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 chimæra 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;[136]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.[138]
Nemerties Borlasii etc.: Plate 3
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[139a]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 Mangeliæ and Nassæ[139b]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,[140a]our only European representative of that grand tropical family. Cast one wondering glance, too, at the forest of zoophytes and corals, Lepraliæ and Flustræ, and those quaint blue stars, set in brown jelly, which are no zoophytes, but respectable molluscs, each with his well-formed mouth and intestines,[140b]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,[140c]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 Algæ 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 Laminariæ (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 eyeAs e’er was mossy bedWhereon the wood-nymphs lieWith 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 hairUpon 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.
“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 eyeAs e’er was mossy bedWhereon the wood-nymphs lieWith 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 hairUpon 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 Rhodymeniæ. 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’sDevonshire 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,”
“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 surgesSank, as the breezes sank dead, into smooth green foam-flecked marbleAwed; 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 TritonsBlinded with kisses their eyes, unreproved, and above them in worshipFluttered the terns, and the sea-gulls swept past them on silvery pinions,Echoing softly their laughter; around them the wantoning dolphinsSighed as they plunged, full of love; and the great sea-horses which bore themCurved 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-boysWhelmed by the roll of the surge, swept down by the anger of Nereus;Hapless, whom never again upon quay or strand shall their mothersWelcome 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.”
“So they came up in their joy; and before them the roll of the surgesSank, as the breezes sank dead, into smooth green foam-flecked marbleAwed; 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 TritonsBlinded with kisses their eyes, unreproved, and above them in worshipFluttered the terns, and the sea-gulls swept past them on silvery pinions,Echoing softly their laughter; around them the wantoning dolphinsSighed as they plunged, full of love; and the great sea-horses which bore themCurved 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-boysWhelmed by the roll of the surge, swept down by the anger of Nereus;Hapless, whom never again upon quay or strand shall their mothersWelcome 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 medusæ 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 “Algæ,” 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 algâ,” 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 seenme, 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,whythings fall, andhow, 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 thecausa 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 serpulæ 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.
Plate 11: Syngnathus Lumbriciformis etc.
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)[163]with strange snipe-bills (which they cannot open) and snake-like bodies; small cuttlefish (Sepiolæ) 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 Sabellæ 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 Serpulæ,[167]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, Plumulariæ and Sertulariæ, 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,[170]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.
Plate 7: Echinus Miliaris etc.
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 shipUpon a painted ocean.”
“As idle as a painted shipUpon 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.[181a]
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,[181b]each of which, too, protrudes its living flower; on another leg is a fresh species, like a little heather-bush of whitest ivory,[182]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,—
οὐτ’ ἐν θέρει, οὐτ’ ἐν ὁπώρῃ.
οὐτ’ ἐν θέρει, οὐτ’ ἐν ὁπώρῃ.
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,[190]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 aërating 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 (Actiniæ); 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 Actiniæ (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 Actiniæ 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 ulvæ; 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.
Plate 8: Littorina Littorea etc.
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.”[201]
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,[203]“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.