out most honourably in the midst of a self-seeking 
 and mammonite generation, inclined to value every- 
 thing by its money price, its private utibty. The 
 spirit which gives freely, because it knows that it 
 has received freely ; which communicates knowledge 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHOEE. 47 
 
 •without hope of reward, without jealousy and 
 mean rivalry, to feUow-students and to the world ; 
 which is content to ^delve and toil comparatively 
 unknown, that from its obscure and seemingly 
 worthless results others may derive pleasure, and 
 even build up great fortunes, and change the very 
 face of cities and lands, by the practical use of some 
 stray talisman which the poor student has invented 
 in his laboratory ; — this is the spirit which is abroad 
 among our scientific men, to a greater degree than 
 it ever has been among any body of men for many 
 a century past ; and might well be copied by those 
 who profess deeper purposes and a more exalted 
 calling, than the discovery of a new zoophyte, or 
 the classification of a moorland crag. 
 
 And it is these qualities, however imperfectly they 
 may be realized in any individual instance, which 
 make our scientific men, as a class, the wholesomest 
 and pleasantest of companions abroad, and at home 
 the most blameless, simple, and cheerful, in all 
 domestic relations ; men for the most part of man- 
 ful heads, and yet of childlike hearts, who have 
 
48 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 turned to quiet study, in these late piping times 
 of peace, an intellectual health and courage which 
 might have made them, in more fierce and troublous 
 times, capable of doing good service with very 
 different instruments than the scalpel and the 
 microscope. 
 
 • I have been sketching an ideal : but one which 
 I seriously recommend to the consideration of all 
 parents ; for, though it be impossible and absurd to 
 wish that every young man should grow up a fiatu- 
 raHst by profession, yet this age offers no more 
 wholesome training, both moral and intellectual, 
 than that which is given by instilling into the young 
 an early taste for outdoor physical science. The 
 education of our children is now more than ever a 
 puzzling problem, if by education we mean the 
 development of the whole humanity, not merely of 
 some arbitrarily chosen part of it. How to feed 
 the imagination with wholesome food, and teach it 
 to despise French novels, and that sugared slough 
 of sentimental poetry, in comparison with which the 
 old fairy-tales and ballads were manful and rational ; 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 49 
 
 how to counteract the tendency to shallowed and 
 conceited sciolism, engendered by hearing popular 
 lectures on all manner of subjects, which can only 
 be really learnt by stem methodic study ; how to 
 give habits of enterprise, patience, accurate obser- 
 vation, which the counting-house or the library will 
 never bestow; above all, how to develop the phy- 
 sical powers, without engendering brutality and 
 coarseness, — are questions becoming daily more and 
 more puzzling, while they need daily more and 
 more to be solved, in an age of enterprise, travel, 
 and emigration, like the present. For the truth 
 must be told, that the great majority of men who 
 are now distinguished by commercial success, have 
 had a training the directly opposite to that which 
 they are giving to their sons. They are for the 
 most part men who have migrated from the country 
 to the town, and had in their youth all the advan- 
 tages of a sturdy and manful hill-side or sea-side 
 training; men whose bodies were developed, and 
 their lungs fed on pure breezes, long before they 
 brought to work in the city the bodily and mental 
 
50 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 strength whicli they had gained by loch and moor. 
 But it is not so with their sons. Their business 
 habits are learnt in the counting-house ; a good 
 school, doubtless, as far as it goes : but one which 
 will expand none but the lowest intellectual faculties; 
 which will make them accurate accountants, shrewd 
 computers and competitors, but never the originators 
 of daring schemes, men able and willing to go forth 
 to replenish the earth and subdue it. And in the 
 hours of relaxation, how much of their time is 
 thrown away, for want of anything better, on fri- 
 volity, not to say on secret profligacy, parents know 
 too well ; and often shut their eyes in very despair 
 to evUs which they know not how to cure. A 
 frightful majority of our middle-class young men 
 are growing up effeminate, empty of all knowledge 
 but what tends directly to the making of a fortune ; 
 or rather, to speak correctly, to the keeping up the 
 fortunes which their fathers have made for them; 
 while of the minority, who are indeed thinkers and 
 readers, how many women as well as men have we 
 seen wearying their souls with study undirected, 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 51 
 
 often misdirected ; craving to learn, yet not knowing 
 how or what to learn ; cultivating, with unwhole- 
 some energy, the head at the expense of the body 
 and the heart ; catching up with the most capricious 
 self-win one mania after another, and tossing it 
 away again for some new phantom ; gorging the 
 memory with facts which no one has taught them 
 to arrange, and the reason with problems which 
 they have no method for solving; till they fret 
 themselves in a chronic fever of the brain, which 
 too often urges them on to plunge, as it were, to 
 cool the inward fire, into the ever-restless seas of 
 doubt or of superstition. It is a sad picture. There 
 are many who may read these pages whose hearts 
 win tell them that it is a true one. What is wanted 
 in these cases is a methodic and scientific habit of 
 mind; and a class of objects on which to exercise 
 that habit, which will fever neither the speculative 
 intellect nor the moral sense ; and those physical 
 science wiU give, as nothing else can give it. 
 
 Moreover, to revert to another point which we 
 touched just now, man has a body as well as a 
 
 E 2 
 
52 GLAUCUS ; OE, 
 
 mind ; and with the vast majority there will be no. 
 mens sana unless there be a corpus sanum for it 
 to inhabit. And what outdoor training to give our 
 youths is, as we have already said, more than ever 
 puzzling. This difficulty is felt, perhaps, less in 
 Scotland than in England. The Scotch climate 
 compels hardiness; the Scotch bodily strength 
 makes it easy; and Scotland, with her mountain- 
 tours in summer, and her frozen lochs in winter, 
 her labyrinth of sea-shore, and, above all, that 
 priceless boon which Providence has bestowed on 
 her, in the contiguity of her great cities to the 
 loveliest scenery, and the hills where every breeze is 
 health, affords facilities for healthy physical life 
 unknown to the Englishman, who has no Arthur's 
 Seat towering above his London, no Western Islands 
 sporting the ocean firths beside his Manchester. 
 Field sports, with the invaluable training which 
 they give, if not 
 
 "The reason fine," 
 yet still 
 
 " The temperate will, 
 Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill," 
 
THE "WONDEBS OF THE SHOKE. 53 
 
 have become impossible for the greater number: 
 and athletic exercises are now, in England at least, 
 becoming more and more artificialized and expensive; 
 and are confined more and more — with the honour- 
 able exception of the football games in Battersea 
 Park — to our Public Schools and the two elder 
 Universities. All honour, meanwhile, to the Volun- 
 teer movement, and its moral as well as its physical 
 effects. But it is only a comparatively few of the 
 very sturdiest who are likely to become effective 
 Volunteers, and so really gain the benefits of learn- 
 ing to be soldiers. And yet the young man who 
 has had no substitute for such occupations will 
 cut but a sorry figure in Australia, Canada, or 
 India ; and if he stays at home, will spend many 
 a pound in doctors' bUls, which could have been 
 better employed elsewhere. "Taking a walk" — 
 as one would take a pill or a draught — seems 
 likely soon to become the only form of outdoor 
 existence possible for too many inhabitants of the 
 British Isles. But a walk without an object, unless 
 in the most lovely and novel of scenery, is a poor 
 
54 GLAT7CUS; OE, 
 
 exercise ; and as a recreation, utterly nil. I never 
 knew two young lads go out for a "constitutional," 
 who did not, if they were commonplace youths, 
 gossip the whole way about things hotter left un- 
 spoken ; or, if they were clever ones, fall on arguing 
 and braiasheating on politics or metaphysics from 
 the moment they left the door, and return with their 
 wits even more heated and tired than they were 
 when they set out. I cannot help fancying that 
 Milton made a mistake in a certain celebrated 
 passage ; and that it was not " sitting on a hill 
 apart/' but tramping four miles out and four nules 
 in along a turnpike-road, that his hapless spirits 
 discoursed 
 
 " Of fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute, 
 And found no end, in wandering- mazes lost." 
 
 Seriously, if we wish rural walks to do our 
 children any good, we must give them a love for 
 rural sights, an object in every walk; we must 
 teach them — and we can teach them — to iind 
 wonder in every insect, sublimity in every hedge- 
 row, the records of past worlds in every pebble, and 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEE. 55 
 
 boundless fertility upon the barren shore; and so, 
 by teachiag them to make full use of that limited 
 sphere in which they now are, make them faithful 
 in a few things, that they may be fit hereafter to 
 be rulers over much. 
 
 I rnay seem to exaggerate the advantages of such 
 studies; but the question after all is one of expe- 
 rience : and I have had experience enough and to 
 spare that what I say is true. I have seen the 
 young man of fierce passions, and uncontrollable 
 daring, expend healthily that energy which threat- 
 ened daily to plunge him into recklessness, if not 
 into sin, upon hunting out and collecting, through 
 rock and bog, snow and tempest, every bird and egg 
 of the neighbouring forest. I have seen the culti- 
 vated man, craving for travel and for success in life, 
 pent up in the drudgery of London work, and yet 
 keeping his spirit calm, and perhaps his morals all 
 the more righteous, by spending over his microscope 
 evenings which would too probably have gradually 
 been wasted at the theatre. I have seen the young 
 London beauty, amid all the excitement and temp- 
 
56 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 tation of luxury and flattery, with her heart pure 
 and her mind occupied in a boudoir full of shells 
 and fossils, flowers and sea-weeds ; keeping her- 
 self unspotted from the world, by considering the 
 lilies of the field, how they grow. And therefore 
 it is that I hail with thankfulness every fresh book 
 of Natural History, as a fresh boon to the young, 
 a fresh help to those who have to educate them. 
 
 The greatest difficulty in the way of beginners 
 is (as in most things) how "to learn the art of 
 learning." They go out, search, find less than they 
 expected, and give the subject up in disappoint- 
 ment. It is good to begin, therefore, if possible, 
 by playing the part of "jackal" to some practised 
 naturalist, who will show the tyro where to look, 
 what to look for, and, moreover, what it is that he 
 has found; often no easy matter to discover. 
 Forty years ago, during an autumn's work of dead- 
 leaf-searching in the Devon woods for poor old 
 Dr. Turton, while he was writing his book on British 
 land-shells, the present writer learnt more of the 
 art of observing than he would have learnt in three 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 57 
 
 years' desultory hunting on his own account ; and 
 he has often regretted that no naturalist has esta- 
 blished shore-lectures at some watering-place, like 
 those up hiU and down dale field-lectures which, 
 in pleasant bygone Cambridge days. Professor Sedg- 
 wick used to give to young geologists, and Professor 
 Henslow to young botanists. ■ 
 
 In the meanwhile, to show you something of what 
 may be seen by those who care to see, let me take 
 you, in imagination, to a shore where I was once at 
 home, and for whose richness I can vouch, and 
 choose our season and our day to start forth, on 
 some glorious September or October morning, to 
 see what last night's equinoctial gale has swept 
 from the populous shallows of Torbay, and cast 
 up, high and dry, on Paignton sands. 
 
 Torbay is a place which should be as much 
 endeared to the naturalist as to the patriot and to 
 the artist. We cannot gaze on its blue ring of 
 water, and the great limestone bluffs which bound 
 it to the north and south, without a glow passing 
 through our hearts, as we remember the terrible and 
 
58 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 glorious pageant which passed by in the glorious 
 July days of 1588, when the Spanish Armada 
 ventured slowly past Berry Head, with Elizabeth's 
 gallant pack of Devon captains (for the London 
 fleet had not yet joined) following fast in its wake, 
 and dashing into the midst of the vast line, undis- 
 mayed by size and numbers, while their kin and 
 Mends stood watching and praying on the cliffs, 
 spectators of Britain's Salamis. The white line of 
 houses, too, on the other side of the bay, is Brix- 
 ham, famed as the landing-place of "William of 
 Orange; the stone on the pier-head, which marks 
 his first footsteps on British ground, is sacred in the 
 eyes of all true English Whigs ; and close by stands 
 the castle of the settler of Newfoundland, Sir 
 Humphrey Gilbert, Ealeigh's half-brother, most 
 learned of all Elizabeth's admirals in life, most 
 pious and heroic in death. And as for scenery, 
 though it can boast of neither mountain peak nor 
 dark fiord, and would seem tame enough in the eyes 
 of a western Scot or Irishman, yet Torbay surely 
 has a soft beauty of its own. The rounded lulls 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 59 
 
 slope gently to the sea, spotted with squares of 
 emerald grass, and rich red fallow fields, and parks 
 full of stately timber trees. Long lines of taU elms 
 run down to the very water's edge, their houghs 
 unwarped by any blast; here and there apple 
 orchards are bending under their loads of fruit, and 
 narrow strips of water-meadow line the glens, where 
 the red cattle are already lounging in richest 
 pastures, within ten yards of the rocky pebble 
 beach. The shore is silent now, the tide far out: 
 but six hours hence it will be hurling columns of 
 rosy foam high into the sunlight, and sprinkling 
 passengers, and cattle, and trim gardens which 
 hardly know what frost and snow may be, but see 
 the flowers of autumn meet the flowers of spring, 
 and the old year linger smilingly to twrae a garland 
 for the new. 
 
 No wonder that such a spot as Torquay, with its 
 delicious Italian climate, and endless variety of rich 
 woodland, flowery lawn, fantastic rock-cavern, and 
 broad bright tide-sand, sheltered from every wind 
 of heaven except the soft south-east, shoxild have 
 
60 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 become a favourite haunt, not only for invalids, but 
 for naturalists. Indeed, it may well claim the 
 honour of being the original home of marine 
 zoology and botany in England, as the Firth of 
 Forth, under the auspices of Sir J. G. Dalyell, has 
 been for Scotland. For here worked Montagu, 
 Turton, and Mrs. Grif&th, to whose extraordinary 
 powers of research English marine botany almost owes 
 its existence, and who survived to an age long 
 beyond the natural term of man, to see, in her cheer- 
 ful and honoured old age, that knowledge become 
 popular and general which she pursued for many a 
 year unassisted and alone. Here, too, the scientific 
 succession is still maintained by Mr. Pengelly and 
 Mr. Gosse, the latter of whom by his delightful and, 
 happily, well-known books has done more for the 
 study of marine zoology than any other living man. 
 Torbay, moreover, from the variety of its rocks, 
 aspects, and sea-floors, where limestones alternate 
 with traps, and traps with slates, while at the 
 valley-mouth the soft sandstones and hard conglo- 
 merates of the new red series slope down into the 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHORE. 61 
 
 tepid and shallow waves, affords an abundance 
 and variety of animal and vegetable life, unequalled, 
 perhaps, in any other part of Great Britain. It 
 cannot boast, certainly, of those strange deep-sea 
 forms which Messrs. Alder, Goodsir, and Laskey 
 dredge among the lochs of the western High- 
 lands, and the sub-marine mountain glens of the 
 Zetland sea ; but it has its own varieties, its 
 own ever-fresh novelties : and in spite of all the 
 research which has been lavished on its shores, a 
 naturalist cannot, I suspect, work there for a winter 
 without discovering forms new to science, or meet- 
 ing with curiosities which have escaped aU ob- 
 servers, since the lynx eye of Montagu espied them 
 full fifty years ago. 
 
 Follow us, then, reader, in imagination, out of 
 the gay watering-place, with its London shops and 
 London equipages, along the broad road beneath 
 the sunny limestone cliff, tufted with golden furze ; 
 past the huge oaks and green slopes of Tor Abbey ; 
 and past the fantastic rocks of Livermead, scooped 
 by the waves into a labyrinth of double and triple 
 
62 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 caves, like Hindoo temples, upborne on pillars 
 banded with yellow and white and red, a week's 
 study, in form and colour and chiaro-oscuro, for 
 any artist; and a mile or so further along a 
 pleasant road, with land-locked glimpses of the 
 bay, to the broad sheet of sand which lies between 
 the village of Paignton and the sea — sands trodden 
 a hundred times by Montagu and Turton, perhaps, 
 by DOlwyn and Gaertner, and many another pioneer 
 of science. And once there, before we look at 
 anything else, come down straight to the sea marge ; 
 for yonder lies, just left by the retiring tide, a 
 mass of life such as you will seldom see again. 
 It is somewhat ugly, perhaps, at first sight; for 
 ankle-deep are spread, for some ten yards long by 
 five broad, huge dirty bivalve shells, as large as 
 the hand, each with its loathly grey and black 
 siphons hanging out, a confused mass of slimy 
 death. Let us walk on to some cleaner heap, and 
 leave these, the great Lutraria Elliptica, which 
 have been lying buried by thousands in the sandy 
 mud, each with the point of its long siphon above 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHORE. 63 
 
 the surface, sucking in and driving out again the 
 salt water on which it feeds, till last night's ground- 
 swell shifted the sea-bottom, and drove them up 
 hither to perish helpless, but not useless, on the 
 beach. 
 
 See, close by is another shell bed, quite as large, 
 but comely enough to please any eye. What a 
 variety of forms and colours are there, amid the 
 purple and olive wreaths of wrack, and bladder- 
 weed, and tangle (ore-weed, as they call it in the 
 south), and the delicate green ribbons of the Zostera 
 (the only English flowering plant which grows 
 beneath the sea). What are they all ? What are 
 the long white razors 1 What are the delicate green- 
 grey scimitars ? What are the tapering brown 
 spires ? What the tufts of delicate yeUow plants 
 like squirrels' tails, and lobsters' horns, and tama- 
 risks, and fir-trees, and all other finely cut animal 
 and vegetable forms ? What are the groups of grey 
 bladders, with something like a little bud at the 
 tip ? What are the hundreds of little pink-striped 
 pears ? What those tiny babies' heads, covered with 
 
64 GLAUCUS : OE. 
 
 grey prickles instead of hair? The great red star- 
 fish, which Ulster chUdren call "the bad man's 
 hands ; " and the great whelks, which the youth 
 of Musselburgh know as roaring buckies, these we 
 have seen before; but what, oh what, are the red 
 capsicums ? — 
 
 Yes, what are the red capsicums ? and why are 
 they poking, snapping, starting, crawling, tumbling 
 wildly over each other, rattling about the htige 
 mahogany cockles, as big as a child's two fists, out 
 of which they are protruded ? Mark them well, 
 for you will perhaps never see them again. They 
 are a Mediterranean species, or rather three species, 
 left behind upon these extreme south-western coasts, 
 probably at the vanishing of that warmer ancient 
 epo6h, which clothed the Lizard Point with the 
 Cornish heath, and the Killarney mountains with 
 Spanish saxifrages, and other relics of a flora whose 
 home is now the Iberian peninsula and the sunny 
 cliffs of the Eiviera. Eare on every other shore, 
 even in the west, it abounds in Torbay at certain, 
 or rather uncertain, times, to so prodigious an 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 65 
 
 amount, that the dredge, after five minutes' scrape, 
 will sometimes come up choked full of this great 
 cockle only. You will see hundreds of them in 
 every cove for miles this day; a seeming waste 
 of life, which would be awful in our eyes, were 
 not the Divine Euler, as His custom is, making 
 this destruction the means of fresh creation, by 
 burying them in the sands, as soon as washed on 
 shore, to fertilize the strata of some future world. 
 It is but a shell-fish truly; but .the great Cuvier 
 thought it remarkable enough to devote to its ana- 
 tomy elaborate descriptions and drawings, which 
 have done more perhaps than any others to illus- 
 trate the curious economy of the whole class of 
 bivalve, or double-shelled, mollusca. (Plate II. 
 Kg. 3.) 
 
 That red capsicum is the foot of the animal 
 contained in the cockle-shelL By its aid it crawls, 
 leaps, and burrows in the sand, where it lies 
 drinking in the salt water through one of its 
 siphons, and discharging it again through the other. 
 Put the shell into a rock pool, or a basin of water. 
 
66 6LAUCUS; 03., 
 
 and you will see the siptons clearly. The valves 
 gape apart some three-quarters of an inch. The 
 semi-pellucid orange " mantle " fills the intermediate 
 space. Through that mantle, at the end from 
 which the foot curves, the siphons protrude ; two 
 thick short tubes joined side by side, their lips 
 fringed with pearly cirri, or fringes; and very 
 beautiful they are. The larger is always open, 
 taking in the water, which is at once the animal's 
 food and air, and which, flowing over the delicate 
 inner surface of the mantle, at once oxygenates its 
 blood, and fills its stomach with minute particles 
 of decayed organized matter. The smaller is shut. 
 Wait a minute, and it will open suddenly and 
 discharge a jet of clear water, which has been 
 robbed, I suppose, of its oxygen and its organic 
 matter. But, I suppose, your eyes will be rather 
 attracted by that same scarlet and orange foot, 
 which is being drawn in and thrust out to a length 
 of nearly four inches, striking with its point against 
 any opposing object, and sending the whole shell 
 backwards with a jerk. The point, you see, ig 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHORE. 67 
 
 sharp and tongue-like; only flattened, not hori- 
 zontally, like a tongue, but perpendicularly, so as 
 to form, as it was intended, a perfect sand-plough, 
 by which the animal can move at will, either above 
 or below the surface of the sand.^ 
 
 But for colour and shape, to what shall we 
 compare it ? To polished cornelian, says Mr. Gosse. 
 I say, to one of the great red capsicums which 
 hang drying in every Covent-garden seedsman's 
 window. Yet is either simile better than the guess 
 of a certain lady, who, entering a room wherein 
 a couple of Cardium tuberculatum were waltzing 
 about a plate, exclaimed, "Oh dear! I always 
 heard that my pretty red coral came out of a fish, 
 and here it is all alive ! " 
 
 " C. tuberculatum," says Mr. Gosse (who described 
 
 it from specimens which I sent him in 1854), " is 
 
 far the finest species. The valves are more globose 
 
 ' If any inland reader wislies to see the action of this foot, in 
 the bivalve Molluscs, let him look at the Common Pond-Mussel 
 (Anodon Cygneus), which he will find in most stagnant waters, and 
 see how he hurrows with it in the mud, and how, when the water 
 is drawn off, he walks solemnly into deeper water, leaving a furrow 
 behind him. 
 
 F 2 
 
68 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 and of a warmer colour ; those that I have seen are 
 even more spinovis." Such may have been the case 
 in those I sent : but it has occurred to me now 
 and then to dredge specimens of C. aculeatum, 
 which had escaped that rolling on the sand fatal 
 in old age to its delicate spines, and which equalled 
 in colour, size, and perfectness the noble one figured 
 in poor dear old Dr. Turton's "British Bivalves." 
 Besides, aculeatum is a far thinner and more 
 delicate shell And a third species, C. echinatum, 
 with curves more graceful and continuous, is to be 
 found now and then with the two former. In it, 
 each point, instead of degenerating into a knot, as 
 in tuberculatum, or developing from delicate flat 
 briar-prickles into long straight thorns, as in acu- 
 leatum, is close-set to its fellow, and curved at the 
 point transversely to the shell, the whole being thus 
 horrid with hundreds of strong tenterhooks, making 
 his castle impregnable to the raveners of the deep. 
 For we can hardly doubt that these prickles are 
 meant as weapons of defence, without which so 
 savoury a morsel as the mollusc within (cooked and 
 
THK WONDERS OF THE SHOKE. 69 
 
 eaten largely on some parts of our south coast) 
 would be a staple article of food for sea-beasts of 
 prey. And it is noteworthy, first, that the defensive 
 thorns which are permanent on the two thinner 
 species, aculeatum and echinatum, disappear alto- 
 gether on the thicker one, tuberculatum, as old age 
 gives him a solid and heavy globose shell ; and 
 next, that he too, while young and tender, and liable 
 therefore to be bored through by whelks and such 
 murderous univalves, does actually possess the same 
 briar-prickles, which his thinner cousins keep 
 throughout life. Nevertheless, prickles, in all three 
 species, are, as far as we can see, useless in Torbay, 
 where no wolf-fish (Anarrhichas lupus) or ot^ier 
 owner of shell-crushing jaws wanders, terrible to 
 lobster and to cockle. Originally intended, as we 
 suppose, to face the strong-toothed monsters of 
 the Mediterranean, these foreigners have wandered 
 northward to shores where their armour is not now 
 needed ; and yet centuries of idleness and security 
 have not been able to persuade them to lay it 
 by. This— if my explanation is the right one— is 
 
70 GLAUCUS; OB, 
 
 but one more case among hundreds in which pecu- 
 liarities, useful doubtless to their original possessors, 
 remain, though now useless, in their descendants. 
 Just so does the tame ram inherit the now super- 
 fluous horns of his primseval wild ancestors, though 
 he fights now — if he fights at all — not with his 
 horns, but with his forehead. 
 
 Enough of Cardium tuberculatum. Now for 
 the other animals of the heap ; and first, for those 
 long white razors. They, as well as the gi-ey 
 scimitars, are Solens, Ea^or-fish (Solen siliqua and 
 S. ensis), burrowers in the sand by that foot 
 which protrudes from one end, nimble in escaping 
 from the Torquay boys, whom you will see boring 
 for them with a long iron screw, on the sands at 
 low tide. They are very good to eat, these razor- 
 fish ; at least, for those who so think them ; and 
 abound in millions upon all our sandy shores.' 
 
 Now for the tapering brown spires. They are 
 TurriteUse, snail-lilce animals (though the form of 
 
 ' These shells are so common that I have not cared to figure 
 them. 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. VI 
 
 the sbell is different), who crawl and browse by- 
 thousands on the beds of Zostera, or grass wrack, 
 which you see thrown about on the beach, and 
 which grows naturally in two or three fathoms water. 
 Stay : here is one which is " naore than itself." On 
 its back is mounted a cluster of barnacles (Balanus 
 Porcatus), of the same family as those which stud 
 the tide-rocks in millions, scratching the legs of 
 hapless bathers. Of them, I will speak presently . 
 for I may have a still more curious member of the 
 familv to show you. But meanwhile, look at the 
 mouth of the shell ; a long grey worm protrudes 
 from it, which is not the rightful inhabitant. He 
 is dead long since, and his place has been occu- 
 pied by one Sipunculus Bernhardi ; a wight of low 
 decree, who connects " radiate" with annulate forms 
 
 in plain English, sea-cucumbers (of which we 
 
 shall see some soon) with sea-worms. But how- 
 ever low in the scale of comparative anatomy, 
 he has wit enough to take care of himself ; mean 
 ugly little worm as he seems. For finding the 
 mouth of the Turritella too big for him, he has 
 
72 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 plastered it up with sand and mud (Heaven alone 
 knows how), just as a wry-neck plasters up a hole 
 in an apple-tree when she intends to build therein, 
 and has left only a round hole, out of which he 
 can poke his proboscis. A curious thing is this 
 proboscis, when seen through the magnifier. You 
 perceive a ring of tentacles round the mouth, for 
 picking up I know not what ; and you will perceive, 
 too, if you watch it, that when he draws it in, he 
 burns mouth, tentacles and all, inwards, and so 
 down into his stomach, just as if you were to turn 
 the finger of a glove inward from the tip till it 
 passed into the hand; and so performs, every time 
 he eats, the clown's as yet ideal feat, of jumping 
 down his own throat.* 
 
 So much have we seen on one little shell. But 
 there is more to see close to it. Those yellow 
 plants which I likened to squirrels' tails and lob- 
 sters' horns, and what not, are zoophytes of different 
 kinds. Here is Sertularia argentea (true squirrel's 
 
 ' Plate II. Fig. 1, represents both parasites on the dead 
 Turritella. 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHORE. 73 
 
 tail) ; here, S. filicula, as delicate as tangled threads 
 of glass ; here, abietina ; here, rosacea. The lob- 
 sters' horns are Antennaria antennina ; and mingled 
 with them are Plnmularise, always to be distin- 
 guished from Sertulariee by polypes growing on 
 one side of the branch, and not on both. Here is 
 falcata, with its roots twisted round . a sea-weed. 
 Here is cristata, on the same weed ; and here is 
 a piece of the beautiful myriophyllum, which has 
 been battered in its long journey out of the deep 
 water about the ore rock. For all these you must 
 consult Johnson's "Zoophytes," and for a dozen 
 smaller species, which you would probably find 
 tangled among them, or parasitic on the sea-weed. 
 Here are Tlustrae, or sea-mats. This, which smells 
 very like Verbena, is Flustra coriacea (PI. I. Pig. 2). 
 That scurf on the frond of ore-weed is P. lineata 
 (PI. I. Pig. 1). The glass bells twined about this 
 Sertularia are Campanularia syringa (PI. I. Pig. 9) ; 
 and here is a tiny plant of Cellularia ciliata (PI. I. 
 Pig. 8). Look at it through the field-glass ; for it 
 is truly wonderful. Each polype cell is edged with 
 
74 GLAUCUS; OB, 
 
 whip-like spines, and oq the back of some of them 
 is — what is it, but a live vulture's head, snapping 
 and snapping — ^what for? 
 
 Nay, reader, 1 am here to show you what can 
 be seen : but as for telling you what can be known, 
 much more what cannot, I decline ; and refer you 
 to Johnson's " Zoophytes," wherein you will find 
 that several species of polypes carry these same 
 birds' heads : but whether they be parts of the 
 polype, and of what use they are, no man living 
 knoweth. 
 
 Next, what are the striped pears? They are 
 sea-anemones, and of a species only lately well 
 known, Sagartia viduata, the snake-locked ane- 
 mone (PL V. Fig. 3^). They have been washed off 
 the loose stones to which they usually adhere by 
 the pitiless roll of the ground-swell ; however, they 
 are not so far gone, but that if you take one oi 
 them home, and put it in a jar of water, it wiU 
 
 ^ A few words on him, and on sea-anemones in general, may be 
 found in Appendix II. But full details, accompanied witli beautiful 
 plates, may be found in Mr. Gosse's work on British sea-anemones 
 and maidrepores, which ought to be in every seaside libraiy. 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE., 75 
 
 expand into a delicate compound flower, which can 
 neither be described nor painted, of long pellucid 
 tentacles, hanging like a thin bluish cloud over a 
 disk of mottled brown and grey. 
 
 Here, adheriiig to this large whelk, is another, 
 but far larger and coarser. It is Sagartia parasitica, 
 one of our largest British species ; and most sin- 
 gular in this, that it is almost always (in Torbay, 
 at least,) found adhering to a whelk : but never to 
 a live one ; and for this reason. The live whelk 
 (as you may see for yourself when the tide is out) 
 burrows in the sand in chase of hapless bivalve 
 shells, whom he' bores through with his sharp 
 tongue (always, cunning fellow, close to the hinge, 
 where the fish is), and then sucks out their life. 
 Now, if the anemone stuck to him, it would be 
 carried under the sand daily, to its own disgust. 
 It prefers, therefore, the dead wheUf, inhabited by 
 a soldier crab, Pagurus Bernhardi (PL XI. Fig. 2), 
 of which you may find a dozen anywhere as the 
 tide goes out; and travels about at the crab's 
 expense, sharing with him the offal which is his 
 
76 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 food. Note, moreover, that the soldier crab is the 
 most hasty and blundering of marine animals, as 
 active as a monkey, and as subject to panics as 
 a horse ; wherefore the poor anemone on his back 
 must have a hard life of it ; being knocked about 
 against rocks and shells, without warning, from 
 morn to night and night to morn. Against which 
 danger, kind Nature, ever maxima in minimis, has 
 provided by fitting him with a stout leather coat, 
 which she has given, I believe, to no other of his 
 family. 
 
 Next, for the babies' heads, covered with prickles, 
 instead of hair. They are sea-urchins, Amphidotus 
 cordatus, which burrow by thousands in the sand. 
 These are of that Spatangoid form, which you will 
 often find fossil in the chalk, and which shepherd 
 boys call snakes' heads. We shall soon find another 
 sort, an Echinus, and have time to talk over these 
 most strange (in my eyes) of all living animals. 
 
 There are a hundred more things to be talked of 
 here: but we must defer the examination of them 
 till our return ; for it wants an hour yet of the 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEE. 77 
 
 dead low spring-tide ; and ere we go home, we will 
 spend a few minutes at least on the rocks at Liver- 
 mead, where awaits us a strong-backed quarryman, 
 with a strong-backed crowbar, as is to be hoped 
 (for he snapped one right across there yesterday, 
 falling miserably on his back into a pool thereby), 
 and we will verify Mr. Gosse's observation, that — 
 
 "When once we have begun to look with curi- 
 osity on the strange things that ordinary people 
 pass over without notice, our wonder is continually 
 excited by the variety of phase, and often by the 
 uncouthness of form, under which some of the 
 meaner creatures are presented to us. And this 
 is very specially the case with the inhabitants of 
 the sea. We can scarcely poke or pry for an hour 
 among the rocks, at low-water mark, or walk, with 
 an observant downcast eye, along the beach after a 
 gale, without finding some oddly-fashioned, suspi- 
 cious-looking being, unlike any form of life that 
 we have seen before. The dark concealed interior 
 of the sea becomes thus invested with a fresh mys- 
 tery ; its vast recesses appear to be stored with all 
 
78 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 imaginaMe forms; and we are tempted to think 
 there must he multitudes of living creatures whose 
 very figure and structure have never yet been sus- 
 pected. 
 
 " ' sea ! old sea ! who yet tnows half 
 Of thy wonders or thy pride ! ' " 
 
 Gorsb's Aquarium, pp. 226, 227. 
 
 These words have more than fulfilled themselves 
 since they were written. Those Deep-Sea dredgings, 
 of which a detailed account will be found in Dr. 
 Wyville Thomson's new. and most beautiful book, 
 " The Depths of the Sea," have disclosed, of late 
 years, wonders of the deep even more strange and 
 more multitudinous than the wonders of the shore. 
 The time is past when we thought ourselves bound 
 to believe, with Professor Edward Forbes, that only 
 some hundred fathoms down, the inhabitants of the 
 sea-bottom "become more and more modified, and 
 fewer and fewer, indicating our approach towards an 
 abyss where life is either extinguished, or exhibits 
 but a few sparks to mark its lingering presence." 
 
 Neither now need we indulge in another theory 
 which had a certain grandeur in it, and was not 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 79 
 
 SO absurd as it looks at first sight, — namely, that, 
 as Dr. Wyville Thomson puts it, picturesc[uely 
 enough, ^ " in going down the sea water became, 
 under the pressure, gradually heavier and heavier, 
 and that all the loose things floated at different 
 levels, according to their specific weight, — skele- 
 tons of men, anchors ' and shot and cannon, and 
 last of all the broad gold pieces lost in the wreck 
 of many a galleon off the Spanish Main ; the whole 
 forming a kind of 'false bottom' to the ocean, be- 
 neath whicb there lay all the depth of clear stiU 
 water, which was heavier than molten gold." 
 
 The facts are ; first that water, being all but in- 
 compressible, is hardly any heavier, and just as 
 liquid, at the greatest depth, than at the surface ; 
 and that therefore animals can move as freely in it 
 in deep as in shallow water ; and next, that as the 
 fluids inside the body of a sea animal must be at 
 the same pressure as that of the water outside it, 
 the two pressures must balance each other ; and the 
 body, instead of being crushed in, may be uncon- 
 scious that it is living imder a weight of two or 
 
80 GLAUCUS ; OE, 
 
 three miles of water. But so it is ; as we gather 
 our curiosities at low-tide mark, or haul the dredge 
 a mile or two out at sea, we may allow our fancy- 
 to range freely out to the westward, and down over 
 the subac[ueous cliffs of the hundred-fathom line, 
 which mark the old shore of the British Isles, or 
 rather of a time when Britain and Ireland were 
 part of the continent, through water a mile, and 
 two, and three miles deep, into total darkness, and 
 icy cold, and a pressure which, in the open air, 
 would crush any known living creature to a jelly ; 
 and be certain that we shall find the ocean-floor 
 teeming everywhere with multitudinous life, some 
 of it strangely like, some strangely unlike, the crea- 
 tures which we see along the shore. 
 
 Some strangely like. You may find, for instance, 
 among the sea-weed, here and there, a little Llack 
 sea-spider, a ISTymphon, who has this peculiarity, that 
 possessing no body at aU to speak of, he carries 
 his needful stomach in long branches, packed inside 
 his legs. The specimens which you will find wiU 
 probably be half an inch across the legs. An 
 
THE.WONDEES OF THE SHOEE. 
 
 81 
 
 almost exactly similar Nymphon has been dredged 
 from the depths of the Arctic and Antarctic oceans, 
 nearly two feet across. 
 
 Fig. 1. — Nym.'phon dbysmrum^ Normal. Slightly enlarged. 
 
 You may find also a quaint little shrimp, Caprella, 
 clinging by its hind claws to sea-weed, and waving 
 
 G 
 
82 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 its gaunt grotesque body to and fro, wliile it makes 
 mesmeric passes with its large fore claws, — one of 
 the most ridiculous of Nature's many ridiculous forms. 
 Those which you will find will be some quarter of 
 an inch in length ; but in the cold area of the North 
 Atlantic, their cousins, it is now found, are nearly 
 three inches long, and perch in like manner, not on 
 sea-weeds, for there are none so deep, but on branch- 
 ing sponges. 
 
 These are but two instances out of many of 
 forms which were supposed to be peculiar to 
 shallow shores repeating themselves at vast depths : 
 thus forcing on us strange qiiestions about changes 
 in the distribirtion and depth of the ancient seas ; 
 and forcing us, also, to reconsider the old rules by 
 wliicli rocks were distinguished as deep-sea or 
 shallow-sea deposits according to the fossils found 
 in them. 
 
 As for the new forms, and even more important 
 than them, the ancient forms, supposed to have 
 been long extinct, and only known as fossils, till 
 they were lately rediscovered alive in the nether 
 
THE WONDKltS OF THE SHORE. 
 
 83 
 
 FiQ. 2.—Caprella spinosissima, Noemas. Twice the natural size. 
 
84 6LAUCUS. 
 
 darkness, — ^for them you must consult Dr. Wyville 
 Thomson's book, and the notices of the "Chal- 
 lenger's " dredgings which appear from time to time 
 in the columns of " Nature ; " for want of space 
 forbids my speaking of them here. 
 
 But if you have no time to read " The Depths of 
 the Sea/' go at least to the British Museum, or if 
 you be a northern man, to the admirable public 
 museum, at Liverpool; ask to be shown the deep- 
 sea forms; and there feast your curiosity and 
 your sense of beauty for au hour. Look at th& 
 Crinoids, or stalked star-fishes, the " Lilies of living 
 stone," which swarmed in the ancient seas, in vast 
 variety, and in such numbers that whole beds of 
 limestone are composed of their disjointed frag- 
 ments ; but which have vanished out of our modern 
 seas, we know not why, tiU, a few years since, almost 
 the only known living species, was the exquisite 
 and rare Pentacrinus asteria, from deep water off 
 the Windward Isles of the West Indies. 
 
 Of this you will see a specimen or two both 
 at Liverpool and in the British Museum ; and near 
 
b'lc. l;. — i'entacrinus asteria, L(nn.eus. One-fuurtli the natural size. 
 
8G GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 them, probably, specipiens of the new-old Crinoids, 
 discovered of late years by Professor Sars, Mr. Gwyii 
 Jeffreys, Dr. Carpenter, Dr. Wyville Thomson, and 
 the other deep-sea disciples of the mythic Glaucus, 
 the fisherman, who, enamoured of the wonders of 
 the sea, plunged into the blue abyss once and for 
 all, and became himself "the blue old man of 
 the sea." 
 
 Next look at the corals, and Gorgonias, and all 
 the sea-fern tribe of branching polypidoms, and 
 last, but not least, at the glass sponges ; first at the 
 Euplectella, or Venus's flower-basket, wliicli lives 
 embedded in the mud of the seas of the Philippines, 
 supported by a glass frill " standing up round it 
 like an Elizabethan ruff." Twenty years ago there 
 was but one specimen in Europe : now you may buy 
 one for a pound in any curiosity shop. I advise you 
 to do so, and to keep- — as I have seen done — under 
 a glass case, as a delight to your eyes, one of 
 the most exquisite, both for form and texture, of 
 natural objects. 
 
 Then look at the Hyalouemas, or glass-rope 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEE. 87 
 
 sponges, which root themselves in the mud of the 
 ocean floor by a twisted wisp of strong flexible 
 flint needles, somewhat on the principle of a screw- 
 pile. So strange and complicated is their structure, 
 that naturalists for a long while could literally make 
 neither head nor tail of them, as long as they had only 
 Japanese specimens to study, some of which the 
 Japanese dealers had, of malice prepense, stuck 
 upside , down into Pholas-borings in stones. Which 
 was top and which bottom ; which the thing itself, 
 and which special parasites growing on it ; whether 
 it was a sponge, or a zoophyte, or something else ; 
 at one time even whether it was natural, or artificial 
 and a make-up, — could not be settled, even till a 
 year or two since. But the discovery of the same, 
 or a similar, species in abundance from the Butt of 
 the Lews down to Setubal on the Portuguese coast, 
 where the deep-water shark fishers call it "sea- 
 ■\vhip," has given our savants specimens enough to 
 make up their minds^that they really know little 
 or nothing about it, and probably will never know. 
 And do not forget, lastly, to ask, whether at 
 
88 GLAXTCUS ; OR, 
 
 Liverpool or at the British Museum, for the Hol- 
 tenias and their congeners, — hollow sponges built 
 up of glassy spicules, and rooted in the mud by 
 glass hairs, in some cases between two and three 
 feet long, as flexible and graceful as tresses of 
 snow-white silk. 
 
 Look at these, and a hundred kindred forms, and 
 then see how nature is not only "maxima in 
 minimis" — greatest in her least, but often "pul- 
 cherrima in abditis" — fairest in her most hidden 
 works; and how the Creative Spirit has lavished, 
 as it were, unspeakable artistic skill on lowly- 
 organized creature, never till now beheld by man, 
 and buried, not only in foul mud, but in their 
 own unsightly heap of living jelly. 
 
 But so it was from the beginning ; — and this planet 
 was not made for man alone. Countless ages before 
 we appeared on earth the depths of the old chalk- 
 ocean teemed with forms as beautiful and perfect 
 as those, their lineal descendants, which the dredge 
 now brings up from the Atlantic sea-floor; and if 
 there were — as my reason tells me that there must 
 
THE WONDERS OF THS SHORE. . 89 
 
 lia^e been — final moral causes for their exist- 
 ence, the only ones which we have a right to 
 imagine are these — that all, down to the lowest 
 Ehizopod, might delight themselves, however dimly, 
 in existing ; and that the Lord might delight Him- 
 self in them. 
 
 Thus, much — alas ! how little — about the wonders 
 of the deep. We, who are no deep-sea dredgers, 
 must return humbly to the wonders of the shore. 
 And first, as after descending the gap in the sea- 
 wall we walk along the ribbed floor of hard yellow 
 sand, let me ask you to give a sharp look-out for 
 a round grey disc, about as big as a penny-piece, 
 peeping out on the surface. No ; that is not it, 
 that little lump : open it, and you will find within 
 one of the common little Venus gallina. — The 
 closet collectors have given it some new name 
 now, and no thanks to them : they are always 
 changing the names, instead of studying the live 
 animals where Nature has put them, in which case 
 they would have no time for word-inventing. Nay, 
 I verily suspect that the names grow, like other 
 
90 GLATJCUS; OR, 
 
 things; at least, they get longer and longer and 
 more jaw-breaking every year. The little bivalve, 
 however, finding itself left by the tide, has wisely 
 shut up its siphons, and, by means of its foot 
 and its edges, buried itself in a comfortable bath 
 of cool wet sand, till the sea shall come back, 
 and make it safe to crawl and lounge about 
 on the surface, smoking the sea-water instead of 
 tobacco. Keith er is that depression what we seek. 
 Touch it, and out poke a pair of astonished and 
 inquiring horns : it is a long-armed crab, who 
 saw us coming, and wisely shovelled himself into 
 the sand by means of his nether-end. Corystes 
 Cassivelaunus is his name, which he is said to have 
 acquired from the marks on his back, which are 
 somewhat like a human face. " Those long an- 
 tenna;," says my friend, Mr. Lloyd ^ — I have not 
 verified the fact, but believe it, as he knows a 
 great deal about crabs, and I know next to no- 
 thing — "form a tube through which a current of 
 water passes into the crab's gills, free from the 
 ' Handbook to the Marine Aqviariam of the Crystal Palace. 
 
THE V/ONDEES OF THE SUOKE. 91 
 
 siTiTouiiding sand." Moreover, it is only the male 
 who has those strangely long fore-arms and claws ; 
 the female contenting herself with limbs of a more 
 moderate length. Neither is that, though it might 
 he, the hole down which what we seek has vanished : 
 but that burrow contains one of the long white 
 I'azors which you saw cast on shore at Paignton. 
 The boys close by are boring for them with 
 iron rods armed with a screw, and taking them in 
 to sell in Torquay market, as excellent food. But 
 there is one, at last — a grey disc pouting up 
 through the sand. Touch it, and 'it is gone down, 
 quick as light. We must dig. it out, and carei'ullj', 
 for it is a delicate monster. At last, after ten 
 minutes' carefirl work, we have broiight up, from 
 a foot depth or more — what ? A thick, dirty, slimy 
 worm, without head or tail, form or colour. A slug 
 ]jas more artistic beauty about him. Be it so. At 
 home in the aquarium (where, alas ! he will live 
 but for a day or two, under the new irritation of 
 light) he will make a very different figure. That 
 is one' of the rarest of British sea-animals, Peachia 
 
92 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 hastata (PL XII. Fig. 1), which differs from most 
 other British Actiniae in this, that instead of having 
 like tliem a walking disc, it has a free open lower 
 end, with which (I know not how) it buries 
 itself upright in the sand, with its mouth just 
 above the surface. The figure on the left of the 
 plate represents a curious cluster of papillte which 
 project from one side of the mouth, and are the 
 opening of the oviduct. But his value consists, 
 not merely in his beauty (though that, reaUy, is 
 not small), but in his belonging to what the long- 
 word-makers call an "interosculant" group, — a party 
 of genera and species which connect families scien- 
 tifically far apart, filling up a fresh link in the great 
 chain, or rather the great network, of zoological 
 classification. For here we have a simple, and, as 
 it were, crude form; of which, if we dared to 
 indulge in reveries, we might say that the Creative 
 Mind realized it before either Actiniae or Holothu- 
 rians, and then went on to perfect the idea con- 
 tained in it in two different directions; dividing 
 it into two different families, and making on its 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 93 
 
 model, by adding new organs, and taking away old 
 ones, in one direction the whole family of Actiniae 
 (sea-anemones), and in a quite opposite one the 
 Holothurife, those strange sea-encumbers, with their 
 mouth-fringe of feathery gills, of which you shall 
 see some anon. Thus there has been, in the 
 Creative Mind, as it gave life to new species, a 
 development of the idea on which older species 
 were . created, in order — we may fancy — that every 
 mesh of the great net might gradually be supplied, 
 and there should be no gaps in the perfect variety 
 of Nature's forms. This development is one which 
 we must believe to be at least possible, if we allow 
 that a Mind presides over the universe, and not 
 a mere brute necessity, a Law (absurd misnomer) 
 without a Lawgiver; and to it (strangely enough 
 coinciding here and there with the Platonic doctrine 
 of Eternal Ideas existing in the Divine Mind) all 
 fresh inductive discovery seems to point more and 
 more. 
 
 Let me speak freely a few words on this important 
 matter. Geology has disproved the old popular 
 
Si GLAUCUS; OK, 
 
 belief that the universe was brought into being as 
 it now exists by a single fiat. We know that the 
 work has been eradual ; that the eartli 
 
 " In tracts of fluent heat began, 
 The seeming prey of cyclic storms, 
 The home of seeming random forms. 
 Till, at the last, arose the man." 
 
 And we know, also, that these forms, "seeming 
 random " as they are, have appeared according to a 
 law which, as far as we can judge, has been on the 
 whole one of progress, — lower animals (though we 
 cannot yet say, the lowest) appearing first, and man, 
 the highest mammal, " the roof and crown of things," 
 one of the latest in the series. We have no more 
 right, let it be observed, to say that man, the highest, 
 appeared last, than that the lowest appeared first. 
 It was probably so, in both cases ; but there is as 
 yet no positive proof of either ; and as we know that 
 species of animals lower than those which already 
 existed appeared again and again during the various 
 eras, so it is quite possible that they may be appear- 
 ing now, and may appear hereafter : and that for 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE bllUltK 95 
 
 every extinct Uodo or Moa, a new species may be 
 created, to keep up the equilibrium of the whole. 
 This is but a surmise : but it may be wise, perhaps, 
 just now, to confess boldly, even to insist on, its 
 possibility, lest any should fancy, from our unwill- 
 ingness to allow it, that there would be ought in it, if 
 proved, contrary to sound religion. 
 
 I am, I must honestly confess, more and more 
 unable to perceive anything which an orthodox 
 Christian may not hold, in those physical theories 
 of " evolution," v/hich are gaining more and more 
 the assent of our best zoologists and botanists. All 
 that they ask us to believe is, that " species " and 
 " families," and indeed the whole of organic nature, 
 have gone through, and may still be going through, 
 some such development from a lowest germ, as we 
 know that every living individual, from the lowest 
 zoophyte to man himself, does actually go through. 
 They apply to the whole • of the living world, past, 
 present, and future, the law which is undeniably at 
 Avork on each individual of it. They may be wrong, 
 or they may be right : but what is there in such a 
 
96 GLATJCUS; OR, 
 
 conception contrary to any doctrine — at least of the 
 Church of England ? To say that this cannot be 
 true ; that species cannot vary, because God, at the 
 beginning, created each thing "according to its 
 kind," is really to beg the question ; which is — Does 
 the idea of " kind " include variability or not ? and 
 if so, how much variability ? Now, " kind," or 
 " species," as we call it, is defined nowhere in the 
 Bible. What right have we to read our own defini- 
 tion into the word ?• — and that against the certain 
 fact, that some " kinds " do vary, and that widely, — 
 mankind, for instance, and the animals and plants 
 which he domesticates. Surely that latter fact 
 should be significant, to those who believe, as I do, 
 that man was created in the likeness of God. For 
 if man has the power, not only of making plants 
 and animals vary, but of developing them into forms 
 of higher beauty and usefulness than their wild 
 ancestors possessed, why should not the God in whose 
 image he is made possess the same power ? If the 
 old' theological rule be true, — "There is nothing 
 in man which was not first in God " (sin, of course. 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHORE. 97 
 
 excluded) — then why should not this imperfect crea- 
 tive faculty in man be the very guarantee that God 
 possesses it in perfection ? 
 
 Such at least is the conclusion of one who, 
 studying certain families of plants, which indulge in 
 the most fantastic varieties of shape and size, and 
 yet through all their vagaries retain — as do the 
 Palms, the Orchids, the Euphorbiacese — one organ, 
 or form of organs, peculiar and highly specialized, 
 yet constant throughout the whole of each family, 
 has been driven to the belief that each of these three 
 families, at least, has " sported off" from one com- 
 mon ancestor — one archetypal Palm, one archetypal 
 Orchid, one archetypal Euphorbia, simple, it may be, 
 in itself, but endowed with infinite possibilities of 
 new and complex beauty, to be developed, not in it, 
 but in its descendants. He has asked himself, sitting 
 alone amid the boundless wealth of tropic forests, 
 whether even then and there the great God might 
 not be creating round him, slowly but surely, new 
 forms of beaiity ? If he chose to do it, could He not 
 do it? That man found himseK none the worse 
 
 H 
 
98 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 Christian for the thought. He has said — and must 
 be allowed to say again, for he sees no reason to alter 
 his words — ^in speaking of the wonderful variety of 
 forms in the Euphorbiacese, from the weedy English 
 Euphorbias, the Dog's Mercuries, and the Box, to 
 the prickly-stemmed Scarlet Euphorbia of Mada- 
 gascar, the succulent Cactus-like Euphorbias of the 
 Canaries and elsewhere ; the Gale-like Phyllanthus ; 
 the many-formed Crotons ; the Hemp-like Maniocs, 
 Physic-nuts, Castor-oUs, the scarlet Poinsettia, the 
 little piok and yellow Dalechampia, the poisonous 
 Manchineel, and the gigantic Hura, or sandbox tree, 
 of the West Indies, — all so different in shape and 
 size, yet all alike in their most peculiar and com- 
 plex fructification, and in their acrid milky juice, — 
 "What if all these forms are the descendants of 
 one original form? Would that be one whit the 
 more wonderful than the theory that they were, 
 each and all, with the minute, and often imaginary, 
 shades of difference between certain cognate species 
 among them, created separately and at once ? But 
 if it be so — which I cannot allow — what would the 
 
THE WONDBRS OF THE SHORE. 99 
 
 theologian have to say, save that God's works are 
 even more wonderful than he always believed them 
 to he ? As for the theory heing impossible — that is 
 is to be decided by men of science, on strict experi- 
 mental grounds. As for us theologians, who are we, 
 that we should limit, k priori, the power of God ? 
 'Is anything too hard for the Lord?' asked the 
 prophet of old ; and we have a right to ask it as 
 long as the world shall last. If it be said that 
 'natural selection,' or, as Mr. Herbert Spencer 
 better defines it, the ' survival of the fittest,' is 
 too simple a cause to produce such fantastic variety 
 — that, again, is a question to be settled exclusively 
 by men of science, on their own grounds. We, 
 meanwhile, always knew that God works by 
 very simple, or seemingly simple, means ; that 
 the universe, as far as we could discern it, was one 
 organization of the most simple means. It was 
 wonderful — or should have been — in our eyes, that 
 a shower of rain should make the grass grow, and 
 that the grass should become flesh, and the flesh 
 food for the thinking brain of man. It was — or 
 
 H 2 
 
100 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 ought to have been — more wonderful yet to us that a 
 child should resemble its parents, or even a butterfly 
 resemble, if not always, still usually, its parents 
 likewise. Ought God to appear less or more august 
 in our eyes if we discover that the means are even 
 simpler than we supposed ? We held Him to be 
 Almighty and AU-wise. Are" we to reverence Him 
 less or more if we find Him to be so much mightier, 
 so much wiser, than we dreamed, that He can not 
 only make all things, but — the very perfection of 
 creative power — make all things make themselves? 
 "We believed that His care was over all His 
 works; that His providence worked perpetually 
 over the universe. We were taught — some of us 
 at least — by Holy Scripture, that without Him 
 not a sparrow fell to the ground, and that the 
 very hairs of our head were all numbered ; that 
 the whole history of the universe was made up, in 
 fact, of an infinite network of special providences. 
 If, then, that should be true which a great na- 
 turalist writes, ' It may be metaphorically said that 
 natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, 
 
THE WOHDEES OF THE SHORE. 101 
 
 througliout the world, every variation, even the 
 slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving 
 and adding up all that is good ; silently and insen- 
 sibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity 
 offers, at the improvement of each organic being, in 
 relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of 
 life,' — if this, I say, were proved to be true, ought 
 God's care and God's providence to seem less or more 
 magnificent in our eyes? Of old it was said by 
 Him without whom nothing is made — ' My Father 
 worketh hitherto, and I work.' Shall we quarrel 
 with physical science, if she gives us evidence that 
 those words are true ? " 
 
 And — understand it well — the grand passage 
 I have just quoted need not be accused qf substi- 
 tuting " natural selection for God." In any case 
 natural selection would be only the means or law 
 by which God works, as He does by other natural 
 laws. We do not substitute gravitation for God, 
 when we say that the planets are sustained in 
 their orbits by the law of gravitation. The theory 
 about natural selection may be untrue, or imperfect, 
 
102 GLAUCITS; OK, 
 
 as may the modern theories of the " evolution and 
 progress " of organic forms : let the man of science 
 decide that. But if true, the theories seem to me 
 perfectly to agree with, and may be perfectly ex- 
 plained by, the simple old belief which the Bible 
 sets before us, of a Living God : not a mere past 
 will, such as the Koran sets forth, creating once 
 and for all, and then leaving the universe, to use 
 Goethe's simile, "to spin round his finger;" nor 
 again, an " all-pervading spirit," words which are 
 mere contradictory jargon, concealing, from those 
 who utter them, blank Materialism : but One who 
 works in all things which have obeyed Him to will 
 and to do of His good pleasure, keeping His abysmal 
 and self-perfect purpose, yet altering the methods 
 by which that purpose is attained, from aeon to 
 seen, ay, from moment to moment, for ever various, 
 yet for ever the same. This great and yet most 
 blessed paradox of the Changeless God, who yet can 
 say " It repenteth me," and " Behold, I work a new 
 thing on the earth," is revealed no less by nature 
 than by Scripture ; the changeableness, not of caprice 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEE. 103 
 
 or imperfection, but of an Infinite Maker and 
 "Poietes," drawing ever fresh forms out of the in- 
 exhaustible treasury of His primaeval Mind ; and yet 
 never throwing away a conception to which He has 
 once given actual birth in time and space, (but to 
 compare reverently small things and great) lovingly 
 repeating it, re-applying it; producing the same 
 effects by endlessly different methods ; or so deli- 
 cately modifying the method that, as by the turn 
 of a hair, it shall produce endlessly diverse effects ; 
 looking back, as it were, ever and anon over the 
 great work of all the ages, to retouch it, and fill 
 up each chasm in the scheme, which for some 
 good purpose had been left open in .earlier worlds ; 
 or leaving some open (the forms, for instance, neces- 
 sary to connect the bimana and the quadrumana) 
 to be filled up perhaps hereafter when the world 
 needs them ; the handiwork, in short, of a living 
 and loving Mind, perfect in His own eternity, but 
 stooping to work in time and space, and there 
 rejoicing Himself in the work of His own hands, 
 and in His eternal Sabbaths ceasing in rest 
 
104 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 ineffable, that He may look on that which He hath 
 made, and behold it is very good. 
 
 I speak, of course, under correctio-n; for this 
 conclusion is emphatically matter of induction, and 
 must be verified or modified by ever-fresh facts : but 
 I meet with many a Christian passage in scientific 
 books, which seems to me to go, not too far, but 
 rather not far enough, in asserting the God of the 
 Bible, as Saint Paul says, " not to have left HimseK 
 without witness," in nature itself, that He is the God 
 of grace. Why speak of the God of nature and the 
 God of ^race as two antithetical terms ? The Bible 
 never, in a single instance, makes the distinction ; 
 and surely, if God be (as He is) the Eternal and 
 Unchangeable One, and if (as we all confess) the 
 universe bears the impress of His signet, we have 
 no right, in the present infantile state of science, 
 to put arbitrary limits of our own to the revelation 
 which He may have thought good to make of Him- 
 self in nature. Nay, rather, let us believe that, if 
 our eyes were opened, we should fulfil the re- 
 quirement of Genius, to "see the universal in the 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHORE. 105 
 
 particular," by seeing God's whole likeness. His 
 whole glory, reflected as in a mirror even in the 
 meanest flower ; and that nothing but the duxness 
 of our own souls prevents them from seeing day 
 and night in all things, however small or trivial 
 to human eclecticism, the Lord Jesus Christ Him- 
 self fulfilling His own saying, " My Father worketh 
 hitherto, and I work." 
 
 To me it seems (to sum up, in a few words, what 
 I have tried to say) that such development and pro- 
 gress as have as yet been actually discovered in 
 nature, bear every trace of having been produced by 
 successive acts of thought and will in some personal 
 mind ; which, however boundlessly rich and power- 
 ful, is still the Archetype of the human mind ; and 
 therefore (for to this I confess I have been all along 
 tending) probably capable, without violence to its 
 properties, of becoming, like the human mind, 
 incarnate. 
 
 But to descend from these perhaps too daring 
 speculations, there is another, and more human, 
 source of interest about the animal who is writhing 
 
106 GLATJCTIS; OE, 
 
 feebly in the glass jar of salt water ; for he is one of 
 the many curiosities which have been added to our 
 fauna by that humble hero Mr. Charles Peach, the 
 self-taught naturalist, of whom, as we walk on 
 toward the rocks, something should be said, or 
 rather read; for Mr. Chambers, in an often-quoted 
 passage from his Edinburgh Journal, which I must 
 have the pleasure of quoting once again, has told the 
 story better than we can tell it : — 
 
 " But who is that little intelligent-looking man 
 in a faded naval uniform, who is so invariably to 
 be seen in a particular central seat in this section ? 
 That, gentle reader, is perhaps one of the most 
 interesting men who attend the British Association. 
 He is only a private in the mounted guard (pre- 
 ventive service) at an obscure part of the Cornwall 
 coast, with four shillings a day, and a wife and nine 
 children, most of whose education he has himself to 
 conduct. He never tastes the luxuries which are 
 so common in the middle ranks of life, and even 
 amongst a large portion of the working classes. He 
 has to mend with his own hands every sort of thing 
 
THE WONDEES OP THE SHOEE. 107 
 
 that can break or wear in Ms house!. Yet Mr. Peach 
 is a votary of Natural History ; not a student of the 
 science in hooks, for he cannot afford books ; but an 
 investigator by sea and shore, a collector of Zoo- 
 phytes and Echinodermata — strange creatures, many 
 of which are as yet hardly known to man. These 
 he collects, preserves, and describes ; and every year 
 does he come up to the British Association with a 
 few novelties of this kind, accompanied by illustra- 
 tive papers and drawings : thus, under circumstances 
 the very opposite of those of such men as Lord 
 EnniskiUen, adding, in like manner, to the general 
 stock of knowledge. On the present occasion he is 
 unusually elated, for he has made the discovery of a 
 Holothuria with twenty tentacula, a species of the 
 Echinodermata which Professor Forbes, in his book 
 on Star-Eishes, has said was never yet observed in 
 the British seas. It may be of small moment to 
 you, who, mayhap, know nothing of Holothurias: 
 but it is a considerable thing to the Eauna of Britain, 
 and a vast matter to a poor private of the Cornwall 
 mounted guard. And accordingly he wiU go home 
 
108 GLAUCUS ; OR, 
 
 in a few days, full of the glory of his exhibition, and 
 strung anew by the kind notice taken of him by the 
 masters of the science, to similar inquiries, difficult as 
 it may be to prosecute them, under such a complica- 
 tion of duties, professional and domestic. Honest 
 Peach! humble as is thy home, and simple thy 
 bearing, thou art an honour even to this assemblage 
 of nobles and doctors : nay, more, when we consider 
 everything, thou art an honour to human nature it- 
 self; for where is the heroism like that of virtuous, 
 intelligent, independent poverty ? And such heroism 
 is thine ! " — Chambers' Edin. Journ., Xov. 23, 1844. 
 
 Mr. Peach has been since rewarded in part for his 
 long labours in the cause of science, by having been 
 removed to a more lucrative post on the north coast 
 of Scotland ; the earnest, it is to be hoped, of still 
 further promotion. 
 
 I mentioned just now Synapta; or, as Montagu 
 called it, Chirodota : a much better name, and, I 
 think, very uselessly changed; for Chirodota ex- 
 presses the peculiarity of the beast, which consists 
 in — start not, reader — twelve hands, like human 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHORE. 109 
 
 hands, while Synapta expresses merely its power of 
 clinging to the lingers, which it possesses in common 
 with many other animals. It is, at least, a beast 
 worth talking about ; as for finding one, I fear that 
 we have no chance of such good fortune. 
 
 Colonel Montagu found them here some forty 
 years ago; and after him, Mr. Alder, in 1845. I 
 found hundreds of them, but only once, in 1854 
 after a heavy south-eastern gale, washed up among 
 the great Lutrarise in a cove near Goodrington ; but 
 all my dredging outside failed to procure a specimen. 
 Mr. Alder, however, and Mr. Cocks (who find every- 
 thing, and wiU at last certainly catch Midgard, the 
 great sea-serpent, as Thor did, by baiting for him 
 with a bull's head), have dredged them in great 
 numbers ; the former, at Helford in Cornwall, the 
 latter on the west coast of Scotland. It seems, 
 however, to be a southern monster, probably a 
 remnant, like the great cockle, of the Mediten'aenan 
 fauna ; for Mr. MacAndrew finds them plentifully in 
 Vigo Bay, and J. Miiller in the Adriatic, off Trieste. 
 But what is it like? Conceive a very fat short 
 
110 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 earth-worm ; not ringed, thoughj like the earth-'worm, 
 but smooth and glossy, dappled with darker spots, 
 especially on one side, which may be the upper one. 
 Put round its mouth twelve little arms, on each a 
 hand with four ragged fingers, and on the back of 
 the hand a stump of a thumb, and you have 
 Synapta Digitata (Plates IV. and V., from my draw- 
 ings of the live animal). These hands it puts down 
 to its mouth, generally in alternate pairs, but how 
 it obtains its food by them is yet a mystery, for 
 its intestines are filled, like an earth-worm's, with 
 the mud in which it lives, and from which it 
 probably extracts (as does the earth-worm) all 
 organic matters. 
 
 You will find it stick to your fingers by the whole 
 skin, causing, if your hand be delicate, a tingUng 
 sensation; and if you examine the skin under the 
 microscope, you will find the cause. The whole skin 
 is studded with minute glass anchors, some hanging 
 freely from the surface, but most imbedded in the 
 skin. Each of these anchors is jointed at its root 
 into one end of a curious cribriform plate, — in plain 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEE. Ill 
 
 English, one pierced like a sieve, which lies under 
 the skin, and reminds one of the similar plates in 
 the skin of the "White Cucumaria, which I will 
 show you presently; and both of these we must 
 regard as the first rudiments of an Echinoderm's 
 outside skeleton, such as in the Sea-urchins covers 
 the whole hody of the animal. (See on Echiaus 
 Miliaris, p. 89.)^ Somewhat similar anchor-plates, 
 from a Eed Sea species, Synapta Vittata, may be 
 seen in any collection of microscopic objects. 
 
 The animal, when caught, has a strange habit of 
 self-destruction, contracting its skin at two or three 
 different points, and writhing till it snaps itself into 
 "junks," as the sailors would say, and then dies. 
 My specimens, on breaking up, threw out from the 
 wounded part long " ovarian filaments " (whatsoever 
 those may be), similar to those thrown out by many 
 of the Sagartian anemones, especially S. parasitica. 
 Beyond this, I can tell you nothiug about Synapta, 
 
 ^ An admirable paper on this extraordinary famUy may be found 
 in the Zoological Society's Proceedings for July 1858, by Messrs. 
 S. P. "Woodward and the late lamented Lucas Barrett. See also 
 Quatrefages, I. 82, or Synapia Duvernsei. 
 
112 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 and only ask you to consider its hands, as an 
 instance of that fantastic play of Nature which 
 repeats, in families widely different, organs of similar 
 form, though perhaps of by no means similar use; 
 nay, sometimes (as in those beautiful clear-wing 
 hawk-moths which you, as they hover round the 
 rhododendrons, mistake for bumble-bees) repeats the 
 outward form of a whole animal, for no conceivable 
 reason save her — shall we not say honestly His ? — 
 own good pleasure. 
 
 But here we are at the old bank of boulders, the 
 ruins of an antique pier which the monks of Tor 
 Abbey built for their convenience, while Torquay 
 was but a knot of fishing huts within a lonely lime- 
 stone cove. To get to it, though, we have passed 
 many a hidden treasure; for every ledge of these 
 flat New-red-sandstone rocks, if torn up with the 
 crowbar, discloses in its cracks and crannies nests 
 of strange forms which shun the light of day; 
 beautiful Actinise fill the tiny caverns with living 
 flowers; great Pholades (Plate X. figs. 3, 4) bore 
 by hundreds in the softer strata; and wherever 
 
THE WONDEES OP THE SHORE. 113 
 
 a thin layer of muddy sand intervenes between 
 two slabs, long Annelid worms of quaintest forms 
 and colours have their horizontal burrows, among 
 those of that curious and rare radiate animal, the 
 Spoonworm,^ an eyeless bag about an inch ■ long, 
 half bluish grey, half pink, with a strange scalloped 
 and wrinkled proboscis of saffron colour, which 
 serves, in some mysterious way, soft as it is, to 
 collect food, and clear its dark passage through 
 the rock. 
 
 See, at the extreme low-water mark, where the 
 broad olive fronds of the Laminarise, 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 
 
 1 Thalassema Neptuni (Fortes' British Star-Fishes, p. 259), 
 
 I 
 
114 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 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, destruc- 
 tive to anima;l 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 gra- 
 dually 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. 
 
 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 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEE. 115 
 
 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, look- 
 ing vei\ 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 Holo- 
 thuria ! who possesses really the secret of everlast- 
 ing youth, which ancient fable bestowed on the 
 
 I 2 
 
116 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 serpent and the eagle. For when his teeth ache, 
 or his digestive organs trouble him, aU 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, rivaUirig there his huge congeners, 
 who display their exquisite plumes on every tropic 
 coral reef. ^ 
 
 Next, what are those bright little buds, like 
 salmon-coloured Banksia roses half expanded, sit- 
 ting closely on the stone? Touch them; the soft 
 part is retracted, and the orange flower of flesh is 
 
 ^ The Londoner may see specimens of them at the Zoological 
 Gardens and at the Crystal Palace ; as also of the rare and beautiful 
 Sabella, figured in the same plate ; and of the Balanophyllia, or a 
 closely-allied species, from the Mediterranean, mentioned in p. 109. 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHORE. 117 
 
 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 haii's, 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 tliiek 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. 
 
118 GLAUOUS; OE, 
 
 hovering from place to place upon delicate ciliae, 
 tiU, having sown its wild oats, it settled down in 
 life, bunt itself a good ston^ house, and became 
 a landowner, or rather a glebae adscriptus, for ever 
 and a day. Mysterious destiny ! — yet not so mys- 
 terious 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, 1 by far the best yet pubUshed, 
 should be read in full ; we must content ourselves 
 with extracts. 
 
 "Doubtless you are familiar with the stony ske- 
 leton 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 
 
 ^ A Naturalist's Eambles on the Devonshire Coast, p. 110. 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEE. 119 
 
 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 ex- 
 panded to an astonishing extent. The space sur- 
 rounding the lips is commonly fawn colour, or rich 
 chestnut-brown, the star or vandyked circle rich 
 red, pale vermilion, and sometimes the most brilliant 
 
120 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 emerald green, as brilliant as the gorget of a hum- 
 ming-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 imper- 
 ceptible 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 
 tjien 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 crea,ture, after swal- 
 lowing and disgorging various large pieces of shell- 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHOEE. 121 
 
 fish, found viands to its taste in " the lean of cooked 
 meat and portions of earthworms," filling np the 
 intervals by a perpetual dessert of microscopic ani- 
 malcules, whirled into that lovely avernus, its mouth, 
 by the currents of the delicate ciliag 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, rea,lly comes under the rule which he 
 seems at first to break, that handsome is who hand- 
 some does. 
 
 Another species of Madrepore ^ 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 curi- 
 osities, is Ilfracombe, on the north coast of Devon. 
 My specimens came from Lundy Island, in the 
 mouth of the British Channel, or more properly 
 from that curious " Eat Island " to the south of it, 
 where still lingers the black long-tailed English rat, 
 1 Balanophyllia regia, Plate V. fig. 1. 
 
122 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 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 three- 
 pence, which contain in their centres a milk-white 
 crust of stone, pierced, as you see under the mag- 
 nifier, 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. AU the world, since the publication of 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEB. 123 
 
 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. Inex- 
 pressibly interesting, even solemn, to those who will 
 think, is the sight of those puny parasites which, as 
 it were, connect the ages and the seons: yet not so 
 solemn and fuU 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 stiU lingering 
 
124 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 here and there alive in the deep water of ScUly 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 G-ita 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 genera- 
 tions have been 
 
 " Playing such fantastic ti'icks before high heaven, 
 As make the angels weep." 
 
 Yes ; it is this vision of the awful permanence and 
 
THE WONDERS OH THE SHOEE. 125 
 
 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 natu- 
 ralist'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 lik'eness, call "mermaid's 
 
1 26 GLAUOUS ; OE, 
 
 head," ^ which we picked up just now on Paignton 
 Sands ? Or which, again, by its more beautiful little 
 congener,* 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, wDl not hold 
 good; for though Eadiates 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 
 ^ Amphidotus oordatus. ^ EcHuua miliaris, Plate VII. 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHOEE. ' 127 
 
 Mr. Hugh Miller's pets the old red sandstone fishes, 
 that very true vertebrate skull and brain, of which 
 this is a mere mockery.^ 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 per- 
 petual imprisonment, of walking, feeding, and breed- 
 ing, 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 wiU probably 
 arise with a sense of the infinity and complexity of 
 Nature, even in what we are pleased to call her 
 
 ^ See Professor Sedgwick's last edition of the "Discourses on 
 the Studies of Cambridge." 
 
128 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 "lower" forms, and tlie 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 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHORE. 129 
 
 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 : never- 
 theless, 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.^ 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 twb 
 different cases, if it will suit in both ?) and some- 
 times (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, m species still farther 
 removed, dies out altogether ; placed there, it would 
 seem, at first sight, merely to keep up the family 
 1 Fissurella grseoa, Plate X. fig. 5. 
 
 E 
 
130 GLATTCUS; OB, 
 
 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. 
 
 Look, again, at those sea-slugs. One, some three 
 inches long, of a bright ]emon-yeUow, clouded with 
 purple ; another of a dingy grey ; ^ another exquisite 
 little creature of a pearly French white,^ furred all 
 over the back with what seem arms, but are really 
 gUls, 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 mol- 
 lusc; and every organ within him is formed on a 
 
 1 Doris tuterculata and biliueata. 
 
 ^ Eolis papi losa. A Doris aud an Eolis, though not of these 
 species, are figured in Plate X. 
 
THE WONDERS OB THE SHOEE. 131 
 
 different type; as indeed are those seemingly iden- 
 tical gills, if you come to examine them under the 
 microscope, having to oxygenate fluids of a very dif- 
 ferent and more complicated kind; and, moreover, 
 the Cucumaria's gUls 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 hack, and in each of his nudibranch 
 congeners these same gills take some new and 
 fantastic form; in Melibsea those clubs are covered 
 with warts ; in ScyUaea, 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 raiabow, as you 
 may see them depicted in Messrs. Alder and Han- 
 cock's unrivalled Monograph on the JSTudibranch 
 MoUusca. 
 
 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 
 
 K 2 
 
132 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 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 ex- 
 press 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 butter- 
 fly'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 Diatomaceae and Infusoria, which fiU. 
 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 moor- 
 lands ; 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 be- 
 
THE WOXDEBS OF THE SHOKE. 133 
 
 yond tlie 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 un- 
 trodden 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. 
 
134 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 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 pos- 
 sesses 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 
 
THE WONDEES OE THE SHORE. 135 
 
 class of phenomena, it is perhaps better not to talk 
 about them at all, but observe a stoic "epochd," 
 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 crea- 
 ture 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 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHOEE. 137 
 
 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, Himan- 
 thalia 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 lengthen- 
 ing, slipping and twining round every piece of gravel 
 and stem of seai-weed, with a tiring drag such as no 
 Highland wrist or step could ever bring to bear on 
 
138 GLAITCUS; OR, 
 
 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 pack- 
 ing 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.^ 
 
 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. 
 
 1 Certain Parisian zoologists have done me the honour to hint 
 that this description was a play of fancy. I can only answer, that 
 I saw it with my own eyes in my own aquarium. I am nqj, I 
 hope, in the hahit of drawing on my fancy in the presence of 
 infinitely more marvellous Nature. Truth is quite strange enough 
 to he interesting without lies. 
 
THE WONDERS OP THE SHOEE, 139 
 
 The bivalve^ 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 AnneKd, 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 beau- 
 tiful pink and straw-coloured scallops (Hinnites 
 pusio, Plate X. fig. 1), who have gradually incorpo- 
 rated the layers of their lower valve with the rough- 
 nesses 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 Mangeliae and Nassae^ are trailing their 
 graceful spires up and down in search of food. That 
 
 1 Saxioava rugosa, Plate II. fig. 2. 
 
 * Plate VIII. represents the common Nassa, with the still more 
 common Littorina littorea, their teeth-studded palates, and the free 
 swimming young of the Nassa. [Vide Appendix.) 
 
140 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 little bright red and yellow pea, too, toucli it — the 
 brilliant coloured cloak is withdrawn, and, instead, 
 you have a beautiful ribbed pink cowry.^ our only 
 European representative of that grand tropical family. 
 Cast one wondering glance, too, at the forest of 
 zoophytes and corals, Lepralise and Tlustrae, and 
 those quaint blue stars, set in brown jelly, which 
 are no zoophytes, but respectable molluscs, each with 
 his well-formed mouth and intestines,^ 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 Eomance." 
 Now away, and as a specimen of the fertility of 
 the water-world, look at this rough list of species,^ 
 
 ^ Cyprsea Europsea. ^ Botrylli. 
 
 ^ Molluscs. Trochus, — 2 species. Area laetea. 
 
 Doris tuterculata. 
 
 Mangelia. 
 
 Pecten pusio. 
 
 bilineata. 
 
 Triton. 
 
 Tapes pullastra. 
 
 Eolis papillosa. 
 
 Trophon. 
 
 Kellia siiborbicularis. 
 
 Pleurobrauclius plu- 
 
 Nassa,— 2 species. 
 
 Sphsenia Binghami. 
 
 mula. 
 
 CeritMum. 
 
 SaxicaTa rugosa. 
 
 Neritina. 
 
 Sigaretus. 
 
 Gastrochoena pholadia. 
 
 Cypraea. 
 
 Fissurella. 
 
 Pholas parva. 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHOKB. 
 
 141 
 
 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 : aod 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 ! 
 
 Anomiae, — 2 or 3 spe- Cucumaria Hynd- 
 
 cies. manni. 
 
 Cynthia, — 2 species. communis. 
 
 Botryllus, do. 
 
 Annelids. Sertularia pumila. 
 
 Phyllodoce, and other rugosa. 
 
 ■ ■ fallax. 
 
 Nereid worms. 
 Polynoe sc[uamata. 
 
 Grvystacea. 
 4 or 5 species. 
 
 EchiTwderms. 
 Echinus miliaris. 
 Asterias gibbosa. 
 Ophiocoma neglecta. 
 
 ■ filioula. 
 
 Plumnlaria falcata. 
 setacea. 
 
 Actinia clavata. 
 
 anguicoma. 
 
 crassicornis. 
 
 Tubulipora patina. 
 
 hispida. 
 
 serpens. 
 
 Crisia eburnea. 
 Cellepora pumicosa. 
 Lepralise, — many spe- 
 cies. 
 Membranipora pilosa. 
 
 Laomedea geniculata. Cellularia ciliata. 
 Campanularia volubi- ■ scruposa. 
 
 lis. reptans. 
 
 Actinia mosembryan- Flustra membraua- 
 
 themum cea, &c. 
 
142 GLAUcas; oe, 
 
 rrom 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 coralliaes and Algse 
 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 Lamiuarise (the great 
 tangles and ore-weeds) is most full of aU 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, 
 
THE WONDEES OE THE SHORE. 143 
 
 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 
 miniature 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 charm- 
 ing " 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 ; 
 
144 GLATJCUS; OR, 
 
 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 arhorets of jointed stone were there. 
 And plants of fibres fine as silkworm's thread ; 
 
 Yea, beautiful as mermaid's golden hair 
 Upon the wares 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 sa-w the 
 type, the very original of this description, tracing, 
 line by line, and image by image, the details of the 
 picture ; and ackno'wledging, 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 depict- 
 ing the gorgeous scenes of Eastern mythology — scenes 
 the wildest and most extravagant that imagination 
 could paint — drew not upon the resources of his 
 
THE WONDEES OP THE SHORE. 145 
 
 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 shrub- 
 beries 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 Ehodymeniee. All these are 
 lovely to behold ; but I think I admire as much as 
 any of them, one of tjie commonest of our marine 
 plants, Chondrus crispus. It occurs in the greatest 
 profusion on this coast, in every pool between tide- 
 
 L 
 
146 GLAUCUS ; OE, 
 
 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 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHOEB. 147 
 
 a moment ; and a solemn beauty and meaning has 
 invested the old Greek fable of Glaiicus the fisher- 
 man : 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 
 Amphitritte 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, 
 
 L 2 
 
148 GLATJCUS ; OE, 
 
 Crimson, and azure, and emerald, were broken in star-showers, 
 
 lighting. 
 Far in the wine-dark depths of the crystal, the gardens of Kerens, 
 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 
 
 IfereuE ; 
 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, 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEB. 149 
 
 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 can- 
 not help at moments envying the old Greek imagi- 
 nation, 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 medusse 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 
 roclis, 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 human, ay and more divine, than there would 
 be even in those Triton and Nereid dreams, if realized 
 
150 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 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 intercoilimunion 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. l^o ; 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 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHORE. 151 
 
 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, re- 
 production, 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 " Algae," to show the wise man 
 
152 GLAtJCITS; OB, 
 
 that he wlio 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 aU. 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 algS.," more worthless than 
 the very sea-weed, says the old Eoman : 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 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHOEB. 153 
 
 ■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 some- 
 thing else ? Why should it cause anything at all ? 
 Because it obeys a law. But why does it obey the 
 law 1 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 Wewton 
 was born, and is likely to remain there. All we 
 can say is, that JSTature has her customs, and that 
 other customs ensue, when those customs appear: 
 
154 GLAUOUS; OR, 
 
 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, logi- 
 cally 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 aU 
 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 inexpli- 
 cable 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 ; 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHOEE. 155 
 
 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 Eling 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 
 
156 GLATJCUS; OE, 
 
 copy neither, and fear neither the silence nor the 
 laughter of the mighty mother Earth, if he will be 
 hut wise, and hear her tell him, alike in both — 
 " Why call me mother 1 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." 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHOKE. 157 
 
 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 key- 
 note 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 pecuKar 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 
 
158 GLAUCUS; OK, 
 
 whicli Mr. Johns has so charmingly described in his 
 "Week at the Lizard Point/' yet an average cliif, 
 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 briUiant in their 
 vegetation are sandhills ; and the seemingly desolate 
 dykes and banks of salt marshes will yield many a 
 cnrions 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 
 stiU unfinished, dry land in the process of creation, 
 to which every tide is adding the elements of fertility, 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHOEE. 159 
 
 wMch 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 saUiug ; 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 in- 
 crease, and not interfere with, the amusements of a 
 water-party. 
 
 The naturalist's dredge, of which Mr. G-osse'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 
 
160 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 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 shoiild b^ 
 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 con- 
 tents 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. 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHORE. 161 
 
 and a couple of buckets, to receive the large lumps 
 of oysters and serpulse whicli 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 weU- 
 
 M 
 
162 GLAUCUS; OB, 
 
 known naturalists, is a very garden of Nereus. Tor- 
 bay, 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 change- 
 able and barren sea-floor. Yet the immense quan- 
 tities 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. 4), Notamia Bursaria, and 
 Serialaria Lendigera, abound within tide-marks ; and 
 as the place is so much visited by Londoners, it may 
 
•f i 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOKE. 163 
 
 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. 
 
 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)^ 
 with strange snipe-bills (which they cannot open) 
 and snake-like bodies; small cuttle-fish (Sepiolse) 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, 
 
 I Plate XI. fig. 1. 
 
 M 2 
 
164 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 to man's deductive intellect, a form almost as impos- 
 sible 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 papulosa, of a delicate 
 French grey; EoKs pellucida (?) (Plate X. fig. 2), 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. Leo- 
 nard's baths, may be found hundreds of the Snipe's 
 feather Anemone (Sagartia troglodytes), of every 
 hue ; from the common brown and grey snipe's 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHORE. 165 
 
 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 
 IJlacinia or Euhicunda of Gosse. A more heautiful 
 living houquet 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 
 
166 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 sand; but whether he always remains in that atti- 
 tude I cannot say. His name is Pectinaria Belgica. 
 He is an Annelid, or true worm, connected with the 
 , Serpulse and Sabellae 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 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHORE. 167 
 
 central row of tanks at the Zoological Gardens : great 
 twisted masses of Serpulse,^ those white tubes of 
 stone, from the mouth of which protrude pairs of 
 rose-coloured or orange fans, flashing in, qpick 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, &nd 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 pro- 
 bably, win 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, wiU be the common brittle-star 
 (Ophiocoma rosula), of which a hundred or so, I can 
 promise, shaU come up at a single haul of the dredge, 
 1 Plate X. fig. 1. 
 
168 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 entwining their long spine-clad arms in a seemingly 
 inextricaMe confusion of "kaleidoscope" patterns 
 (thanks to Mr. Gosse for the one right epithet), purple 
 and azure, fawn, brown, green, grey, white and crim- 
 son ; as if a whole hed 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 in 
 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 flne 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 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHORE. 169 
 
 be rubbed ; for tbey 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: coralliues of 
 exquisite delicacy, Plumulariae and Sertularise, 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 thiuk 
 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 hand- 
 somest 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 
 
170 GLAUOUS; OE, 
 
 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 wiU certainly be the Dianthus,^ which will 
 open into a furbelowed flower, furred with innumer- 
 able 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. 
 
 These and much more you will find on the scal- 
 lops, 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 
 ' There are very fine specimens in the Crystal Palace. 
 
THE WONDBES OF THE SHOES. 171 
 
 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 
 tine sieve, over the boai's side, any sludge and ooze 
 v.'hich 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 satisfac- 
 tion. 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 
 
172 GLAUCUS; OK, 
 
 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 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOES. 173 
 
 red mainsails of the skiffs hung motionless, and their 
 images quivered head downwards in the glassy sweU, 
 
 "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 hun- 
 dred 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 
 
174 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 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 o£^ 
 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 profit- 
 able, 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 perfec- 
 tion 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 dis- 
 covering its possibility. Created it ? Alas for the 
 pride of human genius, and the autotheism which 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOKE. 175 
 
 would make man the measure of all things, aad the 
 centre of the universe ! All the invaluable laws and 
 methods of sanitary reform at test are but clumsy 
 imitations of the unseen wonders which every ani- 
 malcule and leaf have been working since the world's 
 foundation ; with this slight difference between fhem 
 and uSj 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, 
 
176 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 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 Herachtuses. 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 Com- 
 mons 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 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHORE. 177 
 
 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 xione 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 Squiaado, 
 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 o&, to make him do his 
 work gratis, by giving him the nuisances as his per- 
 quisites, and teaching him how to eat them. Cer- 
 tainly (without going the length of the Caribs, who 
 upheld cannibalism because, they said, it made war 
 cheap, and precluded entirely the need of a commis- 
 
178 GLAUCUS; OB, 
 
 sariat), this cardinal virtue of cheapness ougM 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 pre- 
 judicial 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 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHOEE. 179 
 
 consult any lengthy Nuisances' Eemoval Act, witli 
 its clauses, and counter-clauses, and explanations 
 of interpretations, and interpretations of explana- 
 tions. 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 informa- 
 tion," "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 iS, hundred thousand as good as he, 
 each in his office, and as cheaply paid ; who needed 
 
 N 2 
 
180 GLAUCUS; OB, 
 
 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 squiat, 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 wOl 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. 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOES. 181 
 
 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' 
 biids of the acacia.^ 
 
 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,^ each of which, too, pro- 
 trudes its living flower ; on another leg is a fresh 
 ' Coryne ramosa. ^ Campanularia Integra. 
 
182 GLAUOTJS; OE, 
 
 Bpecies, like a little heather-bush of whitest ivory ,^ 
 and every needle leaf a polype cell — ^let us str^i' 
 before the imagination grows dizzy with the con- 
 templation 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 
 decajdng 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 of&ce 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. 
 ' Crisidia Eburnea. 
 
THE ■WONDERS OP THE SHORE. 183 
 
 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-crah, taken out 
 of the lohster-pots, and left to die at the hottom of 
 the boat, because his more aristocratic cousins of 
 the blue and purple armour ■wUl 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 
 finto 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 J but it is difficult to say whether this is owing 
 
184 GLAUCTJS; OE, 
 
 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 witli 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 Ingen- 
 housz, and though doubted by the great Ellis, satis- 
 factorily 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 ? 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHOEB. 185 
 
 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 
 
186 GLAUCUS ; OE, 
 
 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 there- 
 fore a vegetable. 
 
 In 1850, Mr. Eobert Warrington communicated 
 to the Chemical Society the results of a year's 
 experiments, " On the Adjustment of the Eelations 
 between the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms, by 
 which the Vital Functions of both are permanently 
 maintained." The law which his experiments veri- 
 fied 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 respiratioTis might counter- 
 halance 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. 
 
THE WONI^EBS OF THE SHOKE. 187 
 
 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 experi- 
 ment 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 Aqua- 
 rium," 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 
 
188 GLAUCUS; OE, 
 
 coloured plates, whicli'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, — 
 
 oOt' iv Bepeif out* 4v 6ir(iopri, 
 
 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 gor- 
 geous 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 chlorists" — Palma Vecchio, which 
 hangs on the left-hand side of Lord EUesmere's 
 great gallerj'. But as for the forms, — where shall 
 we see their like ? Where, amid miniature forests 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHOEE. 189 
 
 as fantastic as those of tlie 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-iishes and anemones, for example — are nothing 
 hut beauty. The brilliant plates in Mr. Gosse's 
 " Aquarium " give, after all, but a meagre picture of 
 the reality, as it may be seen ia the tank-house 
 at the Zoological Gardens ; and as it may be seen 
 also, by anyone who wiU follow carefully the direc- 
 tions 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 tho- 
 roughly known tiH 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 dif- 
 
190 GLAUCUS; OB, 
 
 fereht 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 unex- 
 pected, win, 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,^ 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," 
 ^ Aquarium, p. 163. 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEE. 191 
 
 to apply St. Paul's words by no meaBS 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 observa- 
 tion 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 " Aqiiarium " 
 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, there- 
 
192 GLAUcrrs; oe, 
 
 fore, mil 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 coat 
 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 wiU foul your tank : but 
 choose the more delicate species which fringe the 
 edges of every pool at low-water mark ; the pink 
 
THE WONDEES OF THE SHORE. ]93 
 
 coralline, the dark purple ragged dulse (Ehodymenia), 
 the Carrageen moss (Chondrus), and above ail, the 
 commonest of all, the delicate green TJlva, which yoa 
 wiU 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 ^phuretted 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 
 
 
 
194 GLAUCTJS ; OE, 
 
 is bare, you can see a sickly or dead inhabitant at 
 once, and take Mm 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 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHOKE. 195 
 
 stress on the necessity of aerating the water, hy 
 keeping it in perpetual motion ; a process not easy 
 to be carried out in small aqnaria ; at least to that 
 pertection which, has been attained at the Crystal 
 Palace, where the water is kept in continual circula- 
 tion by steam-pow^r. 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 wUl find sea-anemones (Actiniee) ; 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 imder 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 
 
 2 
 
196 GLAUCUS ; OE, 
 
 them into a basket of wet sea-weed ; wlien 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 chrysanthe- 
 mums ; each has expanded into a hundred-petalled 
 flower, crimson, pink, purple, or orange ; touch one, 
 and it shrinks together like a sensitive plant, dis- 
 playing at the root of the petals a ring of brilliant 
 turquoise beads. That is the commonest of all the 
 Actiniae (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 bril- 
 liant blood-red ; another a delicate sea-blue striped 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEE. 197 
 
 with pink ; but most have the disc and the innumer- 
 able 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 Actinia stand for a day or two in the 
 dish, and then, picking out the liveliest and hand- 
 somest, detach them once more from their hold, drop 
 them into your vase, right them with a bit of sbick, 
 so that the sucking base is downwards, and leave 
 them 'to themselves thenceforth.. 
 
 These two species (Mesembryanthemum and Cras- 
 sicornis) are quite beautiful enough to give a beginner 
 amusement: but there are two others which are 
 
198 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 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 " Eambles 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 maj'' 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 
 
THE WONDKHS OF THE SHORE. 199 
 
 in the muddy sand which fills 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. 
 
200 GLA.UCUS; OE, 
 
 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 ruh 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 cnly nibble the green ulvjs; but when 
 the film of young weed begins to forni, you will 
 
o a a j 
 
 pr 
 
 n 
 
 im 
 
 loi^li 
 
 3^ 
 
 
 f 
 
THE WONDERS OF THK SHORE. 201 
 
 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. 
 
 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."^ 
 
 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 lon^ 
 
 to 
 
 frozen over, unless a hole be broken in the ice to 
 1 P. 34. Figures of it are given in Plato VIII. 
 
202 GLAUCUS ; OR. 
 
 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 arrang- 
 
THE WONDKRS OF THE SHOEB. 203 
 
 ing 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,^ " thousands 
 of tiny globules forming on eivery 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. 
 
 1 P. 259. 
 
204 GLACCtTS; OR, 
 
 Next, you must' make up for evaporation hy fresh 
 water (a very little will suffice), as often as in sum- 
 mer 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 snn 
 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 ? 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEE. 205 
 
 Then Mr. Gosse's artificial sea-water will form a 
 perfect substitute. You may buy the recLuisite 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- w;ater 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 Anachssris alsinastrum, that 
 
206 GLAUCUS; Oil, 
 
 magical weed which, lately introduced from Canada 
 among timber, has multiplied, self-sown, to so pro- 
 digious an extent, that it bid fair, a few years since, 
 to choice the navigation not only of our canals and 
 fen-rivers, but of the Thames itself : ' or, in default 
 of these, some of the more delicate pond-weeds ; 
 such as Callitriche, Potamogeton pusHlum, and, best 
 of all, perhaps, the beautiful Water-Milfoil (Myrio- 
 phyllium), whose comb-like leaves are the haunts of 
 numberless rare and curious animalcules : — these (in 
 themselves, from the transparency of their circu- 
 lation, 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, 
 
 ^ But if any young lady, her aquarium having failed, shall (as 
 dozens do) cast out the same Anacharis into the nearest ditch, she 
 shall be followed to her gi'ave by the maledictions of all millers 
 and trout-fishers. Seriously, this is a wanton act of injury to the 
 neighbouring streams, which must be carefully guarded against. 
 A.S well turn loose queen-wasps to build in your neiahbonr's banks. 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEE. 207 
 
 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 hand- 
 some 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 
 
208 GLAUCUS ; OR, 
 
 insects, as the "caddises," rising to the surface, 
 become flying Phryganese (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 bicau- 
 data) ; 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 (Ephemerse) ; 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 " (Baetis or Chloron) of in- 
 candescent glass, with gorgeous rainbow-coloured eyes, 
 to the great Green Drake (Ephemera viilgata), known 
 to all fishermen as the prince of trout-flies. These 
 animals, their habits, their miraculous transforma- 
 tions, 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 
 
THE WONDEES OP THE SHOEE. 209 
 
 such meins, any page of that great green book out- 
 side, whose pen is the finger of God, whose covers 
 are the fire kingdoms and the star kingdoms, and 
 its leaves the heather-hells, 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 men- 
 tioned these curious water-flies, I cannot help going 
 a little farther, and saying, that lucky is the fisher- 
 man 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, Mil, simply because they are (in colour, 
 
210 GLAUCU9; OB, 
 
 which is all that fish really care for) exact likenesses 
 of some ohscure local species, which happen to lie 
 on the water at the time. Among gentlemen-fisher- 
 men, 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 under- 
 standing 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 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 211 
 
 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 Ephemerae, 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 
 
 p 2 
 
212 GLAtrCTJS; OE, 
 
 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 excep- 
 tion 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, 
 ajttd 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 
 
THE WONDBES OF THE SHOEE. 213 
 
 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 un- 
 known to him) men worth knowing ; not, it may be, 
 of the meditative and half-saintly type of deaf 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, some- 
 thing 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 ; 
 
214 GLAUCUS ; OE, 
 
 but simply the Lest of whicli the writer knows ; let, 
 therefore, none feel aggrieved, if, as it may chance, 
 openiDg the§e pages, they find their hooks 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 0];.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 discLuisitions and ani- 
 mals 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 
 
THE WONDERS Or THE SHOEE. 215 
 
 Naturalist," lias done for those three places what 
 White did for Selborne, with all the improved appli- 
 ances 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.-' 
 
 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 
 
 1 Very highly also, in interest, ranks M. Quatrefages' "Rambles 
 of a Naturalist" (about the Mediterranean and the French Coast), 
 translated by M. Otte. 
 
216 GLAUCUS; OK, 
 
 — 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 
 \erj 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 Pro- 
 fessor Harvey's large work on British Algae, and 
 to the new edition of Professor Johnston's invalu- 
 able "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. 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEE. 217 
 
 For general Zoology the best books for beginners 
 are, perhaps, as a general introduction, the Eev. 
 J. A. L. "Wood's " Popular Zoology," fuU of excellent 
 plates ; and for systematic Zoology, Mr. Gosse's 
 four little books, on Mammals, Birds, Eeptiles, 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 in- 
 troduction 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, pass^ 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 
 Eambles in Sussex," with Mr. St. John's " High- 
 land Sports,'' and "Tour in Sutherlandshire," are 
 the monographs of naturalists, gentlemen, and 
 
218 GLAPCUS ; OE, 
 
 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. 
 
 Tor general Geology, Professor Ansted's Intro- 
 duction 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 lied Sandstone " ? 
 
 For this last reason, I especially recommend to the 
 young the Eev. C. A. Johns's " Week at the Lizard," 
 as teaching a young person how miieh 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 
 
THE WONDERS OF THE SHOEE. 219 
 
 "Flowers of the Field," the best cheap introduc- 
 tion 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 gra- 
 titude for first lessons in scientific accuracy and 
 patience, — lessons taught, not dully and dryly at the 
 book and desk, but livingly and genially, in adven- 
 turous 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 "Eudiments of Botany'' might accom- 
 pany 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. 
 
220 GLAUCUS ; OR, 
 
 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 some- 
 thing 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. WoUaston'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,"^ 
 by Eichard Shield, a simple London working-man. 
 1 Van Voorst & Co. price 3s. 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHOES. 221 
 
 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. Eichard 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 delight- 
 ful ; 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 ex- 
 pression 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. 
 
222 GLAUCUS; OR, 
 
 wash his soul clean for a while from all the turmoil 
 aad intrigue, the vanity and vexation of spirit of 
 that " too-populous wilderness," by going out to he 
 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 a^ithors 
 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 
 
• THE WONDEES OP THE SHOEE. 223 
 
 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 
 he unjust to any one of them by inadvertently omit- 
 ting its name. Let me add, that in the advertising 
 columns of those serials, wiU 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, mean- 
 while, 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 
 
224 GLAxrous ; or, 
 
 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 com- 
 municate their knowledge to each other, and to the 
 many. These " Microscopic," " Naturalist, " " Geo- 
 logical," 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 a.t 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 ; 
 
THE WONDEKS OF THE SHORE. 225 
 
 aad that there is less fear than ever that the clergy 
 of the Church of England should have to relincLuish 
 their ancient boast — that since the formation of 
 the Eoyal 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 Cluh 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 wUl 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 Marl- 
 borough and Clifton — the same freemasonry; and 
 have their own Naturalists' Clubs ; nay more ; 
 when our public schools and universities shall 
 
 Q 
 
226 GLAUCPS; OB, 
 
 awake to the real needs of the age, and — even to the 
 curtailing of the time usually spent in tiot 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 Eolleston's "Forms of Animal 
 Life," or any other of the excellent Scientific 
 Manuals for beginners, which are now, as I said, 
 happily so numerous. 
 
THE TVONDEES OF THE SHORE. 227 
 
 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 pray- 
 ing, 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. 
 
 q2 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 PLATE I. 
 
 ZOOPHYTA. POLYZOA. 
 
 The forms of animal life -which are now united in 
 an iadependent class, under the name Polyzoa, so 
 nearly resemble the Hydroid Zoophytes in general 
 form and appearance that a casual observer may sup- 
 pose them to be nearly identical. In all but the more 
 recent works, they are treated as distinct indeed, but 
 still included under the general term " Zoophytes." 
 The animals of both groups are minute, polypiform 
 creatures, mostly living in transparent cells, springing 
 from the sides of a stem which unites a number of 
 
232 APPENDIX. 
 
 individuals in one common life, and grows in a shrub- 
 like form upon any submarine body, such as a shell, 
 a rock, a weed, or even another polypidom to which 
 it is parasiticaUy attached. Each polype, in both 
 classes, protrudes from and retreats within its ceU by 
 an independent action, and when protruded puts forth 
 a circle of tentacles whose motion round the mouth 
 is the means of securing nourishment. There are, 
 however, peculiarities in the structure of the Poly- 
 zoa which seem to remove them from Zoophytology 
 to a place in the system of nature more nearly con- 
 nected with MoUuscan types. Some of them come 
 so near to the compound ascidians that they have 
 been termed, as an order, " Zoophyta ascidioida." 
 
 The simplest form of polype is that of a fleshy 
 bag open at one end, surmounted by a circle of con- 
 tractile threads or fingers called tentacles. The plate 
 shows, on a very minute scale, at figs. 1, 3, and 6, 
 several of these little polypiform bodies protruding 
 from their ceUs. But the Hydra or Fresh-water 
 Polype has no cell, and is quite unconnected with 
 any root thread, or with other individuals of the 
 
APPENDIX. 233 
 
 same species. It is perfectly free, and so simple in 
 its structnie, that when the sac which forms its body 
 is turned inside out it will continue to perform the 
 functions of life as before. The greater part, however, 
 of these Hydrafoim Polypes, although equally simple 
 as indiTiduals, are connected in a compound life by 
 means of their variously formed polypidom, as the 
 branched system of cells is termed. The Hydroid 
 Zoophytes are repr^ented in the first plate by the 
 following examples. 
 
 Htdeoida. 
 
 .Sebtct.af.ta eosea. pi. I fig. 6. 
 
 A species which has the cells in pairs on opposite 
 sides of the central tube, with the openings turned 
 outwards. In the more enlarged figure is seen a 
 septum across the inner part of each ceU which 
 forms the base upon which the polype rests. Fig. 
 7 J indicates the natural size of the piece of branch 
 represented; but it must be remembered that this 
 is only a small portion of the bushy shrub. 
 
234 APPENDIX. 
 
 Campanulaeia steinga. H. I. fig. 8. 
 
 This Zoophyte twines itself parasitically upon a 
 species of Sertularia. The cells in this species are 
 thrown out at. irregular intervals upon flexible stems 
 which are wrinkled in rings. They consist of length- 
 ened, cylindrical, transparent vases. 
 
 Campanulaeia volubilis. PI. I. fi^. 9. 
 
 A still more beautiful species, with lengthened 
 foot-stalks ringed at each end. The polype is re- 
 markable for the protrusion and contractile power of 
 its Hps. It has about twentj' knobbed tentacula. 
 
 Polyzoa. 
 
 Among Polyzoa the animal's body is coated with 
 a membraneous covering, like that of the Tunicated 
 Mollusca, but which is a continuation of the edge of 
 the cell, which doubles back upon the body in such 
 a manner that when the animal protrudes from its 
 cell it pushes out the flexible membrane just as one 
 
APPENDES. 235 
 
 would turn inside out the finger of a glove. This 
 oneness of ceU and polype is a distinctive character 
 of the group. Another is the higher organization of 
 the internal parts. The mouth, surrounded by ten- 
 tacles, leads by gullet and gizzard through a channel 
 into a digesting stomach, from which the rejectable 
 matter passes upwards through an intestinal canal 
 till it is discharged near the mouth. The tentacles 
 also differ much from those of true Polypes. Instead 
 of being fleshy and contractile, they are rather stiff, 
 resembhng spun glass, set on the sides with vibrating 
 cilia, which by their motion up one side and down 
 the other of each tentacle, produce a current which 
 impels their living food into the mouth. When these 
 tentacles are withdrawn, they are gathered up in a 
 bundle, like the stays of an umbrella. Our Plate I. 
 contains the following examples of Polyzoa. 
 
 Valkeeia cuscuta. pi. I. fig. 3. 
 
 From, a group in one of Mr. Lloyd's vases. Fig. 
 3 a is the natural size of the central group of 
 cells, in a specimen coiled round a thread-like weed. 
 
236 APPENDIX. 
 
 Underneatli this is the same portion enlarged. When- 
 magnified to this apparent size, the cells could he 
 seen in different states, some closed, and others with 
 their bodies protruded. When magnified to 3 d, we 
 could pleasantly watch the gradual eversion of the 
 membrane, then the points of the tentacles slowly 
 appearing, and then, when fully protruded, suddenly 
 expanding into a bell-shaped circle. This was their 
 usual appearance, but sometimes they could be 
 noticed bending inwards, as in fig. 3 c, as if to 
 imprison some living atom of importance. Kg. I 
 represents two tentacles, showing the direction in 
 which the cilia vibrate 
 
 Ceisia denticulata. pi. I. fig. 4. 
 
 I have only drawn the cells from a prepared speci- 
 men. The polypes are like those described above. 
 
 Gemellaeia loeicata. pi. I. fig. 5. 
 
 Here the cells are placed in pairs, back to back. 
 5 a is a very small portion on the natural scale. 
 
APPENDIX. 237 
 
 Cellulaeia ciliata. pi. I. fig. 7, 
 
 The cells are alternate on the stem, and are 
 curiously armed witli long whip-like cUia or spines. 
 On the back of some of the cells is a very strange 
 appendage, the use of which is not with certainty 
 ascertained. It is a minute body, slightly resembling 
 a vulture's head, with a movable lower beak. The 
 whole head keeps up a nodding motion, and the 
 movable beak occasionally opens widely, and then 
 suddenly snaps to with a jerk. It has been seen to 
 hold an animalcule between its jaws till the latter 
 has died, but it has no power to communicate the 
 prey to the polype in its cell or to swallow and 
 digest it on its own account. It is certainly not 
 an independent parasite, as has been supposed, and 
 yet its purpose in the animal economy is a mystery. 
 Mr. Gosse conjectures that its use may be, by hold- 
 ing animalcules till they die and decay, to attract 
 by their putrescence crowds of other animalcules, 
 which may thus be drawn within the influence of 
 the polype's ciliated tentacles. Fig. 76 shows the 
 
238 APPENDIX. 
 
 form of one of theSe " birds' heads," and fig. 7 c, its 
 position on the cell. 
 
 Flustea lineata. PL I. Jig. 1. 
 
 In FluStrse, the cells are placed side by side on an 
 expanded membrane. Fig. 1 represents the general 
 appearance of a species which at least resembles 
 F. lineata as figured in Johnston's work. It is 
 spread upon a Fucus. Fig. a is an enlarged view 
 of the cells. 
 
 Flustea foliacea. Fl. 1. fig. 2. 
 
 We figure a frond or two of the common species, 
 which has cells on both sides. It is rarely that the 
 polypes can be seen in a state of expansion. 
 
 Seeialaria Lendigera. pi. I. fig. 10. 
 
 Notamia Burs aria. PI. I. fig. 11. 
 The "tobacco-pipe" appendages, fig. 11 &, are of 
 unknown use: they are probably analogous to the 
 birds' heads in the Cellularise. 
 
A.PPENDIX. 
 
 239 
 
 PLATE V. 
 
 COEALS AND SeA ANEMONES. 
 
 Caryophyll^a Smithii. Fl. V. fig. 2. PI. VI. fig. 3. 
 
 The connection between Brainstones, Mushroom 
 Corals, and other Madrepores abounding on Poly- 
 nesian reefs, and the " Sea Anemones," which have 
 lately become so familiar to us all, can be seen by 
 comparing our comparatively insignificant 0. Smithii 
 with our commonest species of Actinia and Sagartia. 
 The former is a beautiful object when the fleshy part 
 and tentacles are whoUy or partially expanded. Like 
 Actinia, it has a membranous covering, a simple sac- 
 like stomach, a central mouth, a disk surrounded by 
 contractile and adhesive tentacles. Unlike Actinia, 
 it is fixed to submarine bodies, to which it is glued 
 in very early life, and cannot change its place. Un- 
 like Actinia, its body is supported by a stony skeleton 
 of calcareous plates arranged edgewise so as to ra- 
 diate from the centre. But as we find some Molluscs 
 
240 APPENDIX. 
 
 furnislied with a shell, and others eren of the same 
 character and habits without one, so we find that 
 in spite of this seemingly important difference, the 
 animals are very similar in their nature. Since the 
 introduction of glass tanks we have opportunities of 
 seeing anemones crawling up the sides, so as to 
 exhibit their entire basal disk, and then we may 
 observe lightly coloured lines of a less transparent 
 substance than the interstices, radiating from the 
 margin to the centre, some short, others reaching 
 the entire distance, and arranged in exactly the same 
 manner as the plates of Caryophyllsea. These are 
 doubtless flexible walls of compartments dividing the 
 fleshy parts of the softer animals, and corresponding 
 with the septa of the coral. Kg. ^ a represents a 
 section of the latter, to he compared with the basal 
 disk of Sagartia. 
 
 SaGAETIA. ANGUICOMA. PZ. V. fig. 3, a, I. 
 
 This genus has been separated from Actinia on 
 account of its habit of throwing out threads when 
 
APPENDIX. 241 
 
 irritated. Although my specimens often assumed the 
 form represented in fig. 3, Mr. Lloyd informs me that 
 it must have arisen from unhealthiness of condition, 
 its usual habit being to contract into a more flattened 
 form. When fully expanded, its transparent and 
 lengthened tentacles present a beautiful appearance. 
 Kg. 3 a, showing a basal disk, is given for the 
 purpose already described. 
 
 Balanophvll^a eegia. pi. V. fig. 1. 
 
 Another species of British madrepore, found by 
 Mr. Gosse at Ilfracombe, and by Mr. Kingsley at 
 Lundy Island. It is smaller than C. Smithii, of a 
 very bright colour, and always covers the upper 
 part of its bony skeleton, ia which the plates are 
 differently arranged from those of the smaller species. 
 Fig. 1 shows the tentacles expanded in an unusual 
 degree; 1 a, animal contracted; 15, the coral; 1 c, 
 a tentacle enlarged. 
 
242 APPENDIX. 
 
 PLATE VI. 
 
 COEALS AND SeA AlJEMONES. 
 
 Actinia mesembhtanthemum. PI. VI. fig. 1 a. 
 
 This common species is more frequently met with 
 than many others, because it prefers shallow water, 
 and often lives high up among rocks which are only 
 covered by the sea at very high tide ; so that the 
 creature can, if it will, spend but a short portion of 
 its time immersed. When uncovered by the tide, 
 it gathers up its leathery tunic, and presents the 
 appearance of fig. 1 a. When under water it may 
 often be seen expanding its flower-like disk and 
 moving its feelers in search of food. These feelers 
 have a certain power of adhesion, and any not too 
 vigorous animals .which they touch are easily drawn 
 towards the centre and swallowed. Around the 
 margin of the tunic are seen peeping out between 
 the tentacles certain bright blue globules looking 
 
APPENDIX. 243 
 
 very like eyes, but whose purpose is not exactly 
 ascertained. Fig. 1 represents the disk only par- 
 tially expanded. 
 
 BUNODES CKASSICORNIS. PI. VI. fig. 2. 
 
 This genus of Actinioid zoophytes is distinguished 
 from Actinia proper by the tubercles or warts which 
 stud the outer covering of the animal In B. 
 gemmacea these warts are arranged symmetrically, 
 so as to give a peculiarly jewelled appearance to 
 the body. Being of a large size, the tentacles of 
 B. crassicornis exhibit in great perfection the adhe- 
 sive powers produced by the nettling threads which 
 proceed from them. 
 
 Caeyophyll^a Smithii. pi. VI. fig. 3. 
 
 This figure is to show a whiter variety, with the 
 flesh and tentacles fully expanded. 
 
 2 E 
 
244 APPENDIX. 
 
 PLATE VIII. 
 
 MOLLUSCA. 
 
 ISTassa eeticulata. PI. VIII. fig. 2, a, h, c, d, e,f 
 
 A VERY active Mollusc, given here chiefly oq 
 account of the opportunity afforded by the birth of 
 young fry iu Mr. Lloyd's tanks. The Nassa feeds on 
 small animalcules, for which, in aquaria, it may be 
 seen routing among the sand and stones, sometimes 
 burying itself among them so as only to show its 
 caudal tube moving along between them. A pair 
 of Nassse in Mr. Lloyd's collection, deposited, on the 
 5th of April, about fifty capsules or bags of eggs 
 upon the stems of weeds (fig. 2 h) ; each capsule con- 
 tained about a hundred eggs. The capsules opened 
 on the 16th of May, permitting the escape of roti- 
 ferous fry (fig. 2, c, d, e), not in the slightest degree 
 resembling the parent, but presenting minute nautilus- 
 shaped transparent shells. These shells rather hang 
 
APPENDIX. 245 
 
 on than cover the bodies, which have a pair of lobes, 
 around which vibrate minute cilia in such a manner 
 as to give them an appearance of rotatory motion. 
 Under a lens they may be seen moving about very 
 actively in various positions, but always with the 
 look of being moved by rapidly turning wheels. 
 We should have been glad to witness the next 
 step towards assuming their ultimate form, but 
 were disappointed, as the embryos died. Fig. 
 2 / is the tongue of a Nassa, from a photo- 
 graph by Dr. Kingsley. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 a. CL.\Y, aONS, AKD TAYLOa, PRINTERS, BREAD STREET HILL. 
 

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