Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore Part 2

Seriously, if we wish rural walks to do our children any good, we must give them a love for rural sights, an object in every walk; we must teach them - and we can teach them - to find wonder in every insect, sublimity in every hedgerow, the records of past worlds in every pebble, and boundless fertility upon the barren sh.o.r.e; and so, by teaching them to make full use of that limited sphere in which they now are, make them faithful in a few things, that they may be fit hereafter to be rulers over much.

I may seem to exaggerate the advantages of such studies; but the question after all is one of experience: and I have had experience enough and to spare that what I say is true. I have seen the young man of fierce pa.s.sions, and uncontrollable daring, expend healthily that energy which threatened daily to plunge him into recklessness, if not into sin, upon hunting out and collecting, through rock and bog, snow and tempest, every bird and egg of the neighbouring forest. I have seen the cultivated man, craving for travel and for success in life, pent up in the drudgery of London work, and yet keeping his spirit calm, and perhaps his morals all the more righteous, by spending over his microscope evenings which would too probably have gradually been wasted at the theatre. I have seen the young London beauty, amid all the excitement and temptation of luxury and flattery, with her heart pure and her mind occupied in a boudoir full of sh.e.l.ls and fossils, flowers and sea-weeds; keeping herself unspotted from the world, by considering the lilies of the field, how they grow. And therefore it is that I hail with thankfulness every fresh book of Natural History, as a fresh boon to the young, a fresh help to those who have to educate them.

The greatest difficulty in the way of beginners is (as in most things) how "to learn the art of learning." They go out, search, find less than they expected, and give the subject up in disappointment. It is good to begin, therefore, if possible, by playing the part of "jackal" to some practised naturalist, who will show the tyro where to look, what to look for, and, moreover, what it is that he has found; often no easy matter to discover. Forty years ago, during an autumn's work of dead-leaf-searching in the Devon woods for poor old Dr. Turton, while he was writing his book on British land-sh.e.l.ls, the present writer learnt more of the art of observing than he would have learnt in three years' desultory hunting on his own account; and he has often regretted that no naturalist has established sh.o.r.e-lectures at some watering-place, like those up hill and down dale field-lectures which, in pleasant bygone Cambridge days, Professor Sedgwick used to give to young geologists, and Professor Henslow to young botanists.

In the meanwhile, to show you something of what may be seen by those who care to see, let me take you, in imagination, to a sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sing through our hearts, as we remember the terrible and glorious pageant which pa.s.sed by in the glorious July days of 1588, when the Spanish Armada ventured slowly past Berry Head, with Elizabeth's gallant pack of Devon captains (for the London fleet had not yet joined) following fast in its wake, and dashing into the midst of the vast line, undismayed by size and numbers, while their kin and friends stood watching and praying on the cliffs, spectators of Britain's Salamis. The white line of houses, too, on the other side of the bay, is Brixham, famed as the landing-place of William of Orange; the stone on the pier-head, which marks his first footsteps on British ground, is sacred in the eyes of all true English Whigs; and close by stands the castle of the settler of Newfoundland, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Raleigh's half-brother, most learned of all Elizabeth's admirals in life, most pious and heroic in death. And as for scenery, though it can boast of neither mountain peak nor dark fiord, and would seem tame enough in the eyes of a western Scot or Irishman, yet Torbay surely has a soft beauty of its own.

The rounded hills slope gently to the sea, spotted with squares of emerald gra.s.s, and rich red fallow fields, and parks full of stately timber trees. Long lines of tall elms run down to the very water's edge, their boughs unwarped by any blast; here and there apple orchards are bending under their loads of fruit, and narrow strips of water-meadow line the glens, where the red cattle are already lounging in richest pastures, within ten yards of the rocky pebble beach. The sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sengers, and cattle, and trim gardens which hardly know what frost and snow may be, but see the flowers of autumn meet the flowers of spring, and the old year linger smilingly to twine a garland for the new.

No wonder that such a spot as Torquay, with its delicious Italian climate, and endless variety of rich woodland, flowery lawn, fantastic rock-cavern, and broad bright tide-sand, sheltered from every wind of heaven except the soft south-east, should have become a favourite haunt, not only for invalids, but for naturalists.

Indeed, it may well claim the honour of being the original home of marine zoology and botany in England, as the Firth of Forth, under the auspices of Sir J. G. Dalyell, has been for Scotland. For here worked Montagu, Turton, and Mrs. Griffith, to whose extraordinary powers of research English marine botany almost owes its existence, and who survived to an age long beyond the natural term of man, to see, in her cheerful and honoured old age, that knowledge become popular and general which she pursued for many a year una.s.sisted and alone. Here, too, the scientific succession is still maintained by Mr. Pengelly and Mr. Gosse, the latter of whom by his delightful and, happily, well-known books has done more for the study of marine zoology than any other living man. Torbay, moreover, from the variety of its rocks, aspects, and sea-floors, where limestones alternate with traps, and traps with slates, while at the valley-mouth the soft sandstones and hard conglomerates of the new red series slope down into the tepid and shallow waves, affords an abundance and variety of animal and vegetable life, unequalled, perhaps, in any other part of Great Britain. It cannot boast, certainly, of those strange deep-sea forms which Messrs.

Alder, Goodsir, and Laskey dredge among the lochs of the western Highlands, and the sub-marine mountain glens of the Zetland sea; but it has its own varieties, its own ever-fresh novelties: and in spite of all the research which has been lavished on its sh.o.r.es, a naturalist cannot, I suspect, work there for a winter without discovering forms new to science, or meeting with curiosities which have escaped all observers, since the lynx eye of Montagu espied them full fifty years ago.

Follow us, then, reader, in imagination, out of the gay watering- place, with its London shops and London equipages, along the broad road beneath the sunny limestone cliff, tufted with golden furze; past the huge oaks and green slopes of Tor Abbey; and past the fantastic rocks of Livermead, scooped by the waves into a labyrinth of double and triple caves, like Hindoo temples, upborne on pillars banded with yellow and white and red, a week's study, in form and colour and chiaro-oscuro, for any artist; and a mile or so further along a pleasant road, with land-locked glimpses of the bay, to the broad sheet of sand which lies between the village of Paignton and the sea - sands trodden a hundred times by Montagu and Turton, perhaps, by Dillwyn and Gaertner, and many another pioneer of science. And once there, before we look at anything else, come down straight to the sea marge; for yonder lies, just left by the retiring tide, a ma.s.s 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 sh.e.l.ls, as large as the hand, each with its loathly grey and black siphons hanging out, a confused ma.s.s of slimy death. Let us walk on to some cleaner heap, and leave these, the great Lutraria Elliptica, which have been lying buried by thousands in the sandy mud, each with the point of its long siphon above the surface, sucking in and driving out again the salt water on which it feeds, till last night's ground-swell shifted the sea-bottom, and drove them up hither to perish helpless, but not useless, on the beach.

See, close by is another sh.e.l.l bed, quite as large, but comely enough to please any eye. What a variety of forms and colours are there, amid the purple and olive wreaths of wrack, and bladder- weed, and tangle (ore-weed, as they call it in the south), and the delicate green ribbons of the Zostera (the only English flowering plant which grows beneath the sea). What are they all? What are the long white razors? What are the delicate green-grey scimitars?

What are the tapering brown spires? What the tufts of delicate yellow plants like squirrels' tails, and lobsters' horns, and tamarisks, and fir-trees, and all other finely cut animal and vegetable forms? What are the groups of grey bladders, with something like a little bud at the tip? What are the hundreds of little pink-striped pears? What those tiny babies' heads, covered with grey p.r.i.c.kles instead of hair? The great red star-fish, which Ulster children call "the bad man's hands;" and the great whelks, which the youth of Musselburgh know as roaring buckies, these we have seen before; but what, oh what, are the red capsic.u.ms? -

Yes, what are the red capsic.u.ms? and why are they poking, snapping, starting, crawling, tumbling wildly over each other, rattling about the huge mahogany c.o.c.kles, as big as a child's two fists, out of which they are protruded? Mark them well, for you will perhaps never see them again. They are a Mediterranean species, or rather three species, left behind upon these extreme south-western coasts, probably at the vanishing of that warmer ancient epoch, which clothed the Lizard Point with the Cornish heath, and the Killarney mountains with Spanish saxifrages, and other relics of a flora whose home is now the Iberian peninsula and the sunny cliffs of the Riviera. Rare on every other sh.o.r.e, even in the west, it abounds in Torbay at certain, or rather uncertain, times, to so prodigious an amount, that the dredge, after five minutes' sc.r.a.pe, will sometimes come up choked full of this great c.o.c.kle only. You will see hundreds of them in every cove for miles this day; a seeming waste of life, which would be awful, in our eyes, were not the Divine Ruler, as His custom is, making this destruction the means of fresh creation, by burying them in the sands, as soon as washed on sh.o.r.e, to fertilize the strata of some future world. It is but a sh.e.l.l-fish truly; but the great Cuvier thought it remarkable enough to devote to its anatomy elaborate descriptions and drawings, which have done more perhaps than any others to ill.u.s.trate the curious economy of the whole cla.s.s of bivalve, or double-sh.e.l.led, mollusca. (Plate II. Fig. 3.)

That red capsic.u.m is the foot of the animal contained in the c.o.c.klesh.e.l.l. 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 sh.e.l.l into a rock pool, or a basin of water, and you will see the siphons clearly. The valves gape apart some three-quarters of an inch.

The semi-pellucid orange "mantle" fills the intermediate s.p.a.ce.

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 sh.e.l.l backwards with a jerk. The point, you see, is sharp and tongue-like; only flattened, not horizontally, like a tongue, but perpendicularly, so as to form, as it was intended, a perfect sand-plough, by which the animal can move at will, either above or below the surface of the sand. (2)

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 capsic.u.ms which hang drying in every Covent-garden seedsman's window. Yet is either simile better than the guess of a certain lady, who, entering a room wherein a couple of Cardium tuberculatum were waltzing about a plate, exclaimed, "Oh dear! I always heard that my pretty red coral came out of a fish, and here it is all alive!"

"C. tuberculatum," says Mr. Gosse (who described it from specimens which I sent him in 1854), "is far the finest species. The valves are more globose and of a warmer colour; those that I have seen are even more spinous." Such may have been the case in those I sent: but it has occurred to me now and then to dredge specimens of C.

aculeatum, which had escaped that rolling on the sand fatal in old age to its delicate spines, and which equalled in colour, size, and perfectness the n.o.ble one figured in poor dear old Dr. Turton's "British Bivalves." Besides, aculeatum is a far thinner and more delicate sh.e.l.l. 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- p.r.i.c.kles into long straight thorns, as in aculeatum, is close-set to its fellow, and curved at the point transversely to the sh.e.l.l, 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 p.r.i.c.kles are meant as weapons of defence, without which so savoury a morsel as the mollusc within (cooked and eaten largely on some parts of our south coast) would be a staple article of food for sea-beasts of prey. And it is noteworthy, first, that the defensive thorns which are permanent on the two thinner species, aculeatum and echinatum, disappear altogether on the thicker one, tuberculatum, as old age gives him a solid and heavy globose sh.e.l.l; 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- p.r.i.c.kles, which his thinner cousins keep throughout life.

Nevertheless, p.r.i.c.kles, in all three species, are, as far as we can see, useless in Torbay, where no wolf-fish (Anarrhichas lupus) or other owner of sh.e.l.l-crushing jaws wanders, terrible to lobster and to c.o.c.kle. Originally intended, as we suppose, to face the strong- toothed monsters of the Mediterranean, these foreigners have wandered northward to sh.o.r.es where their armour is not now needed; and yet centuries of idleness and security have not been able to persuade them to lay it by. This - if my explanation is the right one - is but one more case among hundreds in which peculiarities, useful doubtless to their original possessors, remain, though now useless, in their descendants. Just so does the tame ram inherit the now superfluous horns of his primeval wild ancestors, though he fights now - if he fights at all - not with his horns, but with his forehead.

Enough of Cardium tuberculatum. Now for the other animals of the heap; and first, for those long white razors. They, as well as the grey scimitars, are Solens, Razor-fish (Solen siliqua and S.

ensis), burrowers in the sand by that foot which protrudes from one end, nimble in escaping from the Torquay boys, whom you will see boring for them with a long iron screw, on the sands at low tide.

They are very good to eat, these razor-fish; at least, for those who so think them; and abound in millions upon all our sandy sh.o.r.es. (3)

Now for the tapering brown spires. They are Turritellae, snail- like animals (though the form of the sh.e.l.l is different), who crawl and browse by thousands on the beds of Zostera, or gra.s.s wrack, which you see thrown about on the beach, and which grows naturally in two or three fathoms water. Stay: here is one which is "more than itself." On its back is mounted a cl.u.s.ter of barnacles (Bala.n.u.s Porcatus), of the same family as those which stud the tide-rocks in millions, scratching the legs of hapless bathers. Of them, I will speak presently; for I may have a still more curious member of the family to show you. But meanwhile, look at the mouth of the sh.e.l.l; a long grey worm protrudes from it, which is not the rightful inhabitant. He is dead long since, and his place has been occupied by one Sipunculus Bernhardi; a wight of low degree, who connects "radiate" with annulate forms - in plain English, sea- cuc.u.mbers (of which we shall see some soon) with sea-worms. But however low in the scale of comparative anatomy, he has wit enough to take care of himself; mean ugly little worm as he seems. For finding the mouth of the Turritella too big for him, he has plastered it up with sand and mud (Heaven alone knows how), just as a wry-neck plasters up a hole in an apple-tree when she intends to build therein, and has left only a round hole, out of which he can poke his proboscis. A curious thing is this proboscis, when seen through the magnifier. You perceive a ring of tentacles round the mouth, for picking up I know not what; and you will perceive, too, if you watch it, that when he draws it in, he turns mouth, tentacles and all, inwards, and so down into his stomach, just as if you were to turn the finger of a glove inward from the tip till it pa.s.sed into the hand; and so performs, every time he eats, the clown's as yet ideal feat, of jumping down his own throat. (4)

So much have we seen on one little sh.e.l.l. But there is more to see close to it. Those yellow plants which I likened to squirrels'

tails and lobsters' horns, and what not, are zoophytes of different kinds. Here is Sertularia argentea (true squirrel's tail); here, S. filicula, as delicate as tangled threads of gla.s.s; here, abietina; here, rosacea. The lobsters' horns are Antennaria antennina; and mingled with them are Plumulariae, always to be distinguished from Sertulariae 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 Fl.u.s.trae, or sea-mats. This, which smells very like Verbena, is Fl.u.s.tra coriacea (Pl. I. Fig. 2). That scurf on the frond of ore-weed is F. lineata (Pl. Fig. 1). The gla.s.s bells twined about this Sertularia are Campanularia syringa (Pl. I. Fig. 9); and here is a tiny plant of Cellularia ciliata (Pl. I. Fig. 8). Look at it through the field-gla.s.s; for it is truly wonderful. Each polype cell is edged with whip-like spines, and on the back of some of them is - what is it, but a live vulture's head, snapping and snapping - what for?

Nay, reader, I am here to show you what can be seen: but as for telling you what can be known, much more what cannot, I decline; and refer you to Johnson's "Zoophytes," wherein you will find that several species of polypes carry these same birds' heads: but whether they be parts of the polype, and of what use they are, no man living knoweth.

Next, what are the striped pears? They are sea-anemones, and of a species only lately well known, Sagartia viduata, the snake-locked anemone (Pl. V. Fig. 3(5)). They have been washed off the loose stones to which they usually adhere by the pitiless roll of the ground-swell; however, they are not so far gone, but that if you take one of them home, and put it in a jar of water, it will expand into a delicate compound flower, which can neither be described nor painted, of long pellucid tentacles, hanging like a thin bluish cloud over a disk of mottled brown and grey.

Here, adhering to this large whelk, is another, but far larger and coa.r.s.er. It is Sagartia parasitica, one of our largest British species; and most singular in this, that it is almost always (in Torbay, at least,) found adhering to a whelk: but never to a live one; and for this reason. The live whelk (as you may see for yourself when the tide is out) burrows in the sand in chase of hapless bivalve sh.e.l.ls, whom he bores through with his sharp tongue (always, cunning fellow, close to the hinge, where the fish is), and then sucks out their life. Now, if the anemone stuck to him, it would be carried under the sand daily, to its own disgust. It prefers, therefore, the dead whelk, inhabited by a soldier crab, Pagurus Bernhardi (Pl. II. Fig. 2), of which you may find a dozen anywhere as the tide goes out; and travels about at the crab's expense, sharing with him the offal which is his food. Note, moreover, that the soldier crab is the most hasty and blundering of marine animals, as active as a monkey, and as subject to panics as a horse; wherefore the poor anemone on his back must have a hard life of it; being knocked about against rocks and sh.e.l.ls, 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 p.r.i.c.kles, instead of hair. They are sea-urchins, Amphidotus cordatus, which burrow by thousands in the sand. These are of that Spatangoid form, which you will often find fossil in the chalk, and which shepherd boys call snakes' heads. We shall soon find another sort, an Echinus, and have time to talk over these most strange (in my eyes) of all living animals.

There are a hundred more things to be talked of here: but we must defer the examination of them till our return; for it wants an hour yet of the dead low spring-tide; and ere we go home, we will spend a few minutes at least on the rocks at Livermead, where awaits us a strong-backed quarryman, with a strong-backed crowbar, as is to be hoped (for he snapped one right across there yesterday, falling miserably on his back into a pool thereby), and we will verify Mr.

Gosse's observation, that -

"When once we have begun to look with curiosity on the strange things that ordinary people pa.s.s over without notice, our wonder is continually excited by the variety of phase, and often by the uncouthness of form, under which some of the meaner creatures are presented to us. And this is very specially the case with the inhabitants of the sea. We can scarcely poke or pry for an hour among the rocks, at low-water mark, or walk, with an observant downcast eye, along the beach after a gale, without finding some oddly-fashioned, suspicious-looking being, unlike any form of life that we have seen before. The dark concealed interior of the sea becomes thus invested with a fresh mystery; its vast recesses appear to be stored with all imaginable forms; and we are tempted to think there must be mult.i.tudes of living creatures whose very figure and structure have never yet been suspected.

"'O sea! old sea! who yet knows half Of thy wonders or thy pride!'"

GOSSE'S AQUARIUM, pp. 226, 227.

These words have more than fulfilled themselves since they were written. Those Deep-Sea dredgings, of which a detailed account will be found in Dr. Wyville Thomson's new and most beautiful book, "The Depths of the Sea," have disclosed, of late years, wonders of the deep even more strange and more mult.i.tudinous than the wonders of the sh.o.r.e. The time is past when we thought ourselves bound to believe, with Professor Edward Forbes, that only some hundred fathoms down, the inhabitants of the sea-bottom "become more and more modified, and fewer and fewer, indicating our approach towards an abyss where life is either extinguished, or exhibits but a few sparks to mark it's lingering presence."

Neither now need we indulge in another theory which had a certain grandeur in it, and was not so absurd as it looks at first sight, - namely, that, as Dr. Wyville Thomson puts it, picturesquely enough, "in going down the sea water became, under the pressure, gradually heavier and heavier, and that all the loose things floated at different levels, according to their specific weight, - skeletons of men, anchors and shot and cannon, and last of all the broad gold pieces lost in the wreck of many a galleon off the Spanish Main; the whole forming a kind of 'false bottom' to the ocean, beneath which there lay all the depth of clear still water, which was heavier than molten gold."

The facts are; first that water, being all but incompressible, is hardly any heavier, and just as liquid, at the greatest depth, than at the surface; and that therefore animals can move as freely in it in deep as in shallow water; and next, that as the fluids inside the body of a sea animal must be at the same pressure as that of the water outside it, the two pressures must balance each other; and the body, instead of being crushed in, may be unconscious that it is living under a weight of two or three miles of water. But so it is; as we gather our curiosities at low-tide mark, or haul the dredge a mile or two out at sea, we may allow our fancy to range freely out to the westward, and down over the subaqueous cliffs of the hundred-fathom line, which mark the old sh.o.r.e 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 mult.i.tudinous life, some of it strangely like, some strangely unlike, the creatures which we see along the sh.o.r.e.

Some strangely like. You may find, for instance, among the sea- weed, here and there, a little black sea-spider, a Nymphon, who has this peculiarity, that possessing no body at all to speak of, he carries his needful stomach in long branches, packed inside his legs. The specimens which you will find will probably be half an inch across the legs. An almost exactly similar Nymphon has been dredged from the depths of the Arctic and Antarctic oceans, nearly two feet across.

You may find also a quaint little shrimp, CAPRELLA, clinging by its hind claws to sea-weed, and waving its gaunt grotesque body to and fro, while it makes mesmeric pa.s.ses with its large fore claws, - one of the most ridiculous of Nature's many ridiculous forms.

Those which you will find will be some quarter of an inch in length; but in the cold area of the North Atlantic, their cousins, it is now found, are nearly three inches long, and perch in like manner, not on sea-weeds, for there are none so deep, but on branching sponges.

These are but two instances out of many of forms which were supposed to be peculiar to shallow sh.o.r.es repeating themselves at vast depths: thus forcing on us strange questions about changes in the distribution and depth of the ancient seas; and forcing us, also, to reconsider the old rules by which rocks were distinguished as deep-sea or shallow-sea deposits according to the fossils found in them.

As for the new forms, and even more important than them, the ancient forms, supposed to have been long extinct, and only known as fossils, till they were lately rediscovered alive in the nether darkness, - for them you must consult Dr. Wyville Thomson's book, and the notices of the "Challenger's" dredgings which appear from time to time in the columns of "Nature;" for want of s.p.a.ce forbids my speaking of them here.

But if you have no time to read "The Depths of the Sea," go at least to the British Museum, or if you be a northern man, to the admirable public museum at Liverpool; ask to be shown the deep-sea forms; and there feast your curiosity and your sense of beauty for an hour. Look at the Crinoids, or stalked star-fishes, the "Lilies of living stone," which swarmed in the ancient seas, in vast variety, and in such numbers that whole beds of limestone are composed of their disjointed fragments; but which have vanished out of our modern seas, we know not why, till, a few years since, almost the only known living species was the exquisite and rare Pentacrinus asteria, from deep water off the Windward Isles of the West Indies.

Of this you will see a specimen or two both at Liverpool and in the British Museum; and near them, probably, specimens of the new-old Crinoids, discovered of late years by Professor Sars, Mr. Gwyn Jeffreys, Dr. Carpenter, Dr. Wyville Thomson, and the other deep- sea disciples of the mythic Glaucus, the fisherman, who, enamoured of the wonders of the sea, plunged into the blue abyss once and for all, and became himself "the blue old man of the sea."

Next look at the corals, and Gorgonias, and all the sea-fern tribe of branching polypidoms, and last, but not least, at the gla.s.s sponges; first at the Euplectella, or Venus's flower-basket, which lives embedded in the mud of the seas of the Philippines, supported by a gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s case, as a delight to your eyes, one of the most exquisite, both for form and texture, of natural objects.

Then look at the Hyalonemas, or gla.s.s-rope ocean floor by a twisted wisp of strong flexible flint needles, somewhat on the principle of a screw-pile. So strange and complicated is their structure, that naturalists for a long while could literally make neither head nor tail of them, as long as they had only j.a.panese specimens to study, some of which the j.a.panese 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 b.u.t.t of the Lows down to Setubal on the Portuguese coast, where the deep-water shark fishers call it "sea-whip," has given our savants specimens enough to make up their minds - that they really know little or nothing about it, and probably will never know.

And do not forget, lastly, to ask, whether at Liverpool or at the British Museum, for the Holtenias and their congeners, - hollow sponges built up of gla.s.sy spicules, and rooted in the mud by gla.s.s hairs, in some cases between two and three feet long, as flexible and graceful as tresses of snow-white silk.

Look at these, and a hundred kindred forms, and then see how nature is not only "maxima in minimis" - greatest in her least, but often "pulcherrima in abditis" - fairest in her most hidden works; and how the Creative Spirit has lavished, as it were, unspeakable artistic skill on lowly-organized creature, never till now beheld by man, and buried, not only in foul mud, but in their own unsightly heap of living jelly.

But so it was from the beginning; - and this planet was not made for man alone. Countless ages before we appeared on earth the depths of the old chalk-ocean teemed with forms as beautiful and perfect as those, their lineal descendants, which the dredge now brings up from the Atlantic sea-floor; and if there were - as my reason tells me that there must have been - final moral causes for their existence, the only ones which we have a right to imagine are these - that all, down to the lowest Rhizopod, might delight themselves, however dimly, in existing; and that the Lord might delight Himself in them.

Thus, much - alas! how little - about the wonders of the deep. We, who are no deep-sea dredgers, must return humbly to the wonders of the sh.o.r.e. And first, as after descending the gap in the sea-wall we walk along the ribbed floor of hard yellow sand, let me ask you to give a sharp look-out for a round grey disc, about as big as a penny-piece, peeping out on the surface. No; that is not it, that little lump: open it, and you will find within one of the common little Venus gallina. - The closet collectors have given it some new name now, and no thanks to them: they are always changing the names, instead of studying the live animals where Nature has put them, in which case they would have no time for word-inventing.

Nay, I verify suspect that the names grow, like other things; at least, they get longer and longer and more jaw-breaking every year.

The little bivalve, however, finding itself left by the tide, has wisely shut up its siphons, and, by means of its foot and its edges, buried itself in a comfortable bath of cool wet sand, till the sea shall come back, and make it safe to crawl and lounge about on the surface, smoking the sea-water instead of tobacco. Neither is that depression what we seek. Touch it, and out poke a pair of astonished and inquiring horns: it is a long-armed crab, who saw us coming, and wisely shovelled himself into the sand by means of his nether-end. Corystes Ca.s.sivelaunus 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 antennae," says my friend, Mr. Lloyd (6) - I have not verified the fact, but believe it, as he knows a great deal about crabs, and I know next to nothing - "form a tube through which a current of water pa.s.ses into the crab's gills, free from the surrounding sand." Moreover, it is only the male who has those strangely long fore-arms and claws; the female contenting herself with limbs of a more moderate length. Neither is that, though it might be, the hole down which what we seek has vanished: but that burrow contains one of the long white razors which you saw cast on sh.o.r.e at Paignton. The boys close by are boring for them with iron rods armed with a screw, and taking them in to sell in Torquay market, as excellent food. But there is one, at last - a grey disc pouting up through the sand. Touch it, and it is gone down, quick as light. We must dig it out, and carefully, for it is a delicate monster. At last, after ten minutes' careful work, we have brought up, from a foot depth or more - what? A thick, dirty, slimy worm, without head or tail, form or colour. A slug has more artistic beauty about him. Be it so. At home in the aquarium (where, alas! he will live but for a day or two, under the new irritation of light) he will make a very different figure. That is one of the rarest of British sea- animals, Peachia hastata (Pl. XII. Fig. 1), which differs from most other British Actiniae in this, that instead of having like them a walking disc, it has a free open lower end, with which (I know not how) it buries itself upright in the sand, with its mouth just above the surface. The figure on the left of the plate represents a curious cl.u.s.ter of papillae which project from one side of the mouth, and are the opening of the oviduct. But his value consists, not merely in his beauty (though that, really, is not small), but in his belonging to what the long word-makers call an "interosculant" group, - a party of genera and species which connect families scientifically far apart, filling up a fresh link in the great chain, or rather the great network, of zoological cla.s.sification. 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 Holothurians, and then went on to perfect the idea contained in it in two different directions; dividing it into two different families, and making on its model, by adding new organs, and taking away old ones, in one direction the whole family of Actiniae (sea- anemones), and in a quite opposite one the Holothuriae, those strange sea-cuc.u.mbers, 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 belief that the universe was brought into being as it now exists by a single fiat. We know that the work has been gradual; that the earth