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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore
+#2 in our series by Charles Kingsley
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+Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore
+
+by Charles Kingsley
+
+October, 1996  [Etext #695]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore
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+Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley
+Scanned and proofed by David Price
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore
+
+
+
+
+Dedication.
+
+
+MY DEAR MISS GRENFELL,
+
+I CANNOT forego the pleasure of dedicating this little book 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.
+
+BIDEFORD,
+
+APRIL 24. 1855.
+
+
+
+GLAUCUS; OR, THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.
+
+
+
+You 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-cheerfully, 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 "dull 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 up one parade 
+and down another, interminable reading of the silliest 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 willocks, 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 billiard-room;" and after 
+all, and worst of all, at night a soulless RECHAUFFE of third-rate 
+London frivolity:  this is the life-in-death in which thousands 
+spend the golden weeks of summer, and in which you confess 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:"
+
+
+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 
+employed ages and ages, further back than wisdom can guess or 
+imagination picture, and upholds that least part every moment by 
+laws and forces so complex 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, still 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
+
+
+"No speculation in those eyes
+Which they do glare withal"?
+
+
+Why not, then, try to discover a few of the Wonders of the Shore?  
+For wonders there are there 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 he 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 needlewomen) - has all but vanished from your 
+drawing-room since the "Lady-ferns" and "Venus's hair" appeared; 
+and that you could not help yourself 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 fascination 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 lantern, a jar of strange sweet compound, and 
+innumerable pocketfuls of pill-boxes; and found it very difficult 
+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 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 spell there could be 
+in those "useless" moths, to draw out of his warm bed, twenty miles 
+down the Eastern Counties Railway, 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 
+successful 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 company for 
+dukes and princes.  Nay, the study is now more than honourable; it 
+is (what to many readers will be 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 generations 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 Hordwell Cliffs, for exploring which 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 convince 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 Selborne."  A Hampshire 
+gentleman 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 
+fellow!" till they opened the book itself, and discovered to their 
+surprise that 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 excuses, 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 
+Saltero (as no doubt the Neapolitan gentleman talked of Ferrante 
+Imperato the apothecary, and his museum); great excuses for 
+Voltaire, when he classes the collection of butterflies among the 
+other "bizarreries de l'esprit humain."  For, in the last 
+generation, 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 
+were such as would raise up men to fight him; so the coarse, 
+fierce, hard-handed training of our grandfathers 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, Linne, 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 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 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 all.  Honour to them, 
+nevertheless.  Honour to Ray and his illustrious contemporaries in 
+Holland and France.  Honour to Seba and Aldrovandus; to Pomet, with 
+his "Historie of Drugges;" even to the ingenious Don Saltero, and 
+his tavern-museum in Cheyne Walk.  Where all was chaos, every man 
+was useful who could contribute a single spot of organized standing 
+ground in the shape of a fact or a specimen.  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 itself.  For, when questions belonging to the most sacred 
+hereditary 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 Mathematics 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 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 contradicted His 
+other messages.  When a few more years are past, Buckland and 
+Sedgwick, Murchison and Lyell, Delab�che and Phillips, Forbes and 
+Jamieson, and the group of brave men who accompanied 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 folly 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 between 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; who laboured on with a noble recklessness, determined 
+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 consonant 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, harmonies, laws, chains of cause and effect 
+endlessly interlinked, which draw him out of the narrow 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 clubmoss 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 aeons 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 Sedum, which 
+have all but vanished out of the British Isles.  And what is it 
+which tells him that strange 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.  
+AEons and aeons ago, before the time when Adam first
+
+
+"Embraced his 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 unmistakeable, boundless in significance, like Crusoe's one 
+savage footprint on the sea-shore; and the naturalist 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 but a sportsman ever thinks of going, he 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 geological 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 
+huntsman, 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 world 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.  Moreover, 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 keine seite,
+Todes-stille f�rchterlich;"
+
+
+as G�the has it -
+
+
+"Und der schiffer sieht bek�mmert
+Glatte fl�che rings umher."
+
+
+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 question, "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 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 probably took plus at the 
+bottom of an ocean hundreds 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 palm-fringed island in a 
+tropic sea.  Let us look the place over more fully.
+
+You see the lake is nearly circular; on the side where we stand the 
+pebbly beach is not six feet above the water, and slopes away 
+steeply into the valley behind us, while before us it shelves 
+gradually 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 
+opposite side, that flat-topped wall of rock towers up shoreless 
+into the sky, seven hundred feet perpendicular; the deepest water 
+of all we know is at its very foot.  Right and left, two shoulders 
+of down slope into the lake.  Now turn round and look down the 
+gorge.  Remark that this pebble bank on which we stand reaches some 
+fifty yards downward:  you see the loose stones peeping out 
+everywhere.  We may 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 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 
+condition shoved their way up somewhere or other through these 
+slates.  But where? whence on earth did these Syenite pebbles come?  
+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 cliff-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.
+
+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 determined to have a prodigy, 
+it may as well be a sufficiently 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 coracle.  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 not see that it is polished thus only over 
+the lake? 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, till 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? . . . Really, 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 hunter - 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 will see how ice may have done it.  
+Our friend John Jones's report of plains and bogs and a lake above 
+makes it quite possible that in the "Ice age" (Glacial Epoch, as 
+the big-word-mongers call it) there was above that cliff a great 
+neve, 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 neve, polishing the face of the rock in its 
+descent:  but the snow, having no large and deep outlet, has not 
+slid down in a sufficient 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 daily melting.  If you have 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 Trelaporte, which comes down from the Aiguille de 
+Charmoz.
+
+This explains our pebble-ridge.  The stones which the glacier 
+rubbed off the cliff beneath it it carried forward, slowly but 
+surely, till they saw the light 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; till, the "Ice age" past, a more 
+genial climate succeeded, and neve 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 include 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 all around you, and make you 
+ask yourself seriously, "What branch of Natural History shall I 
+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 left to conquer.  For the geologist, 
+indeed, and the entomologist, especially in the remoter districts, 
+much remains to be done, but only at a heavy outlay of time, 
+labour, and study; and the dilettante (and it is for dilettanti, 
+like myself, that I principally write) must be content to tread in 
+the tracks of greater men who 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 enjoyments 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 pleasure 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 Soldanella, the Rhododendron, or the 
+black Orchis, growing upon the edge of the eternal snow, a thrill 
+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 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 foundation of the world, taking no 
+heed of man, and all the coil which 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 Kyllwald; the 
+first sight of the blue and green Roller-birds, 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; 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 Rheinstein, while the broad Rhine beneath 
+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 valley 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 Ardennes, 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 finding 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, 
+uncomprehended?  As it seems to you:  though in reality it only 
+seems so, in a world wherein not 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 naturalists since the 
+lynx-eye of Colonel Montagu discerned them forty years ago.
+
+And do not despise the creatures because they are minute.  No doubt 
+we should most of us prefer discovering monstrous apes in the 
+tropical forests of Borneo, or stumbling upon herds of gigantic 
+Ammon sheep amid the rhododendron thickets of the Himalaya:  but 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 
+monsters whose models fill the lake at the Crystal 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 SCIENTIA 
+SCIENTIARUM, the priceless art of learning; no branch of science 
+has more utterly confounded a 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," "vegetable," 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 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.  Humbling, truly, to one who looks back to 
+the summer of 1754, when good Mr. Ellis, the wise and benevolent 
+West Indian merchant, read before the Royal 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 RESUME thereof in Dr. Landsborough'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 sound-
+headed men like Pallas and Linne, to give up the old sense-bound 
+fancy, that these corals were vegetables, and their polypes some 
+sort of living 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 believe 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 
+Marsigli'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-like forms, or curious delineations of mosses and minute 
+shrubs on slates and stones, owing to the shooting of salts 
+intermixed with mineral 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 all 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 forming a 
+seeming plant invariable in each species), would have dreamed of 
+the "bizarreries" which these very zoophytes present in their 
+classification?
+
+You go down 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 so. (1)  But you are told to your surprise, that 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 still 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 congeners 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 on your mantel-piece, brought home 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 - bags 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 submarine 
+world whereof Spenser sang -
+
+
+"Oh, what an endless work have I in hand,
+To count the sea's abundant progeny!
+Whose fruitful seed far passeth those in land,
+And also those which won in th' azure sky,
+For much more earth to tell the stars 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 knowledge of sea-animals has progressed, and 
+for the 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 certain 
+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-forgetful 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, "O 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 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 experience, 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 
+settlements 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 and the rest, and even in measuring 
+pens with Linne, the prince of naturalists.
+
+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 Roderick Murchison, was also an old 
+Peninsular officer.  I doubt not that with him, too, the 
+experiences of war may have helped to fit him for the studies of 
+peace.  Certainly, the best naturalist, as far as logical acumen, 
+as well 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 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 bewailing 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 attributes to him the highest faculty - The 
+Art of Seeing; but the study and the book would not 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 herself:  not 
+merely with printed-books about her.  Let no one think that this 
+same 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 perfect 
+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 skilful fisherman; and, if he go far 
+abroad, be able on occasion to fight for his life.
+
+For 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 because he knows how 
+much invaluable local information 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 investigation; 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 him his 
+life long always reverent, yet never superstitious; wondering at 
+the commonest, but not surprised 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 ungainly; 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 Man therein; holding every phenomenon 
+worth the noting down; believing that every pebble holds a 
+treasure, every bud a revelation; making it a point of conscience 
+to pass over nothing through laziness or hastiness, lest the vision 
+once offered and despised should be withdrawn; 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 all the passions which make men see only what 
+they wish to see.  Of solemn and scrupulous reverence for truth; 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 nature'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 everything by its money 
+price, its private utility.  The spirit which gives freely, because 
+it knows that it has received freely; which communicates knowledge 
+without hope of reward, without jealousy and rivalry, to fellow-
+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 manful heads, and yet of 
+childlike hearts, who have 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 
+naturalist 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; 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 stern methodic study; how to give habits of enterprise, 
+patience, accurate observation, which the counting-house or the 
+library will never bestow; above all, how to develop the physical 
+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 advantages 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 strength which 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 frivolity, not 
+to say on secret profligacy, parents know too well; and often shut 
+their eyes in very despair to evils 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, often misdirected; craving to learn, yet not 
+knowing how or what to learn; cultivating, with unwholesome energy, 
+the head at the expense of the body and the heart; catching up with 
+the most capricious self-will 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 urge 
+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 will 
+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 will 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 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 firm,"
+
+
+yet still
+
+
+"The temperate will,
+Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill,"
+
+
+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 honourable exception of the football games in Battersea Park - 
+to our Public Schools and the two elder Universities.  All honour, 
+meanwhile, to the Volunteer 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 learning 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' bills, 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 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 better left unspoken; or, if they 
+were clever ones, fall on arguing and brainsbeating 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 miles 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 find wonder in every 
+insect, sublimity in every hedgerow, the records of past worlds in 
+every pebble, and boundless fertility upon the barren shore; 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 passions, 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 shells 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-shells, 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 shore-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 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 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, 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 grass, 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 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 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 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 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 shores, 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 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 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?  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 prickles 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 capsicums? -
+
+Yes, what are the red capsicums? and why are they poking, snapping, 
+starting, crawling, tumbling wildly over each other, rattling about 
+the huge 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 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 shore, 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' 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 Ruler, 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 anatomy elaborate descriptions and 
+drawings, which have done more perhaps than any others to 
+illustrate the curious economy of the whole class of bivalve, or 
+double-shelled, mollusca.  (Plate II. Fig. 3.)
+
+That red capsicum is the foot of the animal contained in the 
+cockleshell.  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, 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 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, 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 
+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 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 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 aculeatum, 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 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 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 
+other 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 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 
+shores. (3)
+
+Now for the tapering brown spires.  They are Turritellae, snail-
+like animals (though the form of the shell 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 "more 
+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 family 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 
+occupied by one Sipunculus Bernhardi; a wight of low degree, who 
+connects "radiate" with annulate forms - in plain English, sea-
+cucumbers (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 passed 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 shell.  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 glass; 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 Flustrae, or 
+sea-mats.  This, which smells very like Verbena, is Flustra 
+coriacea (Pl. I. Fig. 2).  That scurf on the frond of ore-weed is 
+F. lineata (Pl. Fig. 1).  The glass 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-glass; 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 
+coarser.  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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 multitudes 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 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 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 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 creatures which we see along the shore.
+
+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 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 
+branching 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 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 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 
+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 glass 
+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 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 Hyalonemas, or glass-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 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 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 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 
+"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 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 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 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 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 passes 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 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 
+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 cluster 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 
+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 
+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-cucumbers, 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
+
+
+"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 
+appearing now, and may appear hereafter:  and that for every 
+extinct Dodo 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 unwillingness 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," which 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 
+work on each individual of it.  They may be wrong, or they may be 
+right:  but what is there in such a 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 definition 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, excluded) - then why should not 
+this imperfect creative 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 Euphorbiaceae - 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 
+common 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 beauty?  If he chose to 
+do it, could He not do it?  That man found himself none the worse 
+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 Euphorbiaceae, from the 
+weedy English Euphorbias, the Dog's Mercuries, and the Box, to the 
+prickly-stemmed Scarlet Euphorbia of Madagascar, 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-oils, the scarlet Poinsettia, the little pink 
+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 complex 
+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 
+theologian have to say, save that God's works are even more 
+wonderful than he always believed them to be?  As for the theory 
+being impossible - that is to be decided by men of science, on 
+strict experimental grounds.  As for us theologians, who are we, 
+that we should limit, � 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 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 All-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 
+naturalist writes, 'It may be metaphorically said that natural 
+selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, 
+every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, 
+preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly 
+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 of substituting "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, 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 explained 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 aeon, 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 or imperfection, 
+but of an Infinite Maker and "Poietes," drawing ever fresh forms 
+out of the inexhaustible 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 delicately 
+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, necessary 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 ineffable, that He may look on that which 
+He hath made, and behold it is very good.
+
+I speak, of course, under correction; 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 Himself without witness," in nature itself, 
+that He is the God of grace.  Why speak of the God of nature and 
+the God of grace 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 
+Himself in nature.  Nay, rather, let us believe that, if our eyes 
+were opened, we should fulfil the requirement of Genius, to "see 
+the universal in the 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 dulness 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 Himself 
+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 progress 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 powerful, 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 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 (preventive 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 that can break or wear in his house.  Yet Mr. Peach is a 
+votary of Natural History; not a student of the science in books, 
+for he cannot afford books; but an investigator by sea and shore, a 
+collector of Zoophytes 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 illustrative papers and drawings:  thus, under circumstances the 
+very opposite of those of such men as Lord Enniskillen, 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-Fishes, 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 Fauna of Britain, and a vast matter to a 
+poor private of the Cornwall mounted guard.  And accordingly he 
+will go home in a few days, full of the glory of his exhibition, 
+and strong 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 complication 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 itself; for where is the heroism like that 
+of virtuous, intelligent, independent poverty?  And such heroism is 
+thine!" - CHAMBERS' EDIN. JOURN., Nov. 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 expresses the peculiarity of the beast, which consists in 
+- start not, reader - twelve hands, like human hands, while Synapta 
+expresses merely its power of clinging to the fingers, 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 
+Lutrariae in a cove near Goodrington; but all my dredging outside 
+failed to procure a specimen - Mr. Alder, however, and Mr. Cocks 
+(who find everything, and will 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 Mediterranean fauna; for Mr. MacAndrew finds 
+them plentifully in Vigo Bay, and J. M�ller in the Adriatic, off 
+Trieste.
+
+But what is it like?  Conceive a very fat short earth-worm; not 
+ringed, though, 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 
+drawings 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 tingling 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 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 body of the 
+animal.  (See on Echinus Millaris, p. 89.) (7)  Somewhat similar 
+anchor-plates, from a Red 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 nothing 
+about Synapta, 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 limestone 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 Actiniae fill the tiny caverns with living flowers; great 
+Pholades (Plate X. figs. 3, 4) bore by hundreds in the softer 
+strata; and wherever 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, (8) 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 Laminariae, like fan-palms, droop and wave gracefully in the 
+retiring ripples, a great boulder which will serve our purpose.  
+Its upper side is a whole forest of sea-weeds, large and small; and 
+that forest, if you examined it closely, as full of inhabitants as 
+those of the Amazon or the Gambia.  To "beat" that dense cover 
+would be an endless task:  but on the under side, where no sea-
+weeds grow, we shall find full in view enough to occupy us till the 
+tide returns.  For the slab, see, is such a one as sea-beasts love 
+to haunt.  Its weed-covered surface shows that the surge has not 
+shifted it for years past.  It lies on other boulders clear of sand 
+and mud, so that there is no fear of dead sea-weed having lodged 
+and decayed under it, destructive to animal life.  We can see dark 
+crannies and caves beneath; yet too narrow to allow the surge to 
+wash in, and keep the surface clean.  It will be a fine menagerie 
+of Nereus, if we can but turn it.
+
+Now the crowbar is well under it; heave, and with a will; and so, 
+after five minutes' tugging, propping, slipping, and splashing, the 
+boulder gradually tips over, and we rush greedily upon the spoil.
+
+A muddy dripping surface it is, truly, full of cracks and hollows, 
+uninviting enough at first sight:  let us look it round leisurely, 
+to see if there are not materials enough there for an hour's 
+lecture.
+
+The first object which strikes the eye is probably a group of milk-
+white slugs, from two to six inches long, cuddling snugly together 
+(Plate IX. fig. 1).  You try to pull them off, and find that they 
+give you some trouble, such a firm hold have the delicate white 
+sucking arms, which fringe each of their five edges.  You see at 
+the head nothing but a yellow dimple; for eating and breathing are 
+suspended till the return of tide; but once settled in a jar of 
+salt-water, each will protrude a large chocolate-coloured head, 
+tipped with a ring of ten feathery gills, looking very much like a 
+head of "curled kale," but of the loveliest white and primrose; in 
+the centre whereof lies perdu a mouth with sturdy teeth - if indeed 
+they, as well as the whole inside of the beast, have not been 
+lately got rid of, and what you see be not a mere bag, without 
+intestine or other organ:  but only for the time being.  For hear 
+it, worn-out epicures, and old Indians who bemoan your livers, this 
+little Holothuria knows a secret which, if he could tell it, you 
+would be glad to buy of him for thousands sterling.  To him blue 
+pill and muriatic acid are superfluous, and travels to German 
+Brunnen a waste of time.  Happy Holothuria! who possesses really 
+the secret of everlasting youth, which ancient fable bestowed on 
+the serpent and the eagle.  For when his teeth ache, or his 
+digestive organs trouble him, all he has to do is just to cast up 
+forthwith his entire inside, and, faisant maigre for a month or so, 
+grow a fresh set, and then eat away as merrily as ever.  His name, 
+if you wish to consult so triumphant a hygeist, is Cucumaria 
+Pentactes:  but he has many a stout cousin round the Scotch coast, 
+who knows the antibilious panacea as well as he, and submits, among 
+the northern fishermen, to the rather rude and undeserved name of 
+sea-puddings; one of which grows in Shetland to the enormous length 
+of three feet, rivalling there his huge congeners, who display 
+their exquisite plumes on every tropic coral reef.  (9)
+
+Next, what are those bright little buds, like salmon-coloured 
+Banksia roses half expanded, sitting closely on the stone?  Touch 
+them; the soft part is retracted, and the orange flower of flesh is 
+transformed into a pale pink flower of stone.  That is the 
+Madrepore, Caryophyllia Smithii (Plate V. fig. 2); one of our south 
+coast rarities:  and see, on the lip of the last one, which we have 
+carefully scooped off with the chisel, two little pink towers of 
+stone, delicately striated; drop them into this small bottle of 
+sea-water, and from the top of each tower issues every half-second 
+- what shall we call it? - a hand or a net of finest hairs, 
+clutching at something invisible to our grosser sense.  That is the 
+Pyrgoma, parasitic only (as far as we know) on the lip of this same 
+rare Madrepore; a little "cirrhipod," the cousin of those tiny 
+barnacles which roughen every rock (a larger sort whereof I showed 
+you on the Turritella), and of those larger ones also who burrow in 
+the thick hide of the whale, and, borne about upon his mighty 
+sides, throw out their tiny casting nets, as this Pyrgoma does, to 
+catch every passing animalcule, and sweep them into the jaws 
+concealed within its shell.  And this creature, rooted to one spot 
+through life and death, was in its infancy a free swimming animal, 
+hovering from place to place upon delicate ciliae, till, having 
+sown its wild oats, it settled down in life, built itself a good 
+stone house, and became a landowner, or rather a glebae adscriptus, 
+for ever and a day.  Mysterious destiny! - yet not so mysterious as 
+that of the free medusoid young of every polype and coral, which 
+ends as a rooted tree of horn or stone, and seems to the eye of 
+sensuous fancy to have literally degenerated into a vegetable.  Of 
+them you must read for yourself in Mr. Gosse's book; in the 
+meanwhile he shall tell you something of the beautiful Madrepores 
+themselves.  His description, (10) by far the best yet published, 
+should be read in full; we must content ourselves with extracts.
+
+"Doubtless you are familiar with the stony skeleton of our 
+Madrepore, as it appears in museums.  It consists of a number of 
+thin calcareous plates standing up edgewise, and arranged in a 
+radiating manner round a low centre.  A little below the margin 
+their individuality is lost in the deposition of rough calcareous 
+matter. . . . The general form is more or less cylindrical, 
+commonly wider at top than just above the bottom. . . . This is but 
+the skeleton; and though it is a very pretty object, those who are 
+acquainted with it alone, can form but a very poor idea of the 
+beauty of the living animal. . . . Let it, after being torn from 
+the rock, recover its equanimity; then you will see a pellucid 
+gelatinous flesh emerging from between the plates, and little 
+exquisitely formed and coloured tentacula, with white clubbed tips 
+fringing the sides of the cup-shaped cavity in the centre, across 
+which stretches the oval disc marked with a star of some rich and 
+brilliant colour, surrounding the central mouth, a slit with white 
+crenated lips, like the orifice of one of those elegant cowry 
+shells which we put upon our mantelpieces.  The mouth is always 
+more or less prominent, and can be protruded and expanded to an 
+astonishing extent.  The space surrounding the lips is commonly 
+fawn colour, or rich chestnut-brown; the star or vandyked circle 
+rich red, pale vermilion, and sometimes the most brilliant emerald 
+green, as brilliant as the gorget of a humming-bird."
+
+And what does this exquisitely delicate creature do with its pretty 
+mouth?  Alas for fact!  It sips no honey-dew, or fruits from 
+paradise. - "I put a minute spider, as large as a pin's head, into 
+the water, pushing it down to the coral.  The instant it touched 
+the tip of a tentacle, it adhered, and was drawn in with the 
+surrounding tentacles between the plates.  With a lens I saw the 
+small mouth slowly open, and move over to that side, the lips 
+gaping unsymmetrically; while with a movement as imperceptible as 
+that of the hour hand of a watch, the tiny prey was carried along 
+between the plates to the corner of the mouth.  The mouth, however, 
+moved most, and at length reached the edges of the plates, 
+gradually closed upon the insect, and then returned to its usual 
+place in the centre."
+
+Mr. Gosse next tried the fairy of the walking mouth with a house-
+fly, who escaped only by hard fighting; and at last the gentle 
+creature, after swallowing and disgorging various large pieces of 
+shell-fish, found viands to its taste in "the lean of cooked meat 
+and portions of earthworms," filling up the intervals by a 
+perpetual dessert of microscopic animalcules, whirled into that 
+lovely avernus, its mouth, by the currents of the delicate ciliae 
+which clothe every tentacle.  The fact is, that the Madrepore, like 
+those glorious sea-anemones whose living flowers stud every pool, 
+is by profession a scavenger and a feeder on carrion; and being as 
+useful as he is beautiful, really comes under the rule which he 
+seems at first to break, that handsome is who handsome does.
+
+Another species of Madrepore (11) was discovered on our Devon coast 
+by Mr. Gosse, more gaudy, though not so delicate in hue as our 
+Caryophyllia.  Mr. Gosse's locality, for this and numberless other 
+curiosities, is Ilfracombe, on the north coast of Devon.  My 
+specimens came from Lundy Island, in the mouth of the Bristol 
+Channel, or more properly from that curious "Rat Island" to the 
+south of it, where still lingers the black long-tailed English rat, 
+exterminated everywhere else by his sturdier brown cousin of the 
+Hanoverian dynasty.
+
+Look, now, at these tiny saucers of the thinnest ivory, the largest 
+not bigger than a silver threepence, which contain in their centres 
+a milk-white crust of stone, pierced, as you see under the 
+magnifier, into a thousand cells, each with its living architect 
+within.  Here are two kinds:  in one the tubular cells radiate from 
+the centre, giving it the appearance of a tiny compound flower, 
+daisy or groundsel; in the other they are crossed with waving 
+grooves, giving the whole a peculiar fretted look, even more 
+beautiful than that of the former species.  They are Tubulipora 
+patina and Tubulipora hispida; - and stay - break off that tiny 
+rough red wart, and look at its cells also under the magnifier:  it 
+is Cellepora pumicosa; and now, with the Madrepore, you hold in 
+your hand the principal, at least the commonest, British types of 
+those famed coral insects, which in the tropics are the architects 
+of continents, and the conquerors of the ocean surge.  All the 
+world, since the publication of Darwin's delightful "Voyage of the 
+Beagle,"' and of Williams' "Missionary Enterprises," knows, or 
+ought to know, enough about them:  for those who do not, there are 
+a few pages in the beginning of Dr. Landsborough's "British 
+Zoophytes," well worth perusal.
+
+There are a few other true cellepore corals round the coast.  The 
+largest of all, Cervicornis, may be dredged a few miles outside on 
+the Exmouth bank, with a few more Tubulipores:  but all tiny 
+things, the lingering and, as it were, expiring remnants of that 
+great coral-world which, through the abysmal depths of past ages, 
+formed here in Britain our limestone hills, storing up for 
+generations yet unborn the materials of agriculture and 
+architecture.  Inexpressibly interesting, even solemn, to those who 
+will think, is the sight of those puny parasites which, as it were, 
+connect the ages and the aeons:  yet not so solemn and full of 
+meaning as that tiny relic of an older world, the little pear-
+shaped Turbinolia (cousin of the Madrepores and Sea-anemones), 
+found fossil in the Suffolk Crag, and yet still lingering here and 
+there alive in the deep water of Scilly and the west coast of 
+Ireland, possessor of a pedigree which dates, perhaps, from ages 
+before the day in which it was said, "Let us make man in our image, 
+after our likeness."  To think that the whole human race, its joys 
+and its sorrows, its virtues and its sins, its aspirations and its 
+failures, has been rushing out of eternity and into eternity again, 
+as Arjoon in the Bhagavad Gita beheld the race of men issuing from 
+Kreeshna's flaming mouth, and swallowed up in it again, "as the 
+crowds of insects swarm into the flame, as the homeless streams 
+leap down into the ocean bed," in an everlasting heart-pulse whose 
+blood is living souls - and all that while, and ages before that 
+mystery began, that humble coral, unnoticed on the dark sea-floor, 
+has been "continuing as it was at the beginning," and fulfilling 
+"the law which cannot be broken," while races and dynasties and 
+generations have been
+
+
+"Playing such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
+As make the angels weep."
+
+
+Yes; it is this vision of the awful permanence and perfection of 
+the natural world, beside the wild flux and confusion, the mad 
+struggles, the despairing cries of the world of spirits which man 
+has defiled by sin, which would at moments crush the naturalist's 
+heart, and make his brain swim with terror, were it not that he can 
+see by faith, through all the abysses and the ages, not merely
+
+
+" Hands,
+From out the darkness, shaping man;"
+
+
+but above them a living loving countenance, human and yet Divine; 
+and can hear a voice which said at first, "Let us make man in our 
+image;" and hath said since then, and says for ever and for ever, 
+"Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world."
+
+But now, friend, who listenest, perhaps instructed, and at least 
+amused - if, as Professor Harvey well says, the simpler animals 
+represent, as in a glass, the scattered organs of the higher races, 
+which of your organs is represented by that "sca'd man's head," 
+which the Devon children more gracefully, yet with less adherence 
+to plain likeness, call "mermaid's head," (12) which we picked up 
+just now on Paignton Sands?  Or which, again, by its more beautiful 
+little congener, (13) five or six of which are adhering tightly to 
+the slab before us, a ball covered with delicate spines of lilac 
+and green, and stuck over (cunning fellows!) with stripes of dead 
+sea-weed to serve as improvised parasols?  One cannot say that in 
+him we have the first type of the human skull:  for the 
+resemblance, quaint as it is, is only sensuous and accidental, (in 
+the logical use of that term,) and not homological, I.E. a lower 
+manifestation of the same idea.  Yet how is one tempted to say, 
+that this was Nature's first and lowest attempt at that use of 
+hollow globes of mineral for protecting soft fleshy parts, which 
+she afterwards developed to such perfection in the skulls of 
+vertebrate animals!  But even that conceit, pretty as it sounds, 
+will not hold good; for though Radiates similar to these were among 
+the earliest tenants of the abyss, yet as early as their time, 
+perhaps even before them, had been conceived and actualized, in the 
+sharks, and in Mr. Hugh Miller's pets the old red sandstone fishes, 
+that very true vertebrate skull and brain, of which this is a mere 
+mockery. (14)  Here the whole animal, with his extraordinary 
+feeding mill, (for neither teeth nor jaws is a fit word for it,) is 
+enclosed within an ever-growing limestone castle, to the 
+architecture of which the Eddystone and the Crystal Palace are 
+bungling heaps; without arms or legs, eyes or ears, and yet 
+capable, in spite of his perpetual imprisonment, of walking, 
+feeding, and breeding, doubt it not, merrily enough.  But this 
+result has been attained at the expense of a complication of 
+structure, which has baffled all human analysis and research into 
+final causes.  As much concerning this most miraculous of families 
+as is needful to be known, and ten times more than you are likely 
+to understand, may be read in Harvey's "Sea-Side Book," pp. 142-
+148, - pages from which you will probably arise with a sense of the 
+infinity and complexity of Nature, even in what we are pleased to 
+call her "lower" forms, and the simplest and, as it were, easiest 
+forms of life.  Conceive a Crystal Palace, (for mere difference in 
+size, as both the naturalist and the metaphysician know, has 
+nothing to do with the wonder,) whereof each separate joist, 
+girder, and pane grows continually without altering the shape of 
+the whole; and you have conceived only one of the miracles embodied 
+in that little sea-egg, which the Creator has, as it were, to 
+justify to man His own immutability, furnished with a shell capable 
+of enduring fossil for countless ages, that we may confess Him to 
+have been as great when first His Spirit brooded on the deep, as He 
+is now and will be through all worlds to come.
+
+But we must make haste; for the tide is rising fast, and our stone 
+will be restored to its eleven hours' bath, long before we have 
+talked over half the wonders which it holds.  Look though, ere you 
+retreat, at one or two more.
+
+What is that little brown thing whom you have just taken off the 
+rock to which it adhered so stoutly by his sucking-foot?  A limpet?  
+Not at all:  he is of quite a different family and structure; but, 
+on the whole, a limpet-like shell would suit him well enough, so he 
+had one given him:  nevertheless, owing to certain anatomical 
+peculiarities, he needed one aperture more than a limpet; so one, 
+if you will examine, has been given him at the top of his shell. 
+(15)  This is one instance among a thousand of the way in which a 
+scientific knowledge of objects must not obey, but run counter to, 
+the impressions of sense; and of a custom in nature which makes 
+this caution so necessary, namely, the repetition of the same form, 
+slightly modified, in totally different animals, sometimes as if to 
+avoid waste, (for why should not the same conception be used in two 
+different cases, if it will suit in both?) and sometimes (more 
+marvellous by far) when an organ, fully developed and useful in one 
+species, appears in a cognate species but feeble, useless, and, as 
+it were, abortive; and gradually, in species still farther removed, 
+dies out altogether; placed there, it would seem, at first sight, 
+merely to keep up the family likeness.  I am half jesting; that 
+cannot be the only reason, perhaps not the reason at all; but the 
+fact is one of the most curious, and notorious also, in comparative 
+anatomy.
+
+Look, again, at those sea-slugs.  One, some three inches long, of a 
+bright lemon-yellow, clouded with purple; another of a dingy grey; 
+(16) another exquisite little creature of a pearly French White, 
+(17) furred all over the back with what seem arms, but are really 
+gills, of ringed white and grey and black.  Put that yellow one 
+into water, and from his head, above the eyes, arise two serrated 
+horns, while from the after-part of his back springs a circular 
+Prince-of-Wales's-feather of gills, - they are almost exactly like 
+those which we saw just now in the white Cucumaria.  Yes; here is 
+another instance of the same custom of repetition.  The Cucumaria 
+is a low radiate animal - the sea-slug a far higher mollusc; and 
+every organ within him is formed on a different type; as indeed are 
+those seemingly identical gills, if you come to examine them under 
+the microscope, having to oxygenate fluids of a very different and 
+more complicated kind; and, moreover, the Cucumaria's gills were 
+put round his mouth, the Doris's feathers round the other 
+extremity; that grey Eolis's, again, are simple clubs, scattered 
+over his whole back, and in each of his nudibranch congeners these 
+same gills take some new and fantastic form; in Melibaea those 
+clubs are covered with warts; in Scyllaea, with tufted bouquets; in 
+the beautiful Antiopa they are transparent bags; and in many other 
+English species they take every conceivable form of leaf, tree, 
+flower, and branch, bedecked with every colour of the rainbow, as 
+you may see them depicted in Messrs. Alder and Hancock's unrivalled 
+Monograph on the Nudibranch Mollusca.
+
+And now, worshipper of final causes and the mere useful in nature, 
+answer but one question, - Why this prodigal variety?  All these 
+Nudibranchs live in much the same way:  why would not the same 
+mould have done for them all?  And why, again, (for we must push 
+the argument a little further,) why have not all the butterflies, 
+at least all who feed on the same plant, the same markings?  Of all 
+unfathomable triumphs of design, (we can only express ourselves 
+thus, for honest induction, as Paley so well teaches, allows us to 
+ascribe such results only to the design of some personal will and 
+mind,) what surpasses that by which the scales on a butterfly's 
+wing are arranged to produce a certain pattern of artistic beauty 
+beyond all painter's skill?  What a waste of power, on any 
+utilitarian theory of nature!  And once more, why are those strange 
+microscopic atomies, the Diatomaceae and Infusoria, which fill 
+every stagnant pool; which fringe every branch of sea-weed; which 
+form banks hundreds of miles long on the Arctic sea-floor, and the 
+strata of whole moorlands; which pervade in millions the mass of 
+every iceberg, and float aloft in countless swarms amid the clouds 
+of the volcanic dust; - why are their tiny shells of flint as 
+fantastically various in their quaint mathematical symmetry, as 
+they are countless beyond the wildest dreams of the Poet?  Mystery 
+inexplicable on the conceited notion which, making man forsooth the 
+centre of the universe, dares to believe that this variety of forms 
+has existed for countless ages in abysmal sea-depths and untrodden 
+forests, only that some few individuals of the Western races might, 
+in these latter days, at last discover and admire a corner here and 
+there of the boundless realms of beauty.  Inexplicable, truly, if 
+man be the centre and the object of their existence; explicable 
+enough to him who believes that God has created all things for 
+Himself, and rejoices in His own handiwork, and that the material 
+universe is, as the wise man says, "A platform whereon His Eternal 
+Spirit sports and makes melody."  Of all the blessings which the 
+study of nature brings to the patient observer, let none, perhaps, 
+be classed higher than this:  that the further he enters into those 
+fairy gardens of life and birth, which Spenser saw and described in 
+his great poem, the more he learns the awful and yet most 
+comfortable truth, that they do not belong to him, but to One 
+greater, wiser, lovelier than he; and as he stands, silent with 
+awe, amid the pomp of Nature's ever-busy rest, hears, as of old, 
+"The Word of the Lord God walking among the trees of the garden in 
+the cool of the day."
+
+One sight more, and we have done.  I had something to say, had time 
+permitted, on the ludicrous element which appears here and there in 
+nature.  There are animals, like monkeys and crabs, which seem made 
+to be laughed at; by those at least who possess that most 
+indefinable of faculties, the sense of the ridiculous.  As long as 
+man possesses muscles especially formed to enable him to laugh, we 
+have no right to suppose (with some) that laughter is an accident 
+of our fallen nature; or to find (with others) the primary cause of 
+the ridiculous in the perception of unfitness or disharmony.  And 
+yet we shrink (whether rightly or wrongly, we can hardly tell) from 
+attributing a sense of the ludicrous to the Creator of these forms.  
+It may be a weakness on my part; at least I will hope it is a 
+reverent one:  but till we can find something corresponding to what 
+we conceive of the Divine Mind in any class of phenomena, it is 
+perhaps better not to talk about them at all, but observe a stoic 
+"epoche," waiting for more light, and yet confessing that our own 
+laughter is uncontrollable, and therefore we hope not unworthy of 
+us, at many a strange creature and strange doing which we meet, 
+from the highest ape to the lowest polype.
+
+But, in the meanwhile, there are animals in which results so 
+strange, fantastic, even seemingly horrible, are produced, that 
+fallen man may be pardoned, if he shrinks from them in disgust.  
+That, at least, must be a consequence of our own wrong state; for 
+everything is beautiful and perfect in its place.  It may be 
+answered, "Yes, in its place; but its place is not yours.  You had 
+no business to look at it, and must pay the penalty for 
+intermeddling."  I doubt that answer; for surely, if man have 
+liberty to do anything, he has liberty to search out freely his 
+heavenly Father's works; and yet every one seems to have his 
+antipathic animal; and I know one bred from his childhood to 
+zoology by land and sea, and bold in asserting, and honest in 
+feeling, that all without exception is beautiful, who yet cannot, 
+after handling and petting and admiring all day long every uncouth 
+and venomous beast, avoid a paroxysm of horror at the sight of the 
+common house-spider.  At all events, whether we were intruding or 
+not, in turning this stone, we must pay a fine for having done so; 
+for there lies an animal as foul and monstrous to the eye as 
+"hydra, gorgon, or chimaera dire," and yet so wondrously fitted to 
+its work, that we must needs endure for our own instruction to 
+handle and to look at it.  Its name, if you wish for it, is 
+Nemertes; probably N. Borlasii; (18) a worm of very "low" 
+organization, though well fitted enough for its own work.  You see 
+it?  That black, shiny, knotted lump among the gravel, small enough 
+to be taken up in a dessert spoon.  Look now, as it is raised and 
+its coils drawn out.  Three feet - six - nine, at least:  with a 
+capability of seemingly endless expansion; a slimy tape of living 
+caoutchouc, some eighth of an inch in diameter, a dark chocolate-
+black, with paler longitudinal lines.  Is it alive?  It hangs, 
+helpless and motionless, a mere velvet string across the hand.  Ask 
+the neighbouring Annelids and the fry of the rock fishes, or put it 
+into a vase at home, and see.  It lies motionless, trailing itself 
+among the gravel; you cannot tell where it begins or ends; it may 
+be a dead strip of sea-weed, Himanthalia lorea, perhaps, or Chorda 
+filum; or even a tarred string.  So thinks the little fish who 
+plays over and over it, till he touches at last what is too surely 
+a head.  In an instant a bell-shaped sucker mouth has fastened to 
+his side.  In another instant, from one lip, a concave double 
+proboscis, just like a tapir's (another instance of the repetition 
+of forms), has clasped him like a finger; and now begins the 
+struggle:  but in vain.  He is being "played" with such a fishing-
+line as the skill of a Wilson or a Stoddart never could invent; a 
+living line, with elasticity beyond that of the most delicate fly-
+rod, which follows every lunge, shortening and lengthening, 
+slipping and twining round every piece of gravel and stem of sea-
+weed, with a tiring drag such as no Highland wrist or step could 
+ever bring to bear on salmon or on trout.  The victim is tired now; 
+and slowly, and yet dexterously, his blind assailant is feeling and 
+shifting along his side, till he reaches one end of him; and then 
+the black lips expand, and slowly and surely the curved finger 
+begins packing him end-foremost down into the gullet, where he 
+sinks, inch by inch, till the swelling which marks his place is 
+lost among the coils, and he is probably macerated to a pulp long 
+before he has reached the opposite extremity of his cave of doom.  
+Once safe down, the black murderer slowly contracts again into a 
+knotted heap, and lies, like a boa with a stag inside him, 
+motionless and blest. (19)
+
+There; we must come away now, for the tide is over our ankles; but 
+touch, before you go, one of those little red mouths which peep out 
+of the stone.  A tiny jet of water shoots up almost into your face.
+
+The bivalve (20) who has burrowed into the limestone knot (the 
+softest part of the stone to his jaws, though the hardest to your 
+chisel) is scandalized at having the soft mouths of his siphons so 
+rudely touched, and taking your finger for some bothering Annelid, 
+who wants to nibble him, is defending himself; shooting you, as 
+naturalists do humming-birds, with water.  Let him rest in peace; 
+it will cost you ten minutes' hard work, and much dirt, to extract 
+him; but if you are fond of shells, secure one or two of those 
+beautiful pink and straw-coloured scallops (Hinnites pusio, Plate 
+X. fig. 1), who have gradually incorporated the layers of their 
+lower valve with the roughnesses of the stone, destroying thereby 
+the beautiful form which belongs to their race, but not their 
+delicate colour.  There are a few more bivalves too, adhering to 
+the stone, and those rare ones, and two or three delicate Mangeliae 
+and Nassae (21) are trailing their graceful spires up and down in 
+search of food.  That little bright red and yellow pea, too, touch 
+it - the brilliant coloured cloak is withdrawn, and, instead, you 
+have a beautiful ribbed pink cowry, (22) our only European 
+representative of that grand tropical family.  Cast one wondering 
+glance, too, at the forest of zoophytes and corals, Lepraliae and 
+Flustrae, and those quaint blue stars, set in brown jelly, which 
+are no zoophytes, but respectable molluscs, each with his well-
+formed mouth and intestines, (23) but combined in a peculiar form 
+of Communism, of which all one can say is, that one hopes they like 
+it; and that, at all events, they agree better than the heroes and 
+heroines of Mr. Hawthorne's "Blithedale Romance."
+
+Now away, and as a specimen of the fertility of the water-world, 
+look at this rough list of species, (24) the greater part of which 
+are on this very stone, and all of which you might obtain in an 
+hour, would the rude tide wait for zoologists:  and remember that 
+the number of individuals of each species of polype must be counted 
+by tens of thousands; and also, that, by searching the forest of 
+sea-weeds which covers the upper surface, we should probably obtain 
+some twenty minute species more.
+
+A goodly catalogue this, surely, of the inhabitants of three or 
+four large stones; and yet how small a specimen of the 
+multitudinous nations of the sea!
+
+From the bare rocks above high-water mark, down to abysses deeper 
+than ever plummet sounded, is life, everywhere life; fauna after 
+fauna, and flora after flora, arranged in zones, according to the 
+amount of light and warmth which each species requires, and to the 
+amount of pressure which they are able to endure.  The crevices of 
+the highest rocks, only sprinkled with salt spray in spring-tides 
+and high gales, have their peculiar little univalves, their crisp 
+lichen-like sea-weed, in myriads; lower down, the region of the 
+Fuci (bladder-weeds) has its own tribes of periwinkles and limpets; 
+below again, about the neap-tide mark, the region of the corallines 
+and Algae 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 Laminariae (the great tangles and ore-weeds) is 
+most full of all of every imaginable form of life.  So that as we 
+descend the rocks, we may compare ourselves (likening small things 
+to great) to those who, descending the Andes, pass in a single day 
+from the vegetation of the Arctic zone to that of the Tropics.  And 
+here and there, even at half-tide level, deep rock-basins, shaded 
+from the sun and always full of water, keep up in a higher zone the 
+vegetation of a lower one, and afford in nature an analogy to those 
+deep "barrancos" which split the high table-land of Mexico, down 
+whose awful cliffs, swept by cool sea-breezes, the traveller looks 
+from among the plants and animals of the temperate zone, and sees 
+far below, dim through their everlasting vapour-bath of rank hot 
+steam, the mighty forms and gorgeous colours of a tropic forest.
+
+"I do not wonder," says Mr. Gosse, in his charming "Naturalist's 
+Rambles on the Devonshire Coast" (p. 187), "that when Southey had 
+an opportunity of seeing some of those beautiful quiet basins 
+hollowed in the living rock, and stocked with elegant plants and 
+animals, having all the charm of novelty to his eye, they should 
+have moved his poetic fancy, and found more than one place in the 
+gorgeous imagery of his Oriental romances.  Just listen to him
+
+
+"It was a garden still beyond all price,
+Even yet it was a place of paradise;
+And here were coral bowers,
+And grots of madrepores,
+And banks of sponge, as soft and fair to eye
+As e'er was mossy bed
+Whereon the wood-nymphs lie
+With languid limbs in summer's sultry hours.
+Here, too, were living flowers,
+Which, like a bud compacted,
+Their purple cups contracted;
+And now in open blossom spread,
+Stretch'd, like green anthers, many a seeking head.
+And arborets of jointed stone were there,
+And plants of fibres fine as silkworm's thread;
+Yea, beautiful as mermaid's golden hair
+Upon the waves dispread.
+Others that, like the broad banana growing,
+Raised their long wrinkled leaves of purple hue,
+Like streamers wide outflowing.' - KEHAMA, xvi. 5.
+
+
+"A hundred times you might fancy you saw the type, the very 
+original of this description, tracing, line by line, and image by 
+image, the details of the picture; and acknowledging, as you 
+proceed, the minute truthfulness with which it has been drawn.  For 
+such is the loveliness of nature in these secluded reservoirs, that 
+the accomplished poet, when depicting the gorgeous scenes of 
+Eastern mythology - scenes the wildest and most extravagant that 
+imagination could paint - drew not upon the resources of his 
+prolific fancy for imagery here, but was well content to jot down 
+the simple lineaments of Nature as he saw her in plain, homely 
+England.
+
+"It is a beautiful and fascinating sight for those who have never 
+seen it before, to see the little shrubberies of pink coralline - 
+'the arborets of jointed stone' - that fringe those pretty pools.  
+It is a charming sight to see the crimson banana-like leaves of the 
+Delesseria waving in their darkest corners; and the purple fibrous 
+tufts of Polysiphonia and Ceramia, 'fine as silkworm's thread.'  
+But there are many others which give variety and impart beauty to 
+these tide-pools.  The broad leaves of the Ulva, finer than the 
+finest cambric, and of the brightest emerald-green, adorn the 
+hollows at the highest level, while, at the lowest, wave tiny 
+forests of the feathery Ptilota and Dasya, and large leaves, cut 
+into fringes and furbelows, of rosy Rhodymeniae.  All these are 
+lovely to behold; but I think I admire as much as any of them, one 
+of the commonest of our marine plants, Chondrus crispus.  It occurs 
+in the greatest profusion on this coast, in every pool between 
+tide-marks; and everywhere - except in those of the highest level, 
+where constant exposure to light dwarfs the plant, and turns it of 
+a dull umber-brown tint - it is elegant in form and brilliant in 
+colour.  The expanding fan-shaped fronds, cut into segments, cut, 
+and cut again, make fine bushy tufts in a deep pool, and every 
+segment of every frond reflects a flush of the most lustrous azure, 
+like that of a tempered sword-blade." - GOSSE'S DEVONSHIRE COAST, 
+pp. 187-189.
+
+And the sea-bottom, also, has its zones, at different depths, and 
+its peculiar forms in peculiar spots, affected by the currents and 
+the nature of the ground, the riches of which have to be seen, 
+alas! rather by the imagination than the eye; for such spoonfuls of 
+the treasure as the dredge brings up to us, come too often rolled 
+and battered, torn from their sites and contracted by fear, mere 
+hints to us of what the populous reality below is like.  Often, 
+standing on the shore at low tide, has one longed to walk on and in 
+under the waves, as the water-ousel does in the pools of the 
+mountain burn, and see it all but for a moment; and a solemn beauty 
+and meaning has invested the old Greek fable of Glaucus the 
+fisherman:  how eating of the herb which gave his fish strength to 
+leap back into their native element, he was seized on the spot with 
+a strange longing to follow them under the waves, and became for 
+ever a companion of the fair semi-human forms with which the 
+Hellenic poets peopled their sunny bays and firths, feeding "silent 
+flocks" far below on the green Zostera beds, or basking with them 
+on the sunny ledges in the summer noon, or wandering in the still 
+bays on sultry nights amid the choir of Amphitrite and her sea-
+nymphs:-
+
+
+"Joining the bliss of the gods, as they waken the coves with their 
+laughter,"
+
+
+in nightly revels, whereof one has sung, -
+
+
+"So they came up in their joy; and before them the roll of the 
+surges
+Sank, as the breezes sank dead, into smooth green foam-flecked 
+marble
+Awed; and the crags of the cliffs, and the pines of the mountains, 
+were silent.
+So they came up in their joy, and around them the lamps of the sea-
+nymphs,
+Myriad fiery globes, swam heaving and panting, and rainbows,
+Crimson, and azure, and emerald, were broken in star-showers, 
+lighting,
+Far in the wine-dark depths of the crystal, the gardens of Nereus,
+Coral, and sea-fan, and tangle, the blooms and the palms of the 
+ocean.
+So they went on in their joy, more white than the foam which they 
+scattered,
+Laughing and singing and tossing and twining; while, eager, the 
+Tritons
+Blinded with kisses their eyes, unreproved, and above them in 
+worship
+Fluttered the terns, and the sea-gulls swept past them on silvery 
+pinions,
+Echoing softly their laughter; around them the wantoning dolphins
+Sighed as they plunged, full of love; and the great sea-horses 
+which bore them
+Curved up their crests in their pride to the delicate arms of their 
+riders,
+Pawing the spray into gems, till a fiery rainfall, unharming,
+Sparkled and gleamed on the limbs of the maids, and the coils of 
+the mermen.
+So they went on in their joy, bathed round with the fiery coolness,
+Needing nor sun nor moon, self-lighted, immortal:  but others,
+Pitiful, floated in silence apart; on their knees lay the sea-boys
+Whelmed by the roll of the surge, swept down by the anger of 
+Nereus;
+Hapless, whom never again upon quay or strand shall their mothers
+Welcome with garlands and vows to the temples; but, wearily pining,
+Gaze over island and main for the sails which return not; they, 
+heedless,
+Sleep in soft bosoms for ever, and dream of the surge and the sea-
+maids.
+So they passed by in their joy, like a dream, on the murmuring 
+ripple."
+
+
+Such a rhapsody may be somewhat out of order, even in a popular 
+scientific book; and yet one cannot help at moments envying the old 
+Greek imagination, which could inform the soulless sea-world with a 
+human life and beauty.  For, after all, star-fishes and sea-
+anemones are dull substitutes for Sirens and Tritons; the lamps of 
+the sea-nymphs, those glorious phosphorescent medusae whose beauty 
+Mr. Gosse sets forth so well with pen and pencil, are not as 
+attractive as the sea-nymphs themselves would be; and who would 
+not, like Menelaus, take the grey old man of the sea himself asleep 
+upon the rocks, rather than one of his seal-herd, probably too with 
+the same result as the world-famous combat in the Antiquary, 
+between Hector and Phoca?  And yet - is there no human interest in 
+these pursuits, more humanity and more divine, than there would be 
+even in those Triton and Nereid dreams, if realized to sight and 
+sense?  Heaven forbid that those should say so, whose wanderings 
+among rock and pool have been mixed up with holiest passages of 
+friendship and of love, and the intercommunion of equal minds and 
+sympathetic hearts, and the laugh of children drinking in health 
+from every breeze and instruction at every step, running ever and 
+anon with proud delight to add their little treasure to their 
+parents' stock, and of happy friendly evenings spent over the 
+microscope and the vase, in examining, arranging, preserving, 
+noting down in the diary the wonders and the labours of the happy, 
+busy day.  No; such short glimpses of the water-world as our 
+present appliances afford us are full enough of pleasure; and we 
+will not envy Glaucus:  we will not even be over-anxious for the 
+success of his only modern imitator, the French naturalist who is 
+reported to have fitted himself with a waterproof dress and 
+breathing apparatus, in order to walk the bottom of the 
+Mediterranean, and see for himself how the world goes on at the 
+fifty-fathom line:  we will be content with the wonders of the 
+shore and of the sea-floor, as far as the dredge will discover them 
+to us.  We shall even thus find enough to occupy (if we choose) our 
+lifetime.  For we must recollect that this hasty sketch has hardly 
+touched on that vegetable water-world, which is as wonderful and as 
+various as the animal one.  A hint or two of the beauty of the sea-
+weeds has been given; but space has allowed no more.  Yet we might 
+have spent our time with almost as much interest and profit, had we 
+neglected utterly the animals which we have found, and devoted our 
+attention exclusively to the flora of the rocks.  Sea-weeds are no 
+mere playthings for children; and to buy at a shop some thirty 
+pretty kinds, pasted on paper, with long names (probably mis-spelt) 
+written under each, is not by any means to possess a collection of 
+them.  Putting aside the number and the obscurity of their species, 
+the questions which arise in studying their growth, reproduction, 
+and organic chemistry are of the very deepest and most important in 
+the whole range of science; and it will need but a little study of 
+such a book as Harvey's "Algae," to show the wise man that he who 
+has comprehended (which no man yet does) the mystery of a single 
+spore or tissue-cell, has reached depths in the great "Science of 
+Life" at which an Owen would still confess himself "blind by excess 
+of light."  "Knowest thou how the bones grow in the womb?" asks the 
+Jewish sage, sadly, half self-reprovingly, as he discovers that man 
+is not the measure of all things, and that in much learning may be 
+vanity and vexation of spirit, and in much study a weariness of the 
+flesh; and all our deeper physical science only brings the same 
+question more awfully near.  "Vilior alg�," more worthless than the 
+very sea-weed, says the old Roman:  and yet no torn scrap of that 
+very sea-weed, which to-morrow may manure the nearest garden, but 
+says to us, "Proud man! talking of spores and vesicles, if thou 
+darest for a moment to fancy that to have seen spores and vesicles 
+is to have seen me, or to know what I am, answer this.  Knowest 
+thou how the bones do grow in the womb?  Knowest thou even how one 
+of these tiny black dots, which thou callest spores, grow on my 
+fronds?"  And to that question what answer shall we make?  We see 
+tissues divide, cells develop, processes go on - but How and Why?  
+These are but phenomena; but what are phenomena save effects?  
+Causes, it may be, of other effects; but still effects of other 
+causes.  And why does the cause cause that effect?  Why should it 
+not cause something else?  Why should it cause anything at all?  
+Because it obeys a law.  But why does it obey the law? and how does 
+it obey the law?  And, after all, what is a law?  A mere custom of 
+Nature.  We see the same phenomenon happen a great many times; and 
+we infer from thence that it has a custom of happening; and 
+therefore we call it a law:  but we have not seen the law; all we 
+have seen is the phenomenon which we suppose to indicate the law.  
+We have seen things fall:  but we never saw a little flying thing 
+pulling them down, with "gravitation" labelled on its back; and the 
+question, why things fall, and HOW, is just where it was before 
+Newton was born, and is likely to remain there.  All we can say is, 
+that Nature has her customs, and that other customs ensue, when 
+those customs appear:  but that as to what connects cause and 
+effect, as to what is the reason, the final cause, or even the 
+CAUSA CAUSANS, of any phenomenon, we know not more but less than 
+ever; for those laws or customs which seem to us simplest 
+("endosmose," for instance, or "gravitation"), are just the most 
+inexplicable, logically unexpected, seemingly arbitrary, certainly 
+supernatural - miraculous, if you will; for no natural and physical 
+cause whatsoever can be assigned for them; while if anyone shall 
+argue against their being miraculous and supernatural on the ground 
+of their being so common, I can only answer, that of all absurd and 
+illogical arguments, this is the most so.  For what has the number 
+of times which the miracle occurs to do with the question, save to 
+increase the wonder?  Which is more strange, that an inexplicable 
+and unfathomable thing should occur once and for all, or that it 
+should occur a million times every day all the world over?
+
+Let those, however, who are too proud to wonder, do as seems good 
+to them.  Their want of wonder will not help them toward the 
+required explanation:  and to them, as to us, as soon as we begin 
+asking, "HOW?" and "WHY?" the mighty Mother will only reply with 
+that magnificent smile of hers, most genial, but most silent, which 
+she has worn since the foundation of all worlds; that silent smile 
+which has tempted many a man to suspect her of irony, even of 
+deceit and hatred of the human race; the silent smile which Solomon 
+felt, and answered in "Ecclesiastes;" which Goethe felt, and did 
+not answer in his "Faust;" which Pascal felt, and tried to answer 
+in his "Thoughts," and fled from into self-torture and 
+superstition, terrified beyond his powers of endurance, as he found 
+out the true meaning of St. John's vision, and felt himself really 
+standing on that fragile and slippery "sea of glass," and close 
+beneath him the bottomless abyss of doubt, and the nether fires of 
+moral retribution.  He fled from Nature's silent smile, as that 
+poor old King Edward (mis-called the Confessor) fled from her hymns 
+of praise, in the old legend of Havering-atte-bower, when he cursed 
+the nightingales because their songs confused him in his prayers:  
+but the wise man need copy neither, and fear neither the silence 
+nor the laughter of the mighty mother Earth, if he will be but 
+wise, and hear her tell him, alike in both - "Why call me mother?  
+Why ask me for knowledge which I cannot teach, peace which I cannot 
+give or take away?  I am only your foster-mother and your nurse - 
+and I have not been an unkindly one.  But you are God's children, 
+and not mine.  Ask Him.  I can amuse you with my songs; but they 
+are but a nurse's lullaby to the weary flesh.  I can awe you with 
+my silence; but my silence is only my just humility, and your gain.  
+How dare I pretend to tell you secrets which He who made me knows 
+alone?  I am but inanimate matter; why ask of me things which 
+belong to living spirit?  In God I live and move, and have my 
+being; I know not how, any more than you know.  Who will tell you 
+what life is, save He who is the Lord of life?  And if He will not 
+tell you, be sure it is because you need not to know.  At least, 
+why seek God in nature, the living among the dead?  He is not here:  
+He is risen."
+
+He is not here:  He is risen.  Good reader, you will probably agree 
+that to know that saying, is to know the key-note of the world to 
+come.  Believe me, to know it, and all it means, is to know the 
+keynote of this world also, from the fall of dynasties and the fate 
+of nations, to the sea-weed which rots upon the beach.
+
+It may seem startling, possibly (though I hope not, for my readers' 
+sake, irreverent), to go back at once after such thoughts, be they 
+true or false, to the weeds upon the cliff above our heads.  But He 
+who is not here, but is risen, yet is here, and has appointed them 
+their services in a wonderful order; and I wish that on some day, 
+or on many days, when a quiet sea and offshore breezes have 
+prevented any new objects from coming to land with the rising tide, 
+you would investigate the flowers peculiar to our sea-rocks and 
+sandhills.  Even if you do not find the delicate lily-like 
+Trichonema of the Channel Islands and Dawlish, or the almost as 
+beautiful Squill of the Cornish cliffs, or the sea-lavender of 
+North Devon, or any of those rare Mediterranean species which Mr. 
+Johns has so charmingly described in his "Week at the Lizard 
+Point," yet an average cliff, with its carpeting of pink thrift and 
+of bladder catchfly, and Lady's finger, and elegant grasses, most 
+of them peculiar to the sea marge, is often a very lovely flower-
+bed.
+
+Not merely interesting, too, but brilliant in their vegetation are 
+sandhills; and the seemingly desolate dykes and banks of salt 
+marshes will yield many a curious plant, which you may neglect if 
+you will:  but lay to your account the having to repent your 
+neglect hereafter, when, finding out too late what a pleasant study 
+botany is, you search in vain for curious forms over which you trod 
+every day in crossing flats which seemed to you utterly ugly and 
+uninteresting, but which the good God was watching as carefully as 
+He did the pleasant hills inland:  perhaps even more carefully; for 
+the uplands He has completed, and handed over to man, that he may 
+dress and keep them:  but the tide-flats below are still 
+unfinished, dry land in the process of creation, to which every 
+tide is adding the elements of fertility, which shall grow food, 
+perhaps in some future state of our planet, for generations yet 
+unborn.
+
+But to return to the water-world, and to dredging; which of all 
+sea-side pursuits is perhaps the most pleasant, combining as it 
+does fine weather sailing with the discovery of new objects, to 
+which, after all, the waifs and strays of the beach, whether 
+"flotsom jetsom, or lagand," as the old Admiralty laws define them, 
+are few and poor.  I say particularly fine weather sailing; for a 
+swell, which makes the dredge leap along the bottom, instead of 
+scraping steadily, is as fatal to sport as it is to some people's 
+comfort.  But dredging, if you use a pleasure boat and the small 
+naturalist's dredge, is an amusement in which ladies, if they will, 
+may share, and which will increase, and not interfere with, the 
+amusements of a water-party.
+
+The naturalist's dredge, of which Mr. Gosse's "Aquarium" gives a 
+detailed account, should differ from the common oyster dredge in 
+being smaller; certainly not more than four feet across the mouth; 
+and instead of having but one iron scraping-lip like the oyster 
+dredge, it should have two, one above and one below, so that it 
+will work equally well on whichsoever side it falls, or how often 
+soever it may be turned over by rough ground.  The bag-net should 
+be of strong spunyarn, or (still better) of hide "such as those 
+hides of the wild cattle of the Pampas, which the tobacconists 
+receive from South America," cut into thongs, and netted close.  It 
+should be loosely laced together with a thong at the tail edge in 
+order to be opened easily, when brought on board, without canting 
+the net over, and pouring the contents roughly out through the 
+mouth.  The dragging-rope should be strong, and at least three 
+times as long as the perpendicular depth of the water in which you 
+are working; if, indeed, there is much breeze, or any swell at all, 
+still more line should be veered out.  The inboard end should be 
+made fast somewhere in the stern sheets, the dredge hove to 
+windward, the boat put before the wind; and you may then amuse 
+yourself as you will for the next quarter of an hour, provided that 
+you have got ready various wide-mouthed bottles for the more 
+delicate monsters, and a couple of buckets, to receive the large 
+lumps of oysters and serpulae which you will probably bring to the 
+surface.
+
+As for a dredging ground, one may be found, I suppose, off every 
+watering-place.  The most fertile spots are in rough ground, in not 
+less than five fathoms water.  The deeper the water, the rarer and 
+more interesting will the animals generally be:  but a greater 
+depth than fifteen fathoms is not easily reached on this side of 
+Plymouth; and, on the whole, the beginner will find enough in seven 
+or eight fathoms to stock an aquarium rivalling any of those in the 
+"Tank-house" at the Zoological Gardens.
+
+In general, the south coast of England, to the eastward of 
+Portland, affords bad dredging ground.  The friable cliffs, of 
+comparatively recent formations, keep the sea shallow, and the 
+bottom smooth and bare, by the vast deposits of sand and gravel.  
+Yet round the Isle of Wight, especially at the back of the Needles, 
+there ought to be fertile spots; and Weymouth, according to Mr. 
+Gosse and other well-known naturalists, is a very garden of Nereus.  
+Torbay, as may well be supposed, is an admirable dredging spot; 
+perhaps its two best points are round the isolated Thatcher and 
+Oare-rock, and from the mouth of Brixham harbour to Berry Head; 
+along which last line, for perhaps three hundred years, the decks 
+of all Brixham trawlers have been washed down ere running into 
+harbour, and the sea-bottom thus stored with treasures scraped up 
+from deeper water in every direction for miles and miles.
+
+Hastings is, I fear, but a poor spot for dredging.  Its friable 
+cliffs and strong tides produce a changeable and barren sea-floor.  
+Yet the immense quantities of Flustra thrown up after a storm 
+indicate dredging ground at no great distance outside; its rocks, 
+uninteresting as they are compared with our Devonians, have yielded 
+to the industry and science of M. Tumanowicz a vast number of sea-
+weeds and sponges.  Those three curious polypes, Valkeria cuscuta 
+(Plate I. fig. 3), Notamia Bursaria, and Serialaria Lendigera, 
+abound within tide-marks; and as the place is so much visited by 
+Londoners, it may be worth while to give a few hints as to what 
+might be done, by anyone whose curiosity has been excited by the 
+salt-water tanks of the Zoological Gardens and the Crystal Palace.
+
+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) (25) with 
+strange snipe-bills (which they cannot open) and snake-like bodies; 
+small cuttlefish (Sepiolae) of a white jelly mottled with brilliant 
+metallic hues, with a ring of suckered arms round their tiny 
+parrots' beaks, who, put into a jar, will hover and dart in the 
+water, as the skylark does in air, by rapid winnowings of their 
+glassy side-fins, while they watch you with bright lizard-eyes; the 
+whole animal being a combination of the vertebrate and the mollusc, 
+so utterly fantastic and abnormal, that (had not the family been 
+amongst the commonest, from the earliest geological epochs) it 
+would have seemed, to man's deductive intellect, a form almost as 
+impossible as the mermaid, far more impossible than the sea-
+serpent.  These, and perhaps a few handsome sea-slugs and bivalve 
+shells, you will be pretty sure to find:  perhaps a great deal 
+more.
+
+Meanwhile, without dredging, you may find a good deal on the shore.  
+In the spring Doris bilineata comes to the rocks in thousands, to 
+lay its strange white furbelows of spawn upon their overhanging 
+edges.  Eolides of extraordinary beauty haunt the same spots.  The 
+great Eolis papillosa, of a delicate French grey; Eolis pellucida 
+(?) (Plate X. fig. 4), in which each papilla on the back is 
+beautifully coloured with a streak of pink, and tipped with iron 
+blue; and a most fantastical yellow little creature, so covered 
+with plumes and tentacles that the body is invisible, which I 
+believe to be the Idalia aspersa of Alder and Hancock.
+
+At the bottom of the rock pools, behind St. Leonard's baths, may be 
+found hundreds of the snipe's feather Anemone (Sagartia 
+troglodytes), of every line; from the common brown and grey snipe's 
+feather kind, to the white-horned Hesperus, the orange-horned 
+Aurora, and a rich lilac and crimson variety, which does not seem 
+to agree with either the Lilacinia or Rubicunda of Gosse.  A more 
+beautiful living bouquet could hardly be seen, than might be made 
+of the varieties of this single species, from this one place.
+
+On the outside sands between the end of the Marina and the Martello 
+tower, you may find, at very low tides, great numbers of a sand-
+tube, about three inches long, standing up out of the sand.  I do 
+not mean the tubes of the Terebella, so common in all sands, which 
+are somewhat flexible, and have their upper end fringed with a 
+ragged ring of sandy arms:  those I speak of are straight and 
+stiff, and ending in a point upward.  Draw them out of the sand - 
+they will offer some resistance - and put them into a vase of 
+water; you will see the worm inside expand two delicate golden 
+combs, just like old-fashioned back-hair combs, of a metallic 
+lustre, which will astonish you.  With these combs the worm seems 
+to burrow head downward into the sand; but whether he always 
+remains in that attitude I cannot say.  His name is Pectinaria 
+Belgica.  He is an Annelid, or true worm, connected with the 
+Serpulea and 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 central row of tanks at the 
+Zoological Gardens:  great twisted masses of Serpulae, (26) those 
+white tubes of stone, from the mouth of which protrude pairs of 
+rose-coloured or orange fans, flashing in, quick as light, the 
+moment that your finger approaches them or your shadow crosses the 
+water.
+
+You will dredge, too, the twelve-rayed sun-star (Solaster papposa), 
+with his rich scarlet armour; and more strange, and quite as 
+beautiful, the bird's foot star (Palmipes membranaceus), which you 
+may see crawling by its thousand sucking-feet in the Crystal Palace 
+tanks, a pentagonal webbed bird's foot, of scarlet and orange 
+shagreen.  With him, most probably, will be a specimen of the great 
+purple heart-urchin (Spatangus purpureus), clothed in pale lilac 
+horny spines, and other Echinoderms, for which you must consult 
+Forbes's "British Star-fishes:" but perhaps the species among them 
+which will interest you most, will be the common brittle-star 
+(Ophiocoma rosula), of which a hundred or so, I can promise, shall 
+come up at a single haul of the dredge, entwining their long spine-
+clad arms in a seemingly inextricable confusion of "kaleidoscope" 
+patterns (thanks to Mr. Gosse for the one right epithet), purple 
+and azure, fawn, brown, green, grey, white and crimson; as if a 
+whole bed of China-asters should have first come to life, and then 
+gone mad, and fallen to fighting.  But pick out, one by one, 
+specimens from the tangled mass, and you will agree that no China-
+aster is so fair as this living stone-flower of the deep, with its 
+daisy-like disc, and fine long prickly arms, which never cease 
+their graceful serpentine motion, and its colours hardly alike in 
+any two specimens.  Handle them not, meanwhile, too roughly, lest, 
+whether modesty or in anger, they begin a desperate course of 
+gradual suicide, and, breaking off arm after arm piecemeal, fling 
+them indignantly at their tormentor.  Along with these you will 
+certainly obtain a few of that fine bivalve, the great Scallop, 
+which you have seen lying on every fishmonger's counter in 
+Hastings.  Of these you must pick out those which seem dirtiest and 
+most overgrown with parasites, and place them carefully in a jar of 
+salt water, where they may not be rubbed; for they are worth your 
+examination, not merely for the sake of that ring of gem-like eyes 
+which borders their "cloak," lying along the extreme out edge of 
+the shell as the valves are half open, but for the sake of the 
+parasites outside:  corallines of exquisite delicacy, Plumulariae 
+and Sertulariae, dead men's hands (Alcyonia), lumps of white or 
+orange jelly, which will protrude a thousand star-like polypes, and 
+the Tubularia indivisa, twisted tubes of fine straw, which ought 
+already to have puzzled you; for you may pick them up in 
+considerable masses on the Hastings beach after a south-west gale, 
+and think long over them before you determine whether the oat-like 
+stems and spongy roots belong to an animal, or a vegetable.  
+Animals they are, nevertheless, though even now you will hardly 
+guess the fact, when you see at the mouth of each tube a little 
+scarlet flower, connected with the pink pulp which fills the tube.  
+For a further description of this largest and handsomest of our 
+Hydroid Polypes, I must refer you to Johnston, or, failing him, to 
+Landsborough; and go on, to beg you not to despise those pink, or 
+grey, or white lumps of jelly, which will expand in salt water into 
+exquisite sea-anemones, of quite different forms from any which we 
+have found along the rocks.  One of them will certainly be the 
+Dianthus, (27) which will open into a furbelowed flower, furred 
+with innumerable delicate tentacula; and in the centre a mouth of 
+the most delicate orange, the size of the whole animal being 
+perhaps eight inches high and five across.  Perhaps it will be of a 
+satiny grey, perhaps pale rose, perhaps pure white; whatever its 
+colour, it is the very maiden queen of all the beautiful tribe, and 
+one of the loveliest gems with which it has pleased God to bedeck 
+this lower world.
+
+These and much more you will find on the scallops, or even more 
+plentifully on any lump of ancient oysters; and if you do not 
+dredge, it would be well worth your while to make interest with the 
+fish-monger for a few oyster lumps, put into water the moment they 
+are taken out of the trawl.  Divide them carefully, clear out the 
+oysters with a knife, and put the shells into your aquarium, and 
+you will find that an oyster at home is a very different thing from 
+an oyster on a stall.
+
+You ought, besides, to dredge many handsome species of shells, 
+which you would never pick up along the beach; and if you are 
+conchologizing in earnest, you must not forget to bring home a tin 
+box of shell sand, to be washed and picked over in a dish at your 
+leisure, or forget either to wash through a fine sieve, over the 
+boat's side, any sludge and ooze which the dredge brings up.  Many 
+- I may say, hundreds - rare and new shells are found in this way, 
+and in no other.
+
+But if you cannot afford the expense of your own dredge and boat, 
+and the time and trouble necessary to follow the occupation 
+scientifically, yet every trawler and oyster-boat will afford you a 
+tolerable satisfaction.  Go on board one of these; and while the 
+trawl is down, spend a pleasant hour or two in talking with the 
+simple, honest, sturdy fellows who work it, from whom (if you are 
+as fortunate as I have been for many a year past) you may get many 
+a moving story of danger and sorrow, as well as many a shrewd 
+practical maxim, and often, too, a living recognition of God, and 
+the providence of God, which will send you home, perhaps, a wiser 
+and more genial man.  And when the trawl is hauled, wait till the 
+fish are counted out, and packed away, and then kneel down and 
+inspect (in a pair of Mackintosh leggings, and your oldest coat) 
+the crawling heap of shells and zoophytes which remains behind 
+about the decks, and you will find, if a landsman, enough to occupy 
+you for a week to come.  Nay, even if it be too calm for trawling, 
+condescend to go out in a dingy, and help to haul some honest 
+fellow's deep-sea lines and lobster-pots, and you will find more 
+and stranger things about them than even fish or lobsters:  though 
+they, to him who has eyes to see, are strange enough.
+
+I speak from experience; for it was not so very long ago that, in 
+the north of Devon, I found sermons, not indeed in stones, but in a 
+creature reputed among the most worthless of sea-vermin.  I had 
+been lounging about all the morning on the little pier, waiting, 
+with the rest of the village, for a trawling breeze which would not 
+come.  Two o'clock was past, and still the red mainsails of the 
+skiffs hung motionless, and their images quivered head downwards in 
+the glassy swell,
+
+
+"As idle as a painted ship
+Upon a painted ocean."
+
+
+It was neap-tide, too, and therefore nothing could be done among 
+the rocks.  So, in despair, finding an old coast-guard friend 
+starting for his lobster-pots, I determined to save the old man's 
+arms, by rowing him up the shore; and then paddled homeward again, 
+under the high green northern wall, five hundred feet of cliff 
+furred to the water's edge with rich oak woods, against whose base 
+the smooth Atlantic swell died whispering, as if curling itself up 
+to sleep at last within that sheltered nook, tired with its weary 
+wanderings.  The sun sank lower and lower behind the deer-park 
+point; the white stair of houses up the glen was wrapped every 
+moment deeper and deeper in hazy smoke and shade, as the light 
+faded; the evening fires were lighted one by one; the soft murmur 
+of the waterfall, and the pleasant laugh of children, and the 
+splash of homeward oars, came clearer and clearer to the ear at 
+every stroke:  and as we rowed on, arose the recollection of many a 
+brave and wise friend, whose lot was cast in no such western 
+paradise, but rather in the infernos of this sinful earth, toiling 
+even then amid the festering alleys of Bermondsey and Bethnal 
+Green, to palliate death and misery which they had vainly laboured 
+to prevent, watching the strides of that very cholera which they 
+had been striving for years to ward off, now re-admitted in spite 
+of all their warnings, by the carelessness, and laziness, and greed 
+of sinful man.  And as I thought over the whole hapless question of 
+sanitary reform, proved long since a moral duty to God and man, 
+possible, easy, even pecuniarily profitable, and yet left undone, 
+there seemed a sublime irony, most humbling to man, in some of 
+Nature's processes, and in the silent and unobtrusive perfection 
+with which she has been taught to anticipate, since the foundation 
+of the world, some of the loftiest discoveries of modern science, 
+of which we are too apt to boast as if we had created the method by 
+discovering its possibility.  Created it?  Alas for the pride of 
+human genius, and the autotheism which would make man the measure 
+of all things, and the centre of the universe!  All the invaluable 
+laws and methods of sanitary reform at best are but clumsy 
+imitations of the unseen wonders which every animalcule and leaf 
+have been working since the world's foundation; with this slight 
+difference between them and us, that they fulfil their appointed 
+task, and we do not.
+
+The sickly geranium which spreads its blanched leaves against the 
+cellar panes, and peers up, as if imploringly, to the narrow slip 
+of sunlight at the top of the narrow alley, had it a voice, could 
+tell more truly than ever a doctor in the town, why little Bessy 
+sickened of the scarlatina, and little Johnny of the hooping-cough, 
+till the toddling wee things who used to pet and water it were 
+carried off each and all of them one by one to the churchyard 
+sleep, while the father and mother sat at home, trying to supply by 
+gin that very vital energy which fresh air and pure water, and the 
+balmy breath of woods and heaths, were made by God to give; and how 
+the little geranium did its best, like a heaven-sent angel, to 
+right the wrong which man's ignorance had begotten, and drank in, 
+day by day, the poisoned atmosphere, and formed it into fair green 
+leaves, and breathed into the children's faces from every pore, 
+whenever they bent over it, the life-giving oxygen for which their 
+dulled blood and festered lungs were craving in vain; fulfilling 
+God's will itself, though man would not, too careless or too 
+covetous to see, after thousands of years of boasted progress, why 
+God had covered the earth with grass, herb, and tree, a living and 
+life-giving garment of perpetual health and youth.
+
+It is too sad to think long about, lest we become very 
+Heraclituses.  Let us take the other side of the matter with 
+Democritus, try to laugh man out of a little of his boastful 
+ignorance and self-satisfied clumsiness, and tell him, that if the 
+House of Commons would but summon one of the little Paramecia from 
+any Thames' sewer-mouth, to give his evidence before their next 
+Cholera Committee, sanitary blue-books, invaluable as they are, 
+would be superseded for ever and a day; and sanitary reformers 
+would no longer have to confess, that they know of no means of 
+stopping the smells which in past hot summers drove the members out 
+of the House, and the judges out of Westminster Hall.
+
+Nay, in the boat at the minute of which I have been speaking, 
+silent and neglected, sat a fellow-passenger, who was a greater 
+adept at removing nuisances than the whole Board of Health put 
+together; and who had done his work, too, with a cheapness 
+unparalleled; for all his good deeds had not as yet cost the State 
+one penny.  True, he lived by his business; so do other inspectors 
+of nuisances:  but Nature, instead of paying Maia Squinado, 
+Esquire, some five hundred pounds sterling per annum for his 
+labour, had contrived, with a sublime simplicity of economy which 
+Mr. Hume might have envied and admired afar off, to make him do his 
+work gratis, by giving him the nuisances as his perquisites, and 
+teaching him how to eat them.  Certainly (without going the length 
+of the Caribs, who upheld cannibalism because, they said, it made 
+war cheap, and precluded entirely the need of a commissariat), this 
+cardinal virtue of cheapness ought to make Squinado an interesting 
+object in the eyes of the present generation; especially as he was 
+at that moment a true sanitary martyr, having, like many of his 
+human fellow-workers, got into a fearful scrape by meddling with 
+those existing interests, and "vested rights which are but vested 
+wrongs," which have proved fatal already to more than one Board of 
+Health.  For last night, as he was sitting quietly under a stone in 
+four fathoms water, he became aware (whether by sight, smell, or 
+that mysterious sixth sense, to us unknown, which seems to reside 
+in his delicate feelers) of a palpable nuisance somewhere in the 
+neighbourhood; and, like a trusty servant of the public, turned out 
+of his bed instantly and went in search; till he discovered, 
+hanging among what he judged to be the stems of ore-weed 
+(Laminaria), three or four large pieces of stale thornback, of most 
+evil savour, and highly prejudicial to the purity of the sea, and 
+the health of the neighbouring herrings.  Happy Squinado!  He 
+needed not to discover the limits of his authority, to consult any 
+lengthy Nuisances' Removal Act, with its clauses, and counter-
+clauses, and explanations of interpretations, and interpretations 
+of explanations.  Nature, who can afford to be arbitrary, because 
+she is perfect, and to give her servants irresponsible powers, 
+because she has trained them to their work, had bestowed on him and 
+on his forefathers, as general health inspectors, those very 
+summary powers of entrance and removal in the watery realms for 
+which common sense, public opinion, and private philanthropy are 
+still entreating vainly in the terrestrial realms; so finding a 
+hole, in he went, and began to remove the nuisance, without 
+"waiting twenty-four hours," "laying an information," "serving a 
+notice," or any other vain delay.  The evil was there, - and there 
+it should not stay; so having neither cart nor barrow, he just 
+began putting it into his stomach, and in the meanwhile set his 
+assistants to work likewise.  For suppose not, gentle reader, that 
+Squinado went alone; in his train were more than a hundred thousand 
+as good as he, each in his office, and as cheaply paid; who needed 
+no cumbrous baggage train of force-pumps, hose, chloride of lime 
+packets, whitewash, pails or brushes, but were every man his own 
+instrument; and, to save expense of transit, just grew on 
+Squinado's back.  Do you doubt the assertion?  Then lift him up 
+hither, and putting him gently into that shallow jar of salt water, 
+look at him through the hand-magnifier, and see how Nature is 
+maxima in minimis.
+
+There he sits, twiddling his feelers (a substitute, it seems, with 
+crustacea for biting their nails when they are puzzled), and by no 
+means lovely to look on in vulgar eyes; - about the bigness of a 
+man's fist; a round-bodied, spindle-shanked, crusty, prickly, dirty 
+fellow, with a villanous squint, too, in those little bony eyes, 
+which never look for a moment both the same way.  Never mind:  many 
+a man of genius is ungainly enough; and Nature, if you will 
+observe, as if to make up to him for his uncomeliness, has arrayed 
+him as Solomon in all his glory never was arrayed, and so fulfilled 
+one of the proposals of old Fourier - that scavengers, chimney-
+sweeps, and other workers in disgusting employments, should be 
+rewarded for their self-sacrifice in behalf of the public weal by 
+some peculiar badge of honour, or laurel crown.  Not that his 
+crown, like those of the old Greek games, is a mere useless badge; 
+on the contrary, his robe of state is composed of his fellow-
+servants.  His whole back is covered with a little grey forest of 
+branching hairs, fine as a spider's web, each branchlet carrying 
+its little pearly ringed club, each club its rose-coloured polype, 
+like (to quote Mr. Gosse's comparison) the unexpanded birds of the 
+acacia. (28)
+
+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, 
+(29) each of which, too, protrudes its living flower; on another 
+leg is a fresh species, like a little heather-bush of whitest 
+ivory, (30) and every needle leaf a polype cell - let us stop 
+before the imagination grows dizzy with the contemplation of those 
+myriads of beautiful atomies.  And what is their use?  Each living 
+flower, each polype mouth is feeding fast, sweeping into itself, by 
+the perpetual currents caused by the delicate fringes upon its rays 
+(so minute these last, that their motion only betrays their 
+presence), each tiniest atom of decaying matter in the surrounding 
+water, to convert it, by some wondrous alchemy, into fresh cells 
+and buds, and either build up a fresh branch in their thousand-
+tenanted tree, or form an egg-cell, from whence when ripe may 
+issue, not a fixed zoophyte, but a free swimming animal.
+
+And in the meanwhile, among this animal forest grows a vegetable 
+one of delicatest sea-weeds, green and brown and crimson, whose 
+office is, by their everlasting breath, to reoxygenate the impure 
+water, and render it fit once more to be breathed by the higher 
+animals who swim or creep around.
+
+Mystery of mysteries!  Let us jest no more, - Heaven forgive us if 
+we have jested too much on so simple a matter as that poor spider-
+crab, taken out of the lobster-pots, and left to die at the bottom 
+of the boat, because his more aristocratic cousins of the blue and 
+purple armour will not enter the trap while he is within.
+
+I am not aware whether the surmise, that these tiny zoophytes help 
+to purify the water by exhaling oxygen gas, has yet been verified.  
+The infusorial animalcules do so, reversing the functions of animal 
+life, and instead of evolving carbonic acid gas, as other animals 
+do, evolve pure oxygen.  So, at least, says Liebig, who states that 
+he found a small piece of matchwood, just extinguished, burst out 
+again into a flame on being immersed in the bubbles given out by 
+these living atomies.
+
+I myself should be inclined to doubt that this is the case with 
+zoophytes, having found water in which they were growing (unless, 
+of course, sea-weeds were present) to be peculiarly ready to become 
+foul; but it is difficult to say whether this is owing to their 
+deoxygenating the water while alive, like other animals, or to the 
+fact that it is very rare to get a specimen of zoophyte in which a 
+large number of the polypes have not been killed in the transit 
+home, or at least so far knocked about, that (in the Anthozoa, 
+which are far the most abundant) the polype - or rather living 
+mouth, for it is little more - is thrown off to decay, pending the 
+growth of a fresh one in the same cell.
+
+But all the sea-weeds, in common with other vegetables, perform 
+this function continually, and thus maintain the water in which 
+they grow in a state fit to support animal life.
+
+This fact - first advanced by Priestley and Ingenhousz, and though 
+doubted by the great Ellis, satisfactorily ascertained by Professor 
+Daubeny, Mr. Ward, Dr. Johnston, and Mr. Warrington - gives an 
+answer to the question, which I hope has ere now arisen in the 
+minds of some of my readers, -
+
+How is it possible to see these wonders at home?  Beautiful and 
+instructive as they may be, can they be meant for any but dwellers 
+by the sea-side?  Nay more, even to them, must not the glories of 
+the water-world be always more momentary than those of the rainbow, 
+a mere Fata Morgana which breaks up and vanishes before the eyes?  
+If there were but some method of making a miniature sea-world for a 
+few days; much more of keeping one with us when far inland. -
+
+This desideratum has at last been filled up; and science has shown, 
+as usual, that by simply obeying Nature, we may conquer her, even 
+so far as to have our miniature sea, of artificial salt-water, 
+filled with living plants and sea-weeds, maintaining each other in 
+perfect health, and each following, as far as is possible in a 
+confined space, its natural habits.
+
+To Dr. Johnston is due, as far as is known, the honour of the first 
+accomplishment of this as of a hundred other zoological triumphs.  
+As early as 1842, he proved to himself the vegetable nature of the 
+common pink Coralline, which fringes every rock-pool, by keeping it 
+for eight weeks in unchanged salt-water, without any putrefaction 
+ensuing.  The ground, of course, on which the proof rested in this 
+case was, that if the coralline were, as had often been thought, a 
+zoophyte, the water would become corrupt, and poisonous to the life 
+of the small animals in the same jar; and that its remaining fresh 
+argued that the coralline had re-oxygenated it from time to time, 
+and was therefore a vegetable.
+
+In 1850, Mr. Robert Warrington communicated to the Chemical Society 
+the results of a year's experiments, "On the Adjustment of the 
+Relations between the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms, by which the 
+Vital Functions of both are permanently maintained."  The law which 
+his experiments verified was the same as that on which Mr. Ward, in 
+1842, founded his invaluable proposal for increasing the purity of 
+the air in large towns, by planting trees and cultivating flowers 
+in rooms, THAT THE ANIMAL AND VEGETABLE RESPIRATIONS MIGHT 
+COUNTERBALANCE EACH OTHER; the animal's blood being purified by the 
+oxygen given off by the plants, the plants fed by the carbonic acid 
+breathed out by the animals.
+
+On the same principle, Mr. Warrington first kept, for many months, 
+in a vase of unchanged water, two small gold fish and a plant of 
+Vallisneria spiralis; and two years afterwards began a similar 
+experiment with sea-water, weeds, and anemones, which were, at 
+last, as successful as the former ones.  Mr. Gosse had, in the 
+meanwhile, with tolerable success begun a similar method, unaware 
+of what Mr. Warrington had done; and now the beautiful and curious 
+exhibition of fresh and salt water tanks in the Zoological Gardens 
+in London, bids fair to be copied in every similar institution, and 
+we hope in many private houses, throughout the kingdom.
+
+To this subject Mr. Gosse's book, "The Aquarium," is principally 
+devoted, though it contains, besides, sketches of coast scenery, in 
+his usual charming style, and descriptions of rare sea-animals, 
+with wise and goodly reflections thereon.  One great object of 
+interest in the book is the last chapter, which treats fully of the 
+making and stocking these salt-water "Aquaria;" and the various 
+beautifully coloured plates, which are, as it were, sketches from 
+the interior of tanks, are well fitted to excite the desire of all 
+readers to possess such gorgeous living pictures, if as nothing 
+else, still as drawing-room ornaments, flower-gardens which never 
+wither, fairy lakes of perpetual calm which no storm blackens, -
+
+[Greek text which cannot be reproduced]
+
+Those who have never seen one of them can never imagine (and 
+neither Mr. Gosse's pencil nor my clumsy words can ever describe to 
+them) the gorgeous colouring and the grace and delicacy of form 
+which these subaqueous landscapes exhibit.
+
+As for colouring, - the only bit of colour which I can remember 
+even faintly resembling them (for though Correggio's Magdalene may 
+rival them in greens and blues, yet even he has no such crimsons 
+and purples) is the Adoration of the Shepherds, by that "prince of 
+colorists" - Palma Vecchio, which hangs on the left-hand side of 
+Lord Ellesmere's great gallery.  But as for the forms, - where 
+shall we see their like?  Where, amid miniature forests as 
+fantastic as those of the tropics, animals whose shapes outvie the 
+wildest dreams of the old German ghost painters which cover the 
+walls of the galleries of Brussels or Antwerp?  And yet the 
+uncouthest has some quaint beauty of its own, while most - the 
+star-fishes and anemones, for example - are nothing but beauty.  
+The brilliant plates in Mr. Gosse's "Aquarium" give, after all, but 
+a meagre picture of the reality, as it may be seen in the tank-
+house at the Zoological Gardens; and as it may be seen also, by 
+anyone who will follow carefully the directions given at the end of 
+his book, stock a glass vase with such common things as he may find 
+in an hour's search at low tide, and so have an opportunity of 
+seeing how truly Mr. Gosse says, in his valuable preface, that -
+
+"The habits" (and he might well have added, the marvellous beauty) 
+"of animals will never be thoroughly known till they are observed 
+in detail.  Nor is it sufficient to mark them with attention now 
+and then; they must be closely watched, their various actions 
+carefully noted, their behaviour under different circumstances, and 
+especially those movements which seem to us mere vagaries, 
+undirected by any suggestible motive or cause, well examined.  A 
+rich fruit of result, often new and curious and unexpected, will, I 
+am sure, reward anyone who studies living animals in this way.  The 
+most interesting parts, by far, of published Natural History are 
+those minute, but graphic particulars, which have been gathered up 
+by an attentive watching of individual animals."
+
+Mr. Gosse's own books, certainly, give proof enough of this.  We 
+need only direct the reader to his exquisitely humorous account of 
+the ways and works of a captive soldier-crab, (31) to show them how 
+much there is to be seen, and how full Nature is also of that 
+ludicrous element of which we spoke above.  And, indeed, it is in 
+this form of Natural History:  not in mere classification, and the 
+finding out of means, and quarrellings as to the first discovery of 
+that beetle or this buttercup, - too common, alas! among mere 
+closet-collectors, - "endless genealogies," to apply St. Paul's 
+words by no means irreverently or fancifully, "which do but gender 
+strife;" - not in these pedantries is that moral training to be 
+found, for which we have been lauding the study of Natural History:  
+but in healthful walks and voyages out of doors, and in careful and 
+patient watching of the living animals and plants at home, with an 
+observation sharpened by practice, and a temper calmed by the 
+continual practice of the naturalist's first virtues - patience and 
+perseverance.
+
+Practical directions for forming an "Aquarium" may be found in Mr. 
+Gosse's book bearing that name, at pp. 101, 255, ET SEQ.; and those 
+who wish to carry out the notion thoroughly, cannot do better than 
+buy his book, and take their choice of the many different forms of 
+vase, with rockwork, fountains, and other pretty devices which he 
+describes.
+
+But the many, even if they have Mr. Gosse's book, will be rather 
+inclined to begin with a small attempt; especially as they are 
+probably half sceptical of the possibility of keeping sea-animals 
+inland without changing the water.  A few simple directions, 
+therefore, will not come amiss here.  They shall be such as anyone 
+can put into practice, who goes down to stay in a lodging-house at 
+the most cockney of watering-places.
+
+Buy at any glass-shop a cylindrical glass jar, some six inches in 
+diameter and ten high, which will cost you from three to four 
+shillings; wash it clean, and fill it with clean salt-water, dipped 
+out of any pool among the rocks, only looking first to see that 
+there is no dead fish or other evil matter in the said pool, and 
+that no stream from the land runs into it.  If you choose to take 
+the trouble to dip up the water over a boat's side, so much the 
+better.
+
+So much for your vase; now to stock it.
+
+Go down at low spring-tide to the nearest ledge of rocks, and with 
+a hammer and chisel chip off a few pieces of stone covered with 
+growing sea-weed.  Avoid the common and coarser kinds (fuci) which 
+cover the surface of the rocks; for they give out under water a 
+slime which will foul your tank:  but choose the more delicate 
+species which fringe the edges of every pool at low-water mark; the 
+pink coralline, the dark purple ragged dulse (Rhodymenia), the 
+Carrageen moss (Chondrus), and above all, the commonest of all, the 
+delicate green Ulva, which you will see growing everywhere in 
+wrinkled fan-shaped sheets, as thin as the finest silver-paper.  
+The smallest bits of stone are sufficient, provided the sea-weeds 
+have hold of them; for they have no real roots, but adhere by a 
+small disc, deriving no nourishment from the rock, but only from 
+the water.  Take care, meanwhile, that there be as little as 
+possible on the stone, beside the weed itself.  Especially scrape 
+off any small sponges, and see that no worms have made their 
+twining tubes of sand among the weed-stems; if they have, drag them 
+out; for they will surely die, and as surely spoil all by 
+sulphuretted hydrogen, blackness, and evil smells.
+
+Put your weeds into your tank, and settle them at the bottom; which 
+last, some say, should be covered with a layer of pebbles:  but let 
+the beginner leave it as bare as possible; for the pebbles only 
+tempt cross-grained annelids to crawl under them, die, and spoil 
+all by decaying:  whereas if the bottom of the vase is bare, you 
+can see a sickly or dead inhabitant at once, and take him out 
+(which you must do) instantly.  Let your weeds stand quietly in the 
+vase a day or two before you put in any live animals; and even 
+then, do not put any in if the water does not appear perfectly 
+clear:  but lift out the weeds, and renew the water ere you replace 
+them.
+
+This is Mr. Gosse's method.  But Mr. Lloyd, in his "Handbook to the 
+Crystal Palace Aquarium," advises that no weed should be put into 
+the tank.  "It is better," he says, "to depend only on those which 
+gradually and naturally appear on the rocks of the aquarium by the 
+action of light, and which answer every chemical purpose."  I 
+should advise anyone intending to set up an aquarium, however 
+small, to study what Mr. Lloyd says on this matter in pp. 17-19, 
+and also in page 30, of his pamphlet; and also to go to the Crystal 
+Palace Aquarium, and there see for himself the many beautiful 
+species of sea-weeds which have appeared spontaneously in the tanks 
+from unsuspected spores floating in the sea-water.  On the other 
+hand, Mr. Lloyd lays much stress on the necessity of a�rating the 
+water, by keeping it in perpetual motion; a process not easy to be 
+carried out in small aquaria; at least to that perfection which has 
+been attained at the Crystal Palace, where the water is kept in 
+continual circulation by steam-power.  For a jar-aquarium, it will 
+be enough to drive fresh air through the water every day, by means 
+of a syringe.
+
+Now for the live stock.  In the crannies of every rock you will 
+find sea-anemones (Actiniae); and a dozen of these only will be 
+enough to convert your little vase into the most brilliant of 
+living flower-gardens.  There they hang upon the under side of the 
+ledges, apparently mere rounded lumps of jelly:  one is of dark 
+purple dotted with green; another of a rich chocolate; another of a 
+delicate olive; another sienna-yellow; another all but white.  Take 
+them from their rock; you can do it easily by slipping under them 
+your finger-nail, or the edge of a pewter spoon.  Take care to tear 
+the sucking base as little as possible (though a small rent they 
+will darn for themselves in a few days, easily enough, and drop 
+them into a basket of wet sea-weed; when you get home turn them 
+into a dish full of water and leave them for the night, and go to 
+look at them to-morrow.  What a change!  The dull lumps of jelly 
+have taken root and flowered during the night, and your dish is 
+filled from side to side with a bouquet of chrysanthemums; each has 
+expanded into a hundred-petalled flower, crimson, pink, purple, or 
+orange; touch one, and it shrinks together like a sensitive plant, 
+displaying at the root of the petals a ring of brilliant turquoise 
+beads.  That is the commonest of all the 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 brilliant blood-red; another a 
+delicate sea-blue striped with pink; but most have the disc and the 
+innumerable arms striped and ringed with various shades of grey and 
+brown.  Shall we get them?  By all means if we can.  Touch one.  
+Where is he now?  Gone?  Vanished into air, or into stone?  Not 
+quite.  You see that knot of sand and broken shell lying on the 
+rock, where your Dahlia was one moment ago.  Touch it, and you will 
+find it leathery and elastic.  That is all which remains of the 
+live Dahlia.  Never mind; get your finger into the crack under him, 
+work him gently but firmly out, and take him home, and he will be 
+as happy and as gorgeous as ever to-morrow.
+
+Let your Actiniae stand for a day or two in the dish, and then, 
+picking out the liveliest and handsomest, detach them once more 
+from their hold, drop them into your vase, right them with a bit of 
+stick, so that the sucking base is downwards, and leave them to 
+themselves thenceforth.
+
+These two species (Mesembryanthemum and Crassicornis) are quite 
+beautiful enough to give a beginner amusement:  but there are two 
+others which are not uncommon, and of such exceeding loveliness, 
+that it is worth while to take a little trouble to get them.  The 
+one is Dianthus, which I have already mentioned; the other Bellis, 
+the sea-daisy, of which there is an excellent description and 
+plates in Mr. Gosse's "Rambles in Devon," pp. 24 to 32.
+
+It is common at Ilfracombe, and at Torquay; and indeed everywhere 
+where there are cracks and small holes in limestone or slate rock.  
+In these holes it fixes its base, and expands its delicate brown-
+grey star-like flowers on the surface:  but it must be chipped out 
+with hammer and chisel, at the expense of much dirt and patience; 
+for the moment it is touched it contracts deep into the rock, and 
+all that is left of the daisy flower, some two or three inches 
+across, is a blue knot of half the size of a marble.  But it will 
+expand again, after a day or two of captivity, and will repay all 
+the trouble which it has cost.  Troglodytes may be found, as I have 
+said already, in hundreds at Hastings, in similar situations to 
+that of Bellis; its only token, when the tide is down, being a 
+round dimple in the muddy sand which firs the lower cracks of 
+rocks.
+
+But you will want more than these anemones, both for your own 
+amusement, and for the health of your tank.  Microscopic animals 
+will breed, and will also die; and you need for them some such 
+scavenger as our poor friend Squinado, to whom you were introduced 
+a few pages back.  Turn, then, a few stones which lie piled on each 
+other at extreme low-water mark, and five minutes' search will give 
+you the very animal you want, - a little crab, of a dingy russet 
+above, and on the under side like smooth porcelain.  His back is 
+quite flat, and so are his large angular fringed claws, which, when 
+he folds them up, lie in the same plane with his shell, and fit 
+neatly into its edges.  Compact little rogue that he is, made 
+especially for sidling in and out of cracks and crannies, he 
+carries with him such an apparatus of combs and brushes as Isidor 
+or Floris never dreamed of; with which he sweeps out of the sea-
+water at every moment shoals of minute animalcules, and sucks them 
+into his tiny mouth.  Mr. Gosse will tell you more of this marvel, 
+in his "Aquarium," p. 48.
+
+Next, your sea-weeds, if they thrive as they ought to do, will sow 
+their minute spores in millions around them; and these, as they 
+vegetate, will form a green film on the inside of the glass, 
+spoiling your prospect:  you may rub it off for yourself, if you 
+will, with a rag fastened to a stick; but if you wish at once to 
+save yourself trouble, and to see how all emergencies in nature are 
+provided for, you will set three or four live shells to do it for 
+you, and to keep your sub-aqueous lawn close mown.
+
+That last word is no figure of speech.  Look among the beds of sea-
+weed for a few of the bright yellow or green sea-snails (Nerita), 
+or Conical Tops (Trochus), especially that beautiful pink one 
+spotted with brown (Ziziphinus), which you are sure to find about 
+shaded rock-ledges at dead low tide, and put them into your 
+aquarium.  For the present, they will only nibble the green ulvae; 
+but when the film of young weed begins to form, you will see it 
+mown off every morning as fast as it grows, in little semicircular 
+sweeps, just as if a fairy's scythe had been at work during the 
+night.
+
+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." (32)
+
+A prawn or two, and a few minute star-fish, will make your aquarium 
+complete; though you may add to it endlessly, as one glance at the 
+salt-water tanks of the Zoological Gardens, and the strange and 
+beautiful forms which they contain, will prove to you sufficiently.
+
+You have two more enemies to guard against, dust, and heat.  If the 
+surface of the water becomes clogged with dust, the communication 
+between it and the life-giving oxygen of the air is cut off; and 
+then your animals are liable to die, for the very same reason that 
+fish die in a pond which is long frozen over, unless a hole be 
+broken in the ice to admit the air.  You must guard against this by 
+occasional stirring of the surface, or, as I have already said, by 
+syringing and by keeping on a cover.  A piece of muslin tied over 
+will do; but a better defence is a plate of glass, raised on wire 
+some half-inch above the edge, so as to admit the air.  I am not 
+sure that a sheet of brown paper laid over the vase is not the best 
+of all, because that, by its shade, also guards against the next 
+evil, which is heat.  Against that you must guard by putting a 
+curtain of muslin or oiled paper between the vase and the sun, if 
+it be very fierce, or simply (for simple expedients are best) by 
+laying a handkerchief over it till the heat is past.  But if you 
+leave your vase in a sunny window long enough to let the water get 
+tepid, all is over with your pets.  Half an hour's boiling may 
+frustrate the care of weeks.  And yet, on the other hand, light you 
+must have, and you can hardly have too much.  Some animals 
+certainly prefer shade, and hide in the darkest crannies; and for 
+them, if your aquarium is large enough, you must provide shade, by 
+arranging the bits of stone into piles and caverns.  But without 
+light, your sea-weeds will neither thrive nor keep the water sweet.  
+With plenty of light you will see, to quote Mr. Gosse once more, 
+(33) "thousands of tiny globules forming on every plant, and even 
+all over the stones, where the infant vegetation is beginning to 
+grow; and these globules presently rise in rapid succession to the 
+surface all over the vessel, and this process goes on 
+uninterruptedly as long as the rays of the sun are uninterrupted.
+
+"Now these globules consist of PURE OXYGEN, given out by the plants 
+under the stimulus of light; and to this oxygen the animals in the 
+tank owe their life.  The difference between the profusion of 
+oxygen-bubbles produced on a sunny day, and the paucity of those 
+seen on a dark cloudy day, or in a northern aspect, is very 
+marked."  Choose, therefore, a south or east window, but draw down 
+the blind, or throw a handkerchief over all if the heat become 
+fierce.  The water should always feel cold to your hand, let the 
+temperature outside be what it may.
+
+Next, you must make up for evaporation by FRESH water (a very 
+little will suffice), as often as in summer you find the water in 
+your vase sink below its original level, and prevent the water from 
+getting too salt.  For the salts, remember, do not evaporate with 
+the water; and if you left the vase in the sun for a few weeks, it 
+would become a mere brine-pan.
+
+But how will you move your treasures up to town?
+
+The simplest plan which I have found successful is an earthen jar.  
+You may buy them with a cover which screws on with two iron clasps.  
+If you do not find such, a piece of oilskin tied over the mouth is 
+enough.  But do not fill the jar full of water; leave about a 
+quarter of the contents in empty air, which the water may absorb, 
+and so keep itself fresh.  And any pieces of stone, or oysters, 
+which you send up, hang by a string from the mouth, that they may 
+not hurt tender animals by rolling about the bottom.  With these 
+simple precautions, anything which you are likely to find will well 
+endure forty-eight hours of travel.
+
+What if the water fails, after all?
+
+Then Mr. Gosse's artificial sea-water will form a perfect 
+substitute.  You may buy the requisite salts (for there are more 
+salts than "salt" in sea-water) from any chemist to whom Mr. Gosse 
+has entrusted his discovery, and, according to his directions, make 
+sea-water for yourself
+
+One more hint before we part.  If, after all, you are not going 
+down to the sea-side this year, and have no opportunities of 
+testing "the wonders of the shore," you may still study Natural 
+History in your own drawing-room, by looking a little into "the 
+wonders of the pond."
+
+I am not jesting; a fresh-water aquarium, though by no means as 
+beautiful as a salt-water one, is even more easily established.  A 
+glass jar, floored with two or three inches of pond-mud (which 
+should be covered with fine gravel to prevent the mud washing up); 
+a specimen of each of two water-plants which you may buy now at any 
+good shop in Covent Garden, Vallisneria spiralis (which is said to 
+give to the Canvas-backed duck of America its peculiar richness of 
+flavour), and Anacharis alsinastrum, that magical weed which, 
+lately introduced from Canada among timber, has multiplied, self-
+sown, to so prodigious an extent, that it bid fair, a few years 
+since, to choke the navigation not only of our canals and fen-
+rivers, but of the Thames itself:  (34) or, in default of these, 
+some of the more delicate pond-weeds; such as Callitriche, 
+Potamogeton pusillum, and, best of all, perhaps, the beautiful 
+Water-Milfoil (Myriophyllium), whose comb-like leaves are the 
+haunts of numberless rare and curious animalcules:- these (in 
+themselves, from the transparency of their circulation, interesting 
+microscopic objects) for oxygen-breeding vegetables; and for 
+animals, the pickings of any pond; a minnow or two, an eft; a few 
+of the delicate pond-snails (unless they devour your plants too 
+rapidly):  water-beetles, of activity inconceivable, and that 
+wondrous bug the Notonecta, who lies on his back all day, rowing 
+about his boat-shaped body, with one long pair of oars, in search 
+of animalcules, and the moment the lights are out, turns head over 
+heels, rights himself, and opening a pair of handsome wings, starts 
+to fly about the dark room in company with his friend the water-
+beetle, and (I suspect) catch flies; and then slips back demurely 
+into the water with the first streak of dawn.  But perhaps the most 
+interesting of all the tribes of the Naiads, - (in default, of 
+course, of those semi-human nymphs with which our Teutonic 
+forefathers, like the Greeks, peopled each "sacred fountain,") - 
+are the little "water-crickets," which may be found running under 
+the pebbles, or burrowing in little galleries in the banks:  and 
+those "caddises," which crawl on the bottom in the stiller waters, 
+enclosed, all save the head and legs, in a tube of sand or pebbles, 
+shells or sticks, green or dead weeds, often arranged with quaint 
+symmetry, or of very graceful shape.  Their aspect in this state 
+may be somewhat uninviting, but they compensate for their youthful 
+ugliness by the strangeness of their transformations, and often by 
+the delicate beauty of the perfect insects, as the "caddises," 
+rising to the surface, become flying Phryganeae (caperers and sand-
+flies), generally of various shades of fawn-colour; and the water-
+crickets (though an unscientific eye may be able to discern but 
+little difference in them in the "larva," or imperfect state) 
+change into flies of the most various shapes; - one, perhaps, into 
+the great sluggish olive "Stone-fly" (Perla bicaudata); another 
+into the delicate lemon-coloured "Yellow Sally" (Chrysoperla 
+viridis); another into the dark chocolate "Alder" (Sialis lutaria):  
+and the majority into duns and drakes (Ephemerae); 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" (Ba�tis 
+or Chloron) of incandescent glass, with gorgeous rainbow-coloured 
+eyes, to the great Green Drake (Ephemera vulgata), known to all 
+fishermen as the prince of trout-flies.  These animals, their 
+habits, their miraculous transformations, might give many an hour's 
+quiet amusement to an invalid, laid on a sofa, or imprisoned in a 
+sick-room, and debarred from reading, unless by some such means, 
+any page of that great green book outside, whose pen is the finger 
+of God, whose covers are the fire kingdoms and the star kingdoms, 
+and its leaves the heather-bells, and the polypes of the sea, and 
+the gnats above the summer stream.
+
+I said just now, that happy was the sportsman who was also a 
+naturalist.  And, having once mentioned these curious water-flies, 
+I cannot help going a little farther, and saying, that lucky is the 
+fisherman who is also a naturalist.  A fair scientific knowledge of 
+the flies which he imitates, and of their habits, would often 
+ensure him sport, while other men are going home with empty creels.  
+One would have fancied this a self-evident fact; yet I have never 
+found any sound knowledge of the natural water-flies which haunt a 
+given stream, except among cunning old fishermen of the lower 
+class, who get their living by the gentle art, and bring to indoors 
+baskets of trout killed on flies, which look as if they had been 
+tied with a pair of tongs, so rough and ungainly are they; but 
+which, nevertheless, kill, simply because they are (in COLOUR, 
+which is all that fish really care for) exact likenesses of some 
+obscure local species, which happen to be on the water at the time.  
+Among gentlemen-fishermen, on the other hand, so deep is the 
+ignorance of the natural fly, that I have known good sportsmen 
+still under the delusion that the great green May-fly comes out of 
+a caddis-bait; the gentlemen having never seen, much less fished 
+with, that most deadly bait the "Water-cricket," or free creeping 
+larva of the May-fly, which may be found in May under the river-
+banks.  The consequence of this ignorance is that they depend for 
+good patterns of flies on mere chance and experiment; and that the 
+shop patterns, originally excellent, deteriorate continually, till 
+little or no likeness to their living prototype remains, being tied 
+by town girls, who have no more understanding of what the feathers 
+and mohair in their hands represent than they have of what the 
+National Debt represents.  Hence follows many a failure at the 
+stream-side; because the "Caperer," or "Dun," or "Yellow Sally," 
+which is produced from the fly-book, though, possibly, like the 
+brood which came out three years since on some stream a hundred 
+miles away, is quite unlike the brood which is out to-day on one's 
+own river.  For not only do most of these flies vary in colour in 
+different soils and climates, but many of them change their hue 
+during life; the 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 too great for one man, so prodigal is Nature of her 
+forms, in the stream as in the ocean; but what if a correspondence 
+were opened between a few fishermen - of whom one should live, say, 
+by the Hampshire or Berkshire chalk streams; another on the slates 
+and granites of Devon; another on the limestones of Yorkshire or 
+Derbyshire; another among the yet earlier slates of Snowdonia, or 
+some mountain part of Wales; and more than one among the hills of 
+the Border and the lakes of the Highlands?  Each would find (I 
+suspect), on comparing his insects with those of the others, that 
+he was exploring a little peculiar world of his own, and that with 
+the exception of a certain number of typical forms, the flies of 
+his county were unknown a hundred miles away, or, at least, 
+appeared there under great differences of size and colour; and 
+each, if he would take the trouble to collect the caddises and 
+water-crickets, and breed them into the perfect fly in an aquarium, 
+would see marvels in their transformations, their instincts, their 
+anatomy, quite as great (though not, perhaps, as showy and 
+startling) as I have been trying to point out on the sea-shore.  
+Moreover, each and every one of the party, I will warrant, will 
+find his fellow-correspondents (perhaps previously unknown to him) 
+men worth knowing; not, it may be, of the meditative and half-
+saintly type of dear old Izaak Walton (who, after all, was no fly-
+fisher, but a sedentary "popjoy" guilty of float and worm), but 
+rather, like his fly-fishing disciple Cotton, good fellows and men 
+of the world, and, perhaps, something better over and above.
+
+The suggestion has been made.  Will it ever be taken up, and a 
+"Naiad Club" formed, for the combination of sport and science?
+
+And, now, how can this desultory little treatise end more usefully 
+than in recommending a few books on Natural History, fit for the 
+use of young people; and fit to serve as introductions to such 
+deeper and larger works as Yarrell's "Birds and Fishes," Bell's 
+"Quadrupeds" and "Crustacea," Forbes and Hanley's "Mollusca," 
+Owen's "Fossil Mammals and Birds," and a host of other admirable 
+works?  Not that this list will contain all the best; but simply 
+the best of which the writer knows; let, therefore, none feel 
+aggrieved, if, as it may chance, opening these pages, they find 
+their books omitted.
+
+First and foremost, certainly, come Mr. Gosse's books.  There is a 
+playful and genial spirit in them, a brilliant power of word-
+painting combined with deep and earnest religious feeling, which 
+makes them as morally valuable as they are intellectually 
+interesting.  Since White's "History of Selborne," few or no 
+writers on Natural History, save Mr. Gosse, Mr. G. H. Lewes, and 
+poor Mr. E. Forbes, have had the power of bringing out the human 
+side of science, and giving to seemingly dry disquisitions and 
+animals of the lowest type, by little touches of pathos and humour, 
+that living and personal interest, to bestow which is generally the 
+special function of the poet:  not that Waterton and Jesse are not 
+excellent in this respect, and authors who should be in every boy's 
+library:  but they are rather anecdotists than systematic or 
+scientific inquirers; while Mr. Gosse, in his "Naturalist on the 
+Shores of Devon," his "Tour in Jamaica," his "Tenby," and his 
+"Canadian Naturalist," has done for those three places what White 
+did for Selborne, with all the improved appliances of a science 
+which has widened and deepened tenfold since White's time.  Mr. 
+Gosse's "Manual of the Marine Zoology of the British Isles" is, for 
+classification, by far the completest handbook extant.  He has 
+contrived in it to compress more sound knowledge of vast classes of 
+the animal kingdom than I ever saw before in so small a space. (35)
+
+Miss Anne Pratt's "Things of the Sea-coast" is excellent; and still 
+better is Professor Harvey's "Sea-side Book," of which it is 
+impossible to speak too highly; and most pleasant it is to see a 
+man of genius and learning thus gathering the bloom of his varied 
+knowledge, to put it into a form equally suited to a child and a 
+SAVANT.  Seldom, perhaps, has there been a little book in which so 
+vast a quantity of facts have been told so gracefully, simply, 
+without a taint of pedantry or cumbrousness - an excellence which 
+is the sure and only mark of a perfect mastery of the subject.  Mr. 
+G. H. Lewes's "Sea-shore Studies" are also very valuable; hardly 
+perhaps a book for beginners, but from his admirable power of 
+description, whether of animals or of scenes, is interesting for 
+all classes of readers.
+
+Two little "Popular" Histories - one of British Zoophytes, the 
+other of British Sea-weeds, by Dr. Landsborough (since dead of 
+cholera, at Saltcoats, the scene of his energetic and pious 
+ministry) - are very excellent; and are furnished, too, with well-
+drawn and coloured plates, for the comfort of those to whom a 
+scientific nomenclature (as liable as any other human thing to be 
+faulty and obscure) conveys but a vague conception of the objects.  
+These may serve well for the beginner, as introductions to 
+Professor Harvey's large work on British Algae, and to the new 
+edition of Professor Johnston's invaluable "British Zoophytes," 
+Miss Gifford's "Marine Botanist," third edition, and Dr. Cocks's 
+"Sea-weed Collector's Guide," have also been recommended by a high 
+authority.
+
+For general Zoology the best books for beginners are, perhaps, as a 
+general introduction, the Rev. J. A. L. Wood's "Popular Zoology," 
+full of excellent plates; and for systematic Zoology, Mr. Gosse's 
+four little books, on Mammals, Birds, Reptiles, and Fishes, 
+published with many plates, by the Christian Knowledge Society, at 
+a marvellously cheap rate.  For miscroscopic animalcules, Miss 
+Agnes Catlow's "Drops of Water" will teach the young more than they 
+will ever remember, and serve as a good introduction to those 
+teeming abysses of the unseen world, which must be afterwards 
+traversed under the guidance of Hassall and Ehrenberg.
+
+For Ornithology, there is no book, after all, like dear old Bewick, 
+PASSE though he may be in a scientific point of view.  There is a 
+good little British ornithology, too, published in Sir W. Jardine's 
+"Naturalist's Library," and another by Mr. Gosse.  And Mr. Knox's 
+"Ornithological Rambles in Sussex," with Mr. St. John's "Highland 
+Sports," and "Tour in Sutherlandshire," are the monographs of 
+naturalists, gentlemen, and sportsmen, which remind one at every 
+page (and what higher praise can one give?) of White's "History of 
+Selborne."  These last, with Mr. Gosse's "Canadian Naturalist," and 
+his little book "The Ocean," not forgetting Darwin's delightful 
+"Voyage of the Beagle and Adventure," ought to be in the hands of 
+every lad who is likely to travel to our colonies.
+
+For general Geology, Professor Ansted's Introduction is excellent; 
+while, as a specimen of the way in which a single district may be 
+thoroughly worked out, and the universal method of induction learnt 
+from a narrow field of objects, what book can, or perhaps ever 
+will, compare with Mr. Hugh Miller's "Old Red Sandstone"?
+
+For this last reason, I especially recommend to the young the Rev. 
+C. A. Johns's "Week at the Lizard," as teaching a young person how 
+much there is to be seen and known within a few square miles of 
+these British Isles.  But, indeed, all Mr. Johns's books are good 
+(as they are bound to be, considering his most accurate and varied 
+knowledge), especially his "Flowers of the Field," the best cheap 
+introduction to systematic botany which has yet appeared.  Trained, 
+and all but self-trained, like Mr. Hugh Miller, in a remote and 
+narrow field of observation, Mr. Johns has developed himself into 
+one of our most acute and persevering botanists, and has added many 
+a new treasure to the Flora of these isles; and one person, at 
+least, owes him a deep debt of gratitude for first lessons in 
+scientific accuracy and patience, - lessons taught, not dully and 
+dryly at the book and desk, but livingly and genially, in 
+adventurous rambles over the bleak cliffs and ferny woods of the 
+wild Atlantic shore, -
+
+
+"Where the old fable of the guarded mount
+Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold."
+
+
+Mr. Henfrey's "Rudiments of Botany" might accompany Mr. Johns's 
+books.  Mr. Babington's "Manual of British Botany" is also most 
+compact and highly finished, and seems the best work which I know 
+of from which a student somewhat advanced in English botany can 
+verify species; while for ferns, Moore's "Handbook" is probably the 
+best for beginners.
+
+For Entomology, which, after all, is the study most fit for boys 
+(as Botany is for girls) who have no opportunity for visiting the 
+sea-shore, Catlow's "Popular British Entomology," having coloured 
+plates (a delight to young people), and saying something of all the 
+orders, is, probably, still a good work for beginners.
+
+Mr. Stainton's "Entomologist's Annual for 1855" contains valuable 
+hints of that gentleman's on taking and arranging moths and 
+butterflies; as well as of Mr. Wollaston's on performing the same 
+kind office for that far more numerous, and not less beautiful 
+class, the beetles.  There is also an admirable "Manual of British 
+Butterflies and Moths," by Mr. Stainton, in course of publication; 
+but, perhaps, the most interesting of all entomological books which 
+I have seen (and for introducing me to which I must express my 
+hearty thanks to Mr. Stainton), is "Practical Hints respecting 
+Moths and Butterflies, forming a Calendar of Entomological 
+Operations," (36) by Richard Shield, a simple London working-man.
+
+I would gladly devote more space than I can here spare to a review 
+of this little book, so perfectly does it corroborate every word 
+which I have said already as to the moral and intellectual value of 
+such studies.  Richard Shield, making himself a first-rate 
+"lepidopterist," while working with his hands for a pound a week, 
+is the antitype of Mr. Peach, the coast-guardsman, among his 
+Cornish tide-rocks.  But more than this, there is about Shield's 
+book a tone as of Izaak Walton himself, which is very delightful; 
+tender, poetical, and religious, yet full of quiet quaintness and 
+humour; showing in every page how the love for Natural History is 
+in him only one expression of a love for all things beautiful, and 
+pure, and right.  If any readers of these pages fancy that I over-
+praise the book, let them buy it, and judge for themselves.  They 
+will thus help the good man toward pursuing his studies with larger 
+and better appliances, and will be (as I expect) surprised to find 
+how much there is to be seen and done, even by a working-man, 
+within a day's walk of smoky Babylon itself; and how easily a man 
+might, if he would, wash his soul clean for a while from all the 
+turmoil and intrigue, the vanity and vexation of spirit of that 
+"too-populous wilderness," by going out to be alone a while with 
+God in heaven, and with that earth which He has given to the 
+children of men, not merely for the material wants of their bodies, 
+but as a witness and a sacrament that in Him they live and move, 
+and have their being, "not by bread alone, but by EVERY word that 
+proceedeth out of the mouth of God."
+
+
+Thus I wrote some twenty years ago, when the study of Natural 
+History was confined mainly to several scientific men, or mere 
+collectors of shells, insects, and dried plants.
+
+Since then, I am glad to say, it has become a popular and common 
+pursuit, owing, I doubt not, to the impulse given to it by the many 
+authors whose works I then recommended.  I recommend them still; 
+though a swarm of other manuals and popular works have appeared 
+since, excellent in their way, and almost beyond counting.  But all 
+honour to those, and above all to Mr. Gosse and Mr. Johns, who 
+first opened people's eyes to the wonders around them all day long.  
+Now, we have, in addition to amusing books on special subjects, 
+serials on Natural History more or less profound, and suited to 
+every kind of student and every grade of knowledge.  I mention the 
+names of none.  For first, they happily need no advertisement from 
+me; and next, I fear to be unjust to any one of them by 
+inadvertently omitting its name.  Let me add, that in the 
+advertising columns of those serials, will be found notices of all 
+the new manuals, and of all apparatus, and other matters, needed by 
+amateur naturalists, and of many who are more than amateurs.  
+Microscopy, meanwhile, and the whole study of "The Wonders of the 
+Little," have made vast strides in the last twenty years; and I was 
+equally surprised and pleased, to find, three years ago, in each of 
+two towns of a few thousand inhabitants, perhaps a dozen good 
+microscopes, all but hidden away from the public, worked by men who 
+knew how to handle them, and who knew what they were looking at; 
+but who modestly refrained from telling anybody what they were 
+doing so well.  And it was this very discovery of unsuspected 
+microscopists which made me more desirous than ever to see - as I 
+see now in many places - scientific societies, by means of which 
+the few, who otherwise would work apart, may communicate their 
+knowledge to each other, and to the many.  These "Microscopic," 
+"Naturalist," "Geological," or other societies, and the "Field 
+Clubs" for excursions into the country, which are usually connected 
+with them, form a most pleasant and hopeful new feature in English 
+Society; bringing together, as they do, almost all ranks, all 
+shades of opinion; and it has given me deep pleasure to see, in the 
+case at least of the Country Clubs with which I am acquainted, the 
+clergy of the Church of England taking an active, and often a 
+leading, interest in their practical work.  The town clergy are, 
+for the most part, too utterly overworked to follow the example of 
+their country brethren.  But I have reason to know that they regard 
+such societies, and Natural History in general, with no unfriendly 
+eyes; and that there is less fear than ever that the clergy of the 
+Church of England should have to relinquish their ancient boast - 
+that since the formation of the Royal Society in the seventeenth 
+century, they have done more for sound physical science than any 
+other priesthood or ministry in the world.  Let me advise anyone 
+who may do me the honour of reading these pages, to discover 
+whether such a Club or Society exists in his neighbourhood, and to 
+join it forthwith, certain that - if his experience be at all like 
+mine - he will gain most pleasant information and most pleasant 
+acquaintances, and pass most pleasant days and evenings, among 
+people whom he will be glad to know, and whom he never would have 
+known save for the new - and now, I hope, rapidly spreading - 
+freemasonry of Natural History.
+
+Meanwhile, I hope - though I dare not say I trust - to see the day 
+when the boys of each of our large schools shall join - like those 
+of Marlborough and Clifton - the same freemasonry; and have their 
+own Naturalists' Clubs; nay more; when our public schools and 
+universities shall awake to the real needs of the age, and - even 
+to the curtailing of the time usually spent in not learning Latin 
+and Greek - teach boys the rudiments at least of botany, zoology, 
+geology, and so forth; and when the public opinion, at least of the 
+refined and educated, shall consider it as ludicrous - to use no 
+stronger word - to be ignorant of the commonest facts and laws of 
+this living planet, as to be ignorant of the rudiments of two dead 
+languages.  All honour to the said two languages.  Ignorance of 
+them is a serious weakness; for it implies ignorance of many things 
+else; and indeed, without some knowledge of them, the nomenclature 
+of the physical sciences cannot be mastered.  But I have got to 
+discover that a boy's time is more usefully spent, and his 
+intellect more methodically trained, by getting up Ovid's Fasti 
+with an ulterior hope of being able to write a few Latin verses, 
+than in getting up Professor Rolleston's "Forms of Animal Life," or 
+any other of the excellent Scientific Manuals for beginners, which 
+are now, as I said, happily so numerous.
+
+May that day soon come; and an old dream of mine, and of my 
+scientific friends, be fulfilled at last.
+
+And so I end this little book, hoping, even praying, that it may 
+encourage a few more labourers to go forth into a vineyard, which 
+those who have toiled in it know to be full of ever-fresh health, 
+and wonder and simple joy, and the presence and the glory of Him 
+whose name is LOVE.
+
+
+
+APPENDIX.
+
+
+
+PLATE I.
+
+
+
+ZOOPHYTA.  POLYZOA.
+
+THE forms of animal life which are now united in an independent 
+class, under the name Polyzoa, so nearly resemble the Hydroid 
+Zoophytes in general form and appearance that a casual observer may 
+suppose 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 
+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 parasitically attached.  Each 
+polype, in both classes, protrudes from and retreats within its 
+cell 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 Polyzoa which seem to remove them from 
+Zoophytology to a place in the system of nature more nearly 
+connected with Molluscan 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 contractile 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 cells.  But the Hydra or Fresh-water Polype 
+has no cell, and is quite unconnected with any root thread, or with 
+other individuals of the same species.  It is perfectly free, and 
+so simple in its structure, 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 Hydraform 
+Polypes, although equally simple as individuals, 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 
+represented in the first plate by the following examples.
+
+
+HYDROIDA.
+
+
+SERTULARIA ROSEA.  PL. 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 cell 
+which forms the base upon which the polype rests.  Fig. 6 B 
+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.
+
+
+CAMPANULARIA SYRINGA.  PL. 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 lengthened, cylindrical, transparent vases.
+
+
+CAMPANULARIA VOLUBILIS.  PL. I. FIG. 9.
+
+
+A still more beautiful species, with lengthened foot-stalks ringed 
+at each end.  The polype is remarkable for the protrusion and 
+contractile power of its lips.  It has about twenty 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 would turn inside 
+out the finger of a glove.  This oneness of cell and polype is a 
+distinctive character of the group.  Another is the higher 
+organization of the internal parts.  The mouth, surrounded by 
+tentacles, 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, resembling 
+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.
+
+
+VALKERIA CUSCUTA. PL. 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.  Underneath this is the same portion enlarged.  
+When magnified to this apparent size, the cells could be 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.  
+Fig. B represents two tentacles, showing the direction in which the 
+cilia vibrate.
+
+
+CRISIA DENTICULATA.  PL. I. FIG. 4.
+
+
+I have only drawn the cells from a prepared specimen.  The polypes 
+are like those described above.
+
+
+GEMELLARIA LORICATA.  PL. I. FIG. 5.
+
+
+Here the cells are placed in pairs, back to back.  5 A is a very 
+small portion on the natural scale.
+
+
+CELLULARIA CILIATA.  Pl. I. FIG. 7
+
+
+The cells are alternate on the stem, and are curiously armed with 
+long whip-like cilia 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 holding 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. 7 B shows the form of one of these "birds' heads," 
+and fig. 7 C, its position on the cell.
+
+
+FLUSTRA LINEATA.  PL. I. FIG. 1.
+
+
+In Flustrae, 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.
+
+
+FLUSTRA FOLIACEA.  PL. I. 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.
+
+
+SERIALARIA LENDIGERA.  PL. I. fig. 10.
+
+NOTAMIA BURSARIA.  PL.  I. fig. 11.
+
+
+The "tobacco-pipe"" appendages, fig. 11 B, are of unknown use:  
+they are probably analogous to the birds' heads in the Cellularae.
+
+
+
+PLATE V.
+
+
+
+CORALS AND SEA ANEMONES.
+
+
+CARYOPHYLLAEA SMITHII.  PL. V. FIG. 2.  PL. VI. FIG. 3.
+
+
+THE connection between Brainstones, Mushroom Corals, and other 
+Madrepores abounding on Polynesian reefs, and the "Sea Anemones," 
+which have lately become so familiar to us all, can be seen by 
+comparing our comparatively insignificant C. Smithii with our 
+commonest species of Actinia and Sagartia.  The former is a 
+beautiful object when the fleshy part and tentacles are wholly 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.  Unlike Actinia, its body is supported by 
+a stony skeleton of calcareous plates arranged edgewise so as to 
+radiate from the centre.  But as we find some Molluscs furnished 
+with a shell, and others even 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 
+Caryophyllaea.  These are doubtless flexible walls of compartments 
+dividing the fleshy parts of the softer animals, and corresponding 
+with the septa of the coral.  Fig. 2 A represents a section of the 
+latter, to be compared with the basal disk of Sagartia.
+
+
+SAGARTIA ANGUICOMA.  PL. V. FIG. 3, A, B.
+
+
+This genus has been separated from Actinia on account of its habit 
+of throwing out threads when 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.  Fig. 3 A, showing a basal disk, is given for 
+the purpose already described.
+
+
+BALANOPHYLLAEA REGIA.  PL. 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 O. Smithii, of a very bright colour, and always covers the 
+upper part of its bony skeleton, in 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; 1 B, the coral; 1 C, a tentacle enlarged.
+
+
+
+PLATE VI.
+
+
+
+CORALS AND SEA ANEMONES.
+
+ACTINIA MESEMBRYANTHEMUM.  PL. 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 very like eyes, but whose purpose is 
+not exactly ascertained.  Fig. 1 represents the disk only partially 
+expanded.
+
+
+BUNODES CRASSICORNIS.  PL. 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 adhesive powers produced by the nettling threads 
+which proceed from them.
+
+
+CARYOPHYLLAEA SMITHII.  PL. VI. FIG. 3.
+
+
+This figure is to show a whiter variety, with the flesh and 
+tentacles fully expanded
+
+
+
+PLATE VIII.
+
+
+
+MOLLUSCA.
+
+NASSA RETICULATA.  PL. VIII. fig. 2, A, B, C, D, E, F
+
+
+A VERY active Mollusc, given here chiefly on account of the 
+opportunity afforded by the birth of young fry in 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 Nassae 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 B); each capsule 
+contained about a hundred eggs.  The capsules opened on the 16th of 
+May, permitting the escape of rotiferous 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 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 F is the 
+tongue of a Nassa, from a photograph by Dr. Kingsley.
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+(1) SERTULARIA OPERCULATA and GEMELLARIA LOCICULATA; or any of the 
+small SERTULARIAE, compared with CRISIAE and CELLULARIAE, are very 
+good examples.  For a fuller description of these, see Appendix 
+explaining Plate I.
+
+(2) If any inland reader wishes 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 burrows with it in the mud, and how, when the water is 
+drawn off, he walks solemnly into deeper water, leaving a furrow 
+behind him.
+
+(3) These shells are so common that I have not cared to figure 
+them.
+
+(4) Plate IX. Fig. 3, represents both parasites on the dead 
+Turritella.
+
+(5) A few words on him, and on sea-anemones in general, may be 
+found in Appendix II.  But full details, accompanied with beautiful 
+plates, may be found in Mr. Gosse's work on British sea-anemones 
+and madrepores, which ought to be in every seaside library.
+
+(6) Handbook to the Marine Aquarium of the Crystal Palace.
+
+(7) An admirable paper on this extraordinary family 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 Synapta Duvernaei.
+
+(8) Thalassema Neptuni (Forbes' British Star-Fishes, p. 259),
+
+(9) 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.
+
+(10) A Naturalist's Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, p. 110.
+
+(11) Balanophyllia regia, Plate V. fig. 1.
+
+(12) Amphidotus cordatus.
+
+(13) Echinus miliaris, Plate VII.
+
+(14) See Professor Sedgwick's last edition of the "Discourses on 
+the Studies of Cambridge."
+
+(15) Fissurella graeca, Plate X. fig. 5.
+
+(16) Doris tuberculata and bilineata.
+
+(17) Eolis papi losa.  A Doris and an Eolis, though not of these 
+species, are figured in Plate X.
+
+(18) Plate III.
+
+(19) 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 not, I hope, in 
+the habit of drawing on my fancy in the presence of infinitely more 
+marvellous Nature.  Truth is quite strange enough to be interesting 
+without lies.
+
+(20) Saxicava rugosa, Plate XI. fig. 2.
+
+(21) 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.)
+
+(22) Cyproea Europoea.
+
+(23) Botrylli.
+
+(24) Molluscs.
+
+Doris tuberculata.
+- bilineata.
+Eolis papillosa.
+Pleurobranchus plumila.
+Neritina.
+Cypraea.
+Trochus, - 2 species.
+Mangelia.
+Triton.
+Trophon.
+Nassa, - 2 species.
+Cerithium.
+Sigaretus.
+Fissurella.
+Arca lactea.
+Pecten pusio.
+Tapes pullastra.
+Kellia suborbicularis.
+Shaenia Binghami.
+Saxicava rugosa.
+Gastrochoena pholadia.
+Pholas parva.
+Anomiae, -2 or 3 species
+Cynthia,-2 species.
+Botryllus,  do.
+
+ANNELIDS.
+
+Phyllodoce, and other Nereid worms.
+Polynoe squamata.
+
+CRUSTACEA.
+
+4 or 5 species.
+
+ECHINODERMS.
+
+Echinus miliaris.
+Asterias gibbosa.
+Ophiocoma neglecla.
+Cucumaria Hyndmanni.
+- communis.
+
+POLYPES.
+
+Sertularia pumila.
+- rugosa.
+- fallax.
+- filicula.
+Plumularia falcata.
+- setacea.
+Laomedea geniculata.
+Campanularia volubilis.
+Actinia mesembryanthemum.
+Actinia clavata.
+- anguicoma.
+- crassicornis.
+Tubulipora patina.
+- hispida.
+- serpens.
+Crisia eburnea.
+Cellepora pumicosa.
+Lepraliae,- many species.
+Membranipora pilosa.
+Cellularia ciliata.
+- scruposa.
+- reptans.
+Flustra membranacea, &c.
+
+(25) Plate XI. fig. 1.
+
+(26) Plate X. fig. 1.
+
+(27) There are very fine specimens in the Crystal Palace.
+
+(28) Coryne ramosa.
+
+(29) Campanularia integra.
+
+(30) Crisidia Eburnea.
+
+(31) Aquarium, p. 163.
+
+(32) P. 34.  Figures of it are given in Plate VIII.
+
+(33) P. 259.
+
+(34) 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 grave 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.  
+As well turn loose queen-wasps to build in your neighbour's banks.
+
+(35) Very highly also, in interest, ranks M. Quatrefages' "Rambles 
+of a Naturalist" (about the Mediterranean and the French Coast), 
+translated by M. Otte.
+
+(36) Van Voorst & Co. price 3s.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore
+
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