But these furious devourers are anticipatively kept down; mighty in destroying, they are very slow in reproducing. The Sturgeon, as we have seen is less prolific than the Cod, and the Shark is actually sterile, if compared to any other fish. Not like them does it overspread and discolor the sea. Viviparous, it sends forth its rare youngling, fierce, fully armed, savage and terrible.
In her dark and teeming depths, the Sea can smile in scorn at the destroyers to which she gives birth, well knowing, as the great proud fertile Sea does, that no might of destruction can surpass her might of reproduction. Her chief wealth, her most vast and countless produce, defies all the fury of the devourers, is inaccessible to their attacks. I speak of the infinite world of living atoms, of the microscopic atomies that live and love, enjoy, struggle, suffer and die from the surface to the utmost depths of the sea. It has been affirmed that, in the absence of solar light, life, also, must be absent; yet the darkest depths of the sea are studded with sea stars, living, moving, microscopic infusoriæ and molluscs. The dark crab, the phosphorescent seaworm, and a thousand strange and namelesscreatures swarm in those uttermost depths and rise only now and then, describing long lines of variegated light upon the heaving surface. In its semi-transparent density, the sea has its own lucidity, its own glowing gleam, like that which fish, living or dead, reflect. The Sea! glorious Sea, hath her own lights, her own Sun, Moon, and Stars.
Gaze inquisitively and intelligently on a mere salt well and you at once perceive how prolific the ocean depths must be; that seeming deposit of dead and inert matter hath its real life; it is a mass of infusoriæ, microscopic, but organized and sentient. All voyagers on the wide Ocean concur in telling us that in their far wanderings they still and ever traverse living waters. Freynel saw millions of square yards covered by a crimson glow—that glow, consisting of living animalculæ so minute that a myriad is packed into every square inch. In the bay of Bengal, in 1854, Captain Kingman sailed for thirty miles through one vast white blotch which made the sea look like a great snow field. Not a cloud above, but one unbroken leaden grey, in strange contrast with the brilliant whiteness beneath. Look closely and you see that that seeming snow is gelatinous; bring your microscope into play and you see that that seeming jelly is a mass of living, moving, phosphoric animalculæ, flashing forth strange and marvellous lights.
Peron, too, tells us that for thirty leagues his good ship ploughed her way through what seemed a sort of greyish dust; examined with the microscope, this seeming dust was seen to be the eggs of some unknown species, covering and concealing the waters over all that immense space.
Even along the desolate shores of Greenland, where we vainly fancy that prolific nature must needs expire, the sea is enormously populous. Through waves two hundred miles by fifteen you sail through deep brown waters, colored by microscopic medusæ, of which, de Schleiden tells us, more than a hundred and ten thousand live and love, battle, and die in every cubic foot. These productive and nourishing waters are supersaturated with all sorts of fatty atoms adapted to the delicate nature of the fish which lazily drink in the nourishment provided for them by the fertile and generous common mother. Do they know what they thus swallow? Scarcely. Its minute but abounding nurture, its nourishing mother's-milk, comes to it without its care, and is received without its gratitude. Our great fatality, our sad calamity, fierce and terrible hunger, is known only on the land. Exertion and want of food are unknown in the great world of waters. There, life must glide away like a glad dream. What can the creature there do with his strength? All use of it issuperfluous, impossible;—all save only one; all strength, all energy, are reserved for the great work of love.
The one great law, the one great work of the seas, is to increase and multiply. Love fills up the whole of its fecund depths, and is wealthiest in reproduction among those which are so small that to our unassisted eye they are invisible, unknown as though they were non-existent. We have spoken of mere atomies; but are there, in reality, any such? When we imagine that we have got the lowest, the utterly indivisible, we have but to examine with more earnest and penetrating gaze and we see that this seemingly frail atomy still loves, still reproduces itself in miniature. At the very lowest stages of life you find all the forms of life and reproduction.
Such is the Sea, such the greatFemale of the Globe, whose ceaseless yearning, whose permanent conception, whose production and reproduction, never end.
CHAPTER II.
THE MILKY SEA.
The water of the Sea, even the purest, examined when you are far away from land, and from all possible admixture, is somewhat viscuous; take some between your fingers, and you find it somewhat ropy and tenacious. Chemical analysis has not yet explained this peculiarity; there is in that an organic substance which Chemistry touches only to destroy, taking from it all that it has of special, and violently reducing it back to general elements.
The marine plants and animals are covered with this substance, whose mucousness gives them the appearance of a coating of jelly, now fixed, anon trembling, and always semi-transparent. And nothing more than this contributes to the fanciful illusions presented to us by the world of waters. Its reflections are irregular, often strangely variegated, as, for instance, on thescales of fish and on the molluscæ, which seem to owe to it the exquisite beauty of their pearly shells.
It is that which most attracts and enchains the interest of the child when he first sees a fish. I was very young when I first saw one, but I still remember how vividly I felt the impression. That creature with variously colored lights flashing from its silvery scales, threw me into an astonishment, a fascination, a rapture, which no words can describe. I endeavored to catch it, but found that it could no more be held than the water which glided through my small weak hand. That fish seemed to me to be identical with the element in which it swam, and gave me a confused idea of animated, organized and surpassingly beautiful water.
A long time after, in my maturity, I was scarcely less impressed when on a sea beach I saw, I know not what of shining and transparent substance, through which I could clearly see the sand and pebbles. Colorless as crystal, slightly, very slightly solid, tremulous when ever so slightly touched, it seemed to me as to the ancients and to Réaumur, that which Réaumur so graphically named it—gelatinised water.
Still more forcibly do we feel this impression when we discover in the early stage of their formation the yellowish white threads in which the sea makes her first outlines of the fuci and algæ which are to harden and darken to the strength and color of hides and leather.But when quite young, in their viscuous state, and in their elasticity, they have the consistence of a solidified wave, all the stronger because it is soft. What we now know of the generation and the complex organization of the inferior creatures, animal or vegetable, contradicts the explanation of Réaumur and the ancients. But all this does not forbid us to return to the question which was first put by Borg. de Saint Vincent; viz: What is themucusof the Sea? That viscuousness which water in general presents? Is it not the universal element of life?
Much engaged with these and the like reflections, I called upon an illustrious chemist, a man at once positive and sound, an innovator no less prudent than bold, and I abruptly asked him this plain question—"What, in your opinion, is that whitish, viscuous matter which we find in sea water?" "Nothing else than life," was his reply, then retracting, or rather explaining his somewhat too simple and too absolute dictum, he added, "I should rather say a half organized and wholly organizable matter. In certain waters it is a dense mass of infusoriæ, in others a matter which is not yet, but which is to become infusoriæ. In fact, we have yet to begin, at all seriously, the study of this matter."
This was spoken on the 17th of May, 1860.
On leaving our great Chemist, I went to a Physiologist, whose opinion has no less weight with me, and tohim I put the same question. His reply was very long and very beautiful. In substance it ran thus: "We know in reality no more about the composition of water than we know about that of blood. What we best know and can most safely affirm about themucusof sea water, is that it is at once an Alpha and an Omega, a beginning and an end. Is it the result of the numberless deaths which furnish forth materials for new lives? No doubt, that is the general law; but in the case of the sea, that world of rapid absorption, the majority of the creatures there are absorbed while in full life; they do not slowly linger on towards death, as we on land do. The sea is a very pure element; war and death purvey to it. But life, without arriving at its final dissolution, is incessantly approaching it, exuding and exhaling all that is superfluous. With us, the animals of the earth, the epidermis, through its millions of pores, wastes the body at every instant; we suffer, as it were, a partial death at every breath we draw. Now this partial death, this vast exudation, in the case of the marine world, fills that vast world of waters with a gelatinous wealth of which the young world has the instant benefit. It finds in suspension the oily superabundance of this common exudation, the still living atoms and liquids which have not had time to die. All this does not fall back into the inorganic, but enters quickly into new organisms. Of all the theories on the subject, thisseems the most reasonable; rejecting this theory, we plunge into a sea of extreme difficulties."
These ideas of the most enlightened and earnest thinkers of the present day, are not irreconcilable with those which, nearly thirty years ago were promulgated by Geoffrey Saint Hilaire, upon that generalmucusin which nature seems to find all life. He calls it "theanimalisiblesubstance, the raw material of organic bodies. Not a creature, whether animal or vegetable, but both absorbs and produces it from the earliest to the latest breath; indeed, the weaker the creature, the more abundant that is."
This remark suggests a broad and bright light upon the life of the seas. Their tenants seem, for the most part, fœtuses in the gelatinous stage, which absorb and produce the mucous substance, permeate and saturate with it all the waters, and give to them the fecund and nourishing powers of a vast womb, in whose depths an infinite succession of generations, perpetually float, as in warm milk.
Let us make ourselves present in this divine work. Let us take a drop from the sea; in it we shall be able to espy the very process of the primitive creation. Nature's God is ever consistent; he does not work in one fashion to-day, and in another to-morrow. This drop of water, I doubt not, will tell us in its transformations, the tale of the Universe. Let us be patient, and observe.Who can foresee or guess the history of this drop of water? Which will it first produce, the vegetable-animal, or the animal-vegetable? Will this drop be the infusoriæ, the primitivemonad, which, vibrating, shall shortly becomevibrion, and ascending step by step, from rank to rank, polypus, coral, or pearl, may perchance in ten thousand years reach the dignity of insect? Will it produce the vegetable thread, so slight and silken that one would scarcely discern it, and yet already is no less than the first born hair, amorous and sensitive, which is so well known asVenus's hair? This is no fable—it is true natural history. This hair, of double nature, at once animal and vegetable, is, in fact, the commencement of life.
Look quite down into the depths of a vessel of water; at first you discover nothing; patience for a few moments and you perceive drops, atomies, that are moving. Bring a good glass into the service, and you see a whole cloud of these atomies. Are they gelatinous or fleecy? Under the microscope this seeming fleece becomes a group of filaments, of finest and silkiest threads; a thousand times finer, it is believed, than the finest hair that adorns the head of woman. You are now looking upon the first timid attempt of life that is struggling to achieve organization. These confervæ, these hair-weeds, are to be found wherever there is stagnant water,whether fresh or salt. They are the commencement of that double series of the primary vegetation of the sea which became terrestrial when the earth emerged from the watery depths. Once above and beyond the waters, they become the vast, the numberless Fungus-family; in the water, they are the hair-weeds, the many-formed and many-named Algæ.
This is the primitive, the indispensable element of organized vitality, and we find it even where we should, at the first glance deem it to be impossible. Even in the dark depths of the ferruginous waters, supersaturated with iron; even in the all but boiling hot springs, you find this mucus, this abounding mass of little creatures, moving, writhing, agitated ever, which to your first glance, seem only so many lifeless specks. You need not greatly care into what class our finite and dim science consigns them. If Candolle honors them with the title of animals, if Dujardin, on the other hand, degrades them into the low rank of the lowest vegetation—let us not stay to heed these mere names. Such as they are, all that they ask is that they may live and that their humble existence may open up the long series of beings which, but for them, would never be. These atomies, whether we call them living or dead, or passing from life to death, or vigorously struggling from death into organic life, are self-supporting, independentlystruggling, and ever taking and giving from and to the maternal waters, the life creating and the life supporting gelatine.
It really is without any approach, even, to probability, that they show us, as specimens of the first creation, the primitive organization, the fossil imprints, more or less complex, whether of animal or vegetable—of the Trilobites, for instance, already furnished with the superior organs—eyes, &c.,—or gigantic vegetation, widely branched and richly foliaged. It is beyond all computation more probable that these were preceded and heralded, and prepared, by species far more simple, but of such yielding and destructible matter that it could make no impress, leave no mark behind. How can we expect that those gelatinous, those almost liquid creatures shouldnot"die and make no sign" when we see that the hard shells are ground into very dust? In the South Seas we see fish with teeth so sharp, at once, and of such iron strength that they browse on the tough coral, even as the timid sheep browses on the tender grass-blades. Oh! Depend upon it, generation after generation of the soft gelatinous germs of life have breathed before nature put forth its robust Trilobite and its imperishable ferns.
Let us be just to these conservæ; let us restore to them their pretty obvious right to eldership in this gladand various world of ours. Be they animal or be they vegetable, or do they vibrate and struggle between both—let us at least do them justice, let us speak about them all that is evidently true.
Upon them, and at their expense, arose the immense, the really marvellous marine Flora.
At that starting point I will not hesitate to express my tender sympathy. For three very sound and sufficient reasons I love and I bless that vast vegetation; small or large, that vegetation has three lovely qualities:—
Firstly, how innocent are all its members. Not one of them all is poisonous. Vainly in the whole marine vegetation shall you search for one poisonous plant. Seek in every sea, and in every latitude, you will find the vegetation wholesome, genial, a blessing and a mercy.
Those innocent plants ask for nothing more than to nourish or to heal animality. Many of them, the Laminaires, for instance, contain a luscious sugar; and others, as, for instance, the Corsican or Irish Moss, have a health-restoring bitter; and all, without exception, contain a concentrated and most nourishing mucilage, not a few of them saviours to the weak, worn, perishing lungs of presumptuous and ungrateful man. Where we now exhibit iodide, the English formerly used nothingbut a confection of that same Corsican, or Irish, Moss.
The third characteristic of that vegetation is its marvellous amorousness. We cannot doubt that if we pay the slightest attention to its strange hymeneial metamorphoses, here is the striving to be, beyond being, to be potent beyond power. We see it in the fire flies and the like small things, and we see it no less, if we will only look for it, in the sea weeds which, at the consecrated moment, seem to quit their merely vegetable life and leap into animality.
Where do these wonders commence? Where are these first sketches of animality made? Where are we to look for the primitive scene of organization?
Formerly these things were hotly disputed; in our own day there seems to be a certain agreement in the learned world of Europe. I can find the reply to these questions in many recognized and authorized volumes, but I prefer to borrow it from an Essay recently crowned by the Academy of Sciences, and, consequently, shielded by its high, unquestionable authority.
Living creatures are found in the hot waters of eighty, even up to ninety, degrees. It is when the cooled globe gets down to that temperature that life becomes possible. The water has then absorbed, at least in part, that terrible element of death—carbonic acid gas. It becomes possible to breathe.
All the seas were at first like those parts of the great Pacific Ocean, which are comparatively shallow, and are studded with small, low islets. These islets are extinct craters of by-gone volcanoes; the seaman knows them only by the summits which the slow but steadfast toil of the coral insect has upheaved from the depths. But the depths between these volcanoes are probably themselves no less volcanic, and must have been, for the first essays of primitive creation, so many receptacles of life.
Popular tradition has, for ages past, attributed to volcanoes the guardianship of buried treasures, which from time to time give out to our upper world the gold that lies buried in the depths.—Poetic fiction, which yet has its firm foundation in fact. The volcanic regions have within themselves the treasure of our globe, potent virtues of fecundity. It is they that most largely dower the otherwise sterile earth; from the dust of their lavas, from their still warm ashes, life springs, expands, glows, and creates new life. We recognize the wealth of Vesuvius, and of Etna in the long offshoots that they send far into the Sea, and we know what a lovely paradise is formed under the Himalayas, by the volcanic circle of the vale of Cachemire. And the same thing is repeated in the lovely isles of the far South Sea.
Even under the least favorable circumstances, the vicinityof volcanoes, and the warm currents which are their concomitants, create and preserve animal life, even in the most desolate and dreary places. Amidst all the freezing horrors of the Antarctic pole, not far from the volcanic Erebus, Captain James Ross found living coral insects at the depth of a thousand fathoms below the surface of the frozen sea.
In the early ages of our world, innumerable volcanoes exerted a submarine action far more powerful than they exhibit now. Their clefts and their intermediate valleys allowed the marine mucus to accumulate in places, and to be electrified into life by the warm currents. No doubt themucusaffected those parts, fixed itself there and worked and fermented to the utmost of its young power. Its leaven was the attraction of the substance for itself. The creative elements, originally dissolved in the sea formed combinations, leagues, I had well nigh written marriages. First appeared, merely elementary lives—death following almost inseparably, indistinguishably, upon young life; and other lives following close upon, and nourished by, those wrecks and spoils, had firmer hold on life, became preparatory beings, slow but sure creators, which, thenceforth, began beneath the waters that eternal labor which, even in our own day and beneath our own scrutiny, they still continue.
The sea nourishing them all, gives to each that which best suits it. Each draws from that great nursing-mother, in its own fashion, and for its own especial behoof, that which it most needs, must have, to make it what we see of naked, or of shelled, of seeming vegetable, or of fierce, vigorous, and pugnacious life. And whether in life or in death, whether building actively or passively decomposing, they clothe the sad nudity of the virgin rocks, those daughters of the volcanic fires from which flaming and sterile, they were hurled from the planetary nucleus.
Quartz, basalt, porphyry, and semi-vitrified flints, each and all receive from these minute laborers a new, a more graceful, and a more fecund garb; from the fecund maternal milk (for such we must call themucusof the Sea) they absorb and restore, and thus build up, and secure, and fructify, and beautify, this, our habitable earth. It is from these more favoring localities that have arisen our primal species.
These works must have been commenced among the volcanic isles and islets, in the depths of their Archipelagoes, in those sinuous windings, those peaceful labyrinths where the tides enter timidly and gently, warm and sheltered cradles for the newly-born.
But the bolder strength of the fully-expanded flower, is to be sought for in, for instance, the vast depthsof the Indian Gulfs. There, the Sea is veritably a great artist. There she gives to the earth its most adorable forms, lively, loving, and lovable. With her assiduous caresses she rounds or slopes the shore, and gives it those maternal outlines, and I had almost said the visible tenderness of that feminine bosom on which the pleased child finds so softly safe a shelter, such warmth, such saving warmth, and rest.
CHAPTER III.
THE ATOM.
From the bottom of his nets a fisherman one day gave me three almost dying creatures, a sea hedge-hog, a sea star, and another star, a pretty ophiure, which still moved and soon lost its delicate arms. I gave them some sea water, but forgot them for two days, and when I again saw them, all were dead. On the surface of the water a thick gelatinous film had formed. I took an atom of this on the point of a needle; that atom, when placed under the microscope, showed me the following scene. A whirling crowd of short, thick, strongly built animals—Kolpodes—rushed to and fro as though intoxicated with their sense of life, delighted, I may say, that they were born and keeping their birthday with a perfectly bacchanalian joy, while microscopic eels—Vibrions—swam less than vibrated to spring forward.
Wearied with the contemplation of such movement,the eye, however, soon remarked, that all was not in motion, there were some vibrions yet stiff and still, and there were some intertwined in heaps which had not yet detached themselves and which looked as though expecting the moment of their deliverance.
In that living fermentation of still motionless creatures, the disorderly Kolpodes rushed and raged, hither and thither, regaling and fattening themselves at will.
And this grand spectacle was displayed within the compass of an atom of film taken on the point of a needle! How many such scenes would be enacted in the whole of the gelatinous film which had so promptly formed on the surface of the water containing three dead creatures! The time had been wonderfully put to profit. In two days the dead had made a world; for three animals that I had lost I had gained millions, abounding in youth, absorbed in a real fury of new life!
That infinite world of life which every where surrounds us was almost unknown until lately. Swammerdam and others, who formerly recognized it, were stopped at their first step; and it was as lately as the year 1830, that the magician Uhrenberg looked, revealed, and classified it. He studied the figure of these invisibles, their organization, their manners; he saw them absorb, digest, chase, and fiercely battle. Their generation remained a mystery to him. What isthe nature of their amours?Havethey any amours? For creatures so elementary, would nature go to the expense of a complicated generation? Or do they spring up spontaneously, and, in vulgar phrase, "like mushrooms?"
A great question! at which more than one naturalist smiles and shakes his head. One is so certain of having solved the great mystery of the world and secured, laid down, once and forever, the true laws of life! It is for Nature to obey! When, a hundred years ago, Réaumur was told that the female silk worm could produce alone and without the male, he denied it in the brief phrase—"Out of nothing, nothing comes." But the fact, often denied but always proved, is now thoroughly established and admitted, not only as to the silk worm, but as to the bee, certain butterflies, and still other creatures.
In all times, in every nation, both the learned and unlearned have said, "Out of death cometh life." It was especially supposed that the imperceptible animalculæ immediately sprang up from the wrecks of death. Even Harvey, who first laid down the law of generation, did not venture to contradict that ancient belief, for though he said every body comes from the egg, he immediately added—or from the dissolved body of a preceding life.
It is precisely the theory which has been so brilliantlyrevived by the experiments of M. Ponchet. He has established the fact that from the remains of the infusoriæ and other creatures, there proceeds a fecund jelly, the "prolific membrane" from which spring, not new beings, indeed, but the germs, the eggs from which new creatures will spring.
We live in an age of miracles. This is not to astonish us. Any one would formerly have been laughed at who had ventured to say that some animals, disobedient to the general laws of nature, take the liberty to breathe through their paws. The noble labors of Milne Edwards have brought this to light. And Cuvier and Blainville had observed, it is said, that other creatures, destitute of the regular organs of circulation, supply their place by the intestines, but those great naturalists deemed the fact so enormous and so incredible, that they did not venture to publish it. It is now perfectly established by Milne Edwards, M. de Quatrefages, &c.
Whatever may be thought of their birth, our atoms, when once born, present a world infinitely and admirably varied. All forms of life are there honorably represented. If they know themselves, they must consider that they compose among themselves a harmony so complete as to leave but little to desire.
They are not dispersed species, created apart; they clearly form a kingdom in which the various specieshave organized a great division of the vital labor. They have collective beings like our polypus or coral insect, engaged in the servitude of a common life; and they have their minute molluscs which already display their minute and delicate shells; they have their swiftly swimming fish and whirling insects, proud crustaceæ, miniatures of the future crabs, armed, like them, to the teeth; warrior, atoms that chase and devour inoffensive atoms.
And all this in an enormous and marvellous abundance, which shows the comparative poverty of our visible world. Without speaking of those Rhizopodes which have made their part of the Apennines and the Cordilleras,—the Foramineferes, alone, that numerous tribe of shelled atoms, amount, according to Charles d'Orbigny, to two thousand species. They are contemporary with every age of the earth; they present themselves at all the various depths of our thirty crises of the globe; sometimes varying a little in form, but always existing as species; identical witnesses of the life of the earth. In the present day the cold current from the south pole which the point of America cuts in two, sends forty species towards La Plata and forty towards Chili. But the great scene of their creation and organization appears to be the warm stream of the sea which flows from the Antilles. The northern currents kill them. The great paternal torrent driftsmyriads of their dead to Newfoundland in our ocean, whose bottom is paved with them.
When the illustrious godfather of the atoms, Ehrenberg, baptised them and introduced them to the scientific world, he was accused of being too favorable to them, and of exaggerating the character of those little creatures. He declared them to be a complicated and elevated organization. So liberally did he endow them, that he gave them a hundred and twenty stomachs. The visible world became jealous of these invisibles, and, by a violent reaction, Dujardin reduced them to the lowest degree of simplicity. The asserted organs he treated as mere appearances; but, as he could not deny their obvious and great powers of absorption, he granted them the gift of being able to improvise stomachs proportioned to what they had to swallow. M. Pouchet does not coincide with this opinion, but rather inclines to that of Ehrenberg.
What is incontestable and admirable in these atoms is the vigor of movement.
Many have all the appearance of a precocious individuality. They do not long remain subject to the communistic life led by their immediate superiors, the true Polypes. Very many of these invisibles are individuals at the first leap; that is to say, that, at the first moment of their existence, they can come and go aloneand at their own will; true citizens of the world whose movements depend only upon themselves.
Whatever can be seen or imagined of various modes of locomotion in the visible world, is equalled, even surpassed, among these invisibles. The impetuous whirl of a potent star, of a sun which attracts around him, as his planets, the weaker one which he meets, the more irregular course of the eccentric comet, the graceful undulation of the slender one in the water or upon the land, the rocking barque that veers right round in an instant, the rush of the swift shark and the slow crawl of the wretched sloth—all and every movement, clumsy or graceful, slow or swift, is to be found in the various species of atoms. And with what a marvellous simplicity of machinery! Here you see one, a mere thread, advancing, twisting, a veritable elastic cork-screw; there you see one that for oar and rudder has only an undulating tail or a pair of little vibrating eye-lashes. The beautiful little polypus-worms, like flowers in a vase, anchor together upon an isle—a little plant, or a miniature crab, and then separate and cast off by detaching their delicate peduncle.
What is even more surprising than the organs of motion, is what we may term the expression, the attitudes, the original signs of character and temper. You may recognize here the apathetic, there the vivacious andfantastic, some all alert for war, and others, as it would seem, fretful and agitated without any apparent cause. Again, you will occasionally see a whole crowd of remarkably quiet and peaceable atoms suddenly dispersed and knocked over by some scapegrace atom, conscious of superior strength, and spoiling for a fight.
A prodigious comedy is that of our atoms! They seem to be satirically rehearsing the various farces which are played in our own noble and serious world, of atoms of larger growth!
At the head of the infusoriæ, we must make respectful mention of the majestic giants, the highest type of motion and of strength, slow, but terrible and great.
Take some moss from a roof, steep it for a few hours in water, then place it under the microscopic inspection, and you behold a vast, a mighty animal, the elephant or the whale of the invisibles, moving with a youthful grace which those large animals do not always display. Respect this king of all the atoms, this rotifer, so called because on either side of his head he has a wheel; these wheels are his organs of locomotion, like the paddle-wheels of a steamship, or perhaps they also serve him as his arms of chase to catch his small game, the inferior and peaceable atoms! All fly, all yield to the rotifer, save one; one atom only fears nothing, yields nothing, but trusts to his superior weapons. He is a monster, but he is providedwith superior senses. He has two great gleaming, purplish eyes. He is slow, but he can see, and he is admirably armed. To his strong paws he adds strong, sharp talons, which serve him to hold on with, and, at need, to serve him in the fight.
Potent initial essays of Nature, that with such small expenditure of matter, can create in such majestic fashion! Sublime first note of the sublime overture. These,—of what consequence is mere size?—have a colossal power of absorption and of movement, far beyond that which will be given to the enormous animals that are classed so much higher in the animal scale.
The oyster fixed upon its rock, the crawling slug, are to the rotifers creatures as disproportioned as man to the Alps or Cordilleras—so disproportioned that one cannot compare them by glance, hardly by reflection and calculation. Yet among those animal mountains, where will you find the vivacity, the ardor of vitality, displayed by the rotifer? What a fall we have as we ascend! Our atoms are too vivacious, dazzlingly agile, and these gigantic beasts are smitten with paralysis. What if the rotifer could conceive, for instance, the superb, the colossal starred sponge, which one may see in the Museum at Paris? It is to the rotifer what this globe, with its twenty-seven thousand miles of circumference is to man. Well! If the rotifer could compare himself to the huge sponge, rely upon it that therotifer would move his wheels in utmost excitement, and exclaim—"I am great."
Ah! Rotifer, rotifer! we should despise no one, and nothing.
I am well convinced of your advantages and your superiority. But who knows if the captive and slumbering life which you, for instance, despise in the oyster or the snail, or the slug, be not in truth a progress? Your wild vertiginous movement, and vivacity, by no means secure a passage towards higher destinies; for that passage, nature prefers a motion of less enchantment. She enters the dark sepulchre of that melancholy communism in which element reckons but for little; she teaches how to dominate individual anxieties and ambitions, and to concentrate substances for the benefit of superior lives.
She sleeps there, for a time, like theSleeping Beauty in the Wood. But sleep, captivity, enchantment, be it what it may, it is not Death. In the sponge, seemingly so dead, what life there is! It moves not, breathes not, has no organs of circulation, or of sense,—and yet it lives. How know we that, do you ask? Twice in every year the sponge reproduces. She lives after her fashion, and even more richly than many others. At the proper day, small spheres leave the mother sponge, armed with minute fins, which enable them for a short time to float about in full liberty, but soon comingto anchor, they remain there, growing, reproducing, till the sponge-hunter carries them to the habitations of man, to the service of the greater enslaver, man, the civilized.
Thus, in the apparent absence of senses, and of all organization, in that mysterious enigma, at the doubtful threshold of life, generation opens up to us the visible world by which we are to ascend. As yet there is nothing, and in the bosom of that nothingness maternity already appears. As with the fabled gods of antique and mysterious Egypt, as with that old Isis and Osiris, who begat before their birth, here, also, Love exists before Being.
CHAPTER IV.
BLOOD-FLOWER.
At the heart of the globe, in the warm waters of the Line, and upon their volcanic bottoms, the sea so superabounds in life that it seems impossible for it to balance its multitudinous creations. Overpassing purely vegetable life, its earliest products are organized, sensitive, living.
But these animals adorn themselves with a singular splendor of botanic beauty, the splendid liveries of an eccentric and most luxuriant Flora. Far as the eye can reach, you see what, judging from the forms and colors, you take for flowers, and shrubs, and plants. But those plants have their movements, those shrubs are irritable, those flowers shrink and shudder with an incipient sensitiveness which promises, perception andwill.
Charming oscillation, fascinating motion, most gracefulequivoque! On the confines of the two kingdoms of animal and vegetable life, Mind, under those faëry oscillations gives token of its first awakening, its dawn, its morning twilight, to be followed by a glorious and glowing noon. Those brilliant colors, those pearly and enamelled flashings, tell at once of the past night and the thought of the dawning day.
Thought! may we venture to call it so? No, it is still a Dream, which by degrees will clear up into Thought.
Already, in the north of Africa, over the other side of the Cape, the vegetable kingdom, which reigns alone in the temperate zone, sees itself rivalled, surpassed. The great enchantment progresses, increases, as we near the Equator. On the land,—tree, shrub, flower, weed, are proud and gorgeous, flaming in every bright color, delicate in every soft shade, and beneath the waters' slime and the ruddy corals. Beside parterres, that display rainbow beauties of every color and every tint, commence the stone plants; the madrepores, whose branches (should we not rather say their hands and fingers?) flourish in a rose-tinted snow; like peach or apple blossoms. Seven hundred leagues on either side of the Equator, you sail through this faëry land of magical illusion and wondrous beauty.
There are doubtful creatures, the Corallines, for instance, that are claimed by all the three kingdoms.They tend towards the animal, they tend towards the mineral, and, finally, are assigned to the vegetable. Perchance they form the real point at which Life obscurely and mysteriously rises from the slumber of the stone, without utterly quitting that rude starting-point, as if to remind us, so high placed and so haughty, of the right of even the humble mineral to rise into animation, and of the deep and eternal aspiration that lies buried, but busy, in the bosom of Nature.
"The fields and forests of our dry land," says Darwin, "appear sterile and empty, if we compare them with those of the sea." And, in fact, all who traverse the marvellous transparent Indian seas are thrilled, stirred, startled, by the phantasmagoria that flashes up from their far clear depths. Especially surprising is the interchange between animal and vegetable life of their especial and characteristic appearances. The soft impressible gelatinous plants, with rounded organs, that are neither precisely leaves nor precisely stalks, the delicacy of their animal curves—those Hogarthian "lines of beauty," seem to ask us to believe that they are veritable animals, while the real animals, on the other hand, in form, in color, in all, seem to do their utmost to be mistaken for vegetables. Each kingdom skilfully imitates the other. These have the solidity, the quasi permanence, of the tree; the others alternately expand and fade like the evanescent flower.Thus the sea Anemone opens as a roseate and pearly flower, or as a granite star with deep blue eyes; but when her corollæ have given forth an Anemone daughter, you see the fair mother droop, fade, die.
Far otherwise variable, that Proteus of the waters, the Halcyon, takes every form and every color. Now plant, now flower, it spreads itself out into a fanlike beauty, becomes a bushy hedge, or rounds itself into a graceful bouquet. But all this is so ephemeral, so fugitive, so timid, so shrinking, that at the slightest touch of the softest breath it disappears, and returns on the instant into the womb of the common mother. In these slight and fugitive forms you at once recognize the twin sisters of the sensitive plants of our earth; closing up, as they close at the first breath of evening.
When you gaze down upon a coral reef, you see the depths carpeted, many colored flowers with fungi, masses of snowy brilliancy; every hill, every valley, of the great deep, is variegated with a thousand forms, and a thousand colors, from the ruddy and outstretched branches of the coral, to the deep, rich, velvety green of the Cariophylles or violets, which seek their food by the gentle motion of the richly golden stamens. Above this lower world, as if to shade them from the too glowing kiss of the ardent sun, waves a whole forest of giant and dwarf trees and shrubs, and from tree to tree feathery spirals stretch and interlace like the lovingand embracing tendrils of the vine, but finer in tendril and infinitely more splendid in their variegated and contrasting, yet singularly harmonizing colors.
This glorious sight inspires, yet agitates us; it is a dream, a vertigo; that Fay of the shifting mirage, the Sea, adding to these colors her own prismatic tints, fading, reappearing, now here, now gone, a capricious and fitful inconstancy, a hesitation, a doubt. Have we really seen it, this lovely scene? No, it was not so. Was it an entity, or a delusion? Yes, yes, it must be real, there are certainly very real beings there, for I see whole hosts of them lodged there and sporting there. The molluscs confide in that reality, for there you can see their pearly shells reflecting lights, now flashing and brilliant, and anon of a most tender delicacy; and the crab, too, believes in it, for see how he hastens on his sidelong path. Strange fish, vast and curious monsters of the deep, move hither and thither in their many colored vesture of purple and gold, and deep azure and delicate pink; and that delicate star, the Ophiure agitates his delicate and elegant arms.
In this phantasmagoria the arborescent Madrepore more gravely displays his less brilliant colors. His beauty is chiefly that of form.
But the chief attraction of the aspect of this vast community is in its entirety; the individual is humble, but the republic is imposing. Here you have thestrong assemblage of aloes and cactus; there you have the superbly branching antlers of the Deer; and anon, you see the vast stretch of the vigorous branches of the giant cedar stretching at first horizontally, but tending to advance upward and upward still.
Those forms at present despoiled of the thousands and tens of thousands of living flowers, which should cover and enliven them have, perhaps, in that stern nudity an additional attraction for the mind. I love to look upon the trees in winter, when their bared boughs tell us and show us what they really are. And thus it is with the Madrepores. In their present nudity, when from pictures they have become statues, it seems as though they were about to reveal to us the whole secret of the minute populations of which they are at once the creation and the monument. Many of them seem to write to us in strange characters, to speak to us in strange tones. Their interlacings evidently have a something to tell us, could we but understand them. But who shall be their interpreter; who shall give us the keynote to their harmony, mysterious harmony—but Harmony doubtless?
How much less significant is the Bee architecture in its cold, severe, geometry! That is the produce of life, but here we look upon life itself. The stone was not simply the base and shelter of this people; it was itself a previous people, an anterior generation, which,gradually overtopped by the younger, assumed its present consistence. And all the movements of that first community are still strikingly visible, as details of another Herculaneum, or Pompeii. But here everything is accomplished without catastrophe, without violence, by orderly and natural progress; all testifies to serenity and peace.
Every sculptor will here admire the forms of a marvellous art which has achieved such infinite variety of forms, improving upon all arts of ornamentation. But we have to reflect upon something far beyond mere form. The arborescent variety on which the activity of these laborious tribes has been so wonderfully employed, is the effort of a thought, of a captive liberty, seeking the guiding thread in the deep and mazy labyrinth, and timidly feeling its way upward towards the light, and gently and gracefully working out its emancipation from communist life.
I have in my possession two of these little trees differing from each other, but of like species. No vegetable is comparable to them. One, purely white as the most immaculate alabaster, has an inexhaustible wealth of buds, and blossoms and flowers, on every one of its many spreading branches. The other, less white and less spreading, has also its whole world upon its branches. Exquisitely beautiful are they both; alike yet unlike, twins of innocence and fraternity. Oh who shallexplain to us the mystery of the infant soul that created these faëry things! We feel that it must be at work, captive and yet free; captive in a captivity so beloved that though still tending upward towards freedom, it yet cares not fully to achieve it.
The arts have not yet seized upon those wonders from which the world has derived so much benefit. The beautiful statue of Nature (at the entrance of the Jardin des Plantes) should have been surrounded by them; Nature should only be exhibited as she ever lives, amidst faëry triumphs, enthroning her on a mountain of her own beauties. Her first born, the Madrepores, would have furnished the lower strata with their meanders, their stars and their alabaster branches; while above, their sisters, with their bodies and their fine hair would have made a living bed, softly to embrace with caressing love the divine Mother in her dream of eternal maternity.
Painting has succeeded in these things no better than sculpture. Her animated flowers have neither the expression nor the true, pure, delicate coloring of the animated flowers, of the nature of which our colored engravings give but a poor and mechanical idea, altogether destitute of the unctuous softness, suppleness, and warm emotion of the flowers of the fields, the woods, the gardens, or animated flowers of the seas. Enamels, even attempted as by Palissy, are too hard and cold; admirablefor reptiles and the scales of fish, they are too glaring to resemble these tender and soft creatures that have not even a skin. The little exterior lungs of the annelides, the slight net work in which certain of the Polypes float, the sensitive and ever-moving hairs which support the Medusæ, are objects not merely delicate to sight, but affecting to imagination. They are of every shade, fine and vague, yet warm; as though a balmy breath had become visible. You see an ever-varying, ever-moving rainbow that delights your eye; but for them it is a very serious matter, the creating of that marvellous rainbow, of various forms and colors; it is their blood and their weak life converted into changing hues and tints, and lights and shades. Take care! Do not stifle that little floating soul, which mutely, but oh how eloquently, tells you its secret in those varying and palpitating colors.
The colors do not long survive, and their creators, the Madrepores, themselves survive only in their base, which has been called inorganic, but which in reality is condensed and solidified life.
Women, who have a more delicate and penetrating sense of the beautiful than we have, do not thus mistake; they have, at the least, confusedly divined that one of these trees, the coral, is a living thing, and thence the just favor in which they hold it. Vainlydid science tell them that coral was mere stone, and then that it was a plant, they knew quite differently.
"Madame, why is it that you prefer this tree of a dubious red, to all the precious stones?"
"Monsieur, it suits my complexion. Rubies are too vivid, they make me look pale, while this, somewhat duller, rather more favorably contrasts fairness."
The lady is quite right; the coral and the lady are related. In the coral, as in the lip and the cheek of the lady, it is iron, according to Voyel, which makes the one red and the others roseate.
"But, Madame, these brilliant stones have an incomparable polish, and dazzling lustre."
"Yes, but the coral has something of the softness and even the warmth of the skin. As soon as I put it on, it seems to become a part of myself."
"But Madame, there are much finer reds than that of your coral necklace."
"Doctor, leave me this, I love it. Why? That I know not; or if there is a reason, that which will do as well as any, is that its Eastern and true name is 'the Blood-Flower.'"
CHAPTER V.
THE WORLD MAKERS.
Our Museum of Natural History, within its too narrow limits, contains a faëry palace in every part of which we see the genius of metamorphoses of Lamarck and Geoffroy. In the dark lower hall the Madrepores serve as the base of the more and more living world that rises, stage above stage, above. Higher up the superior creatures of the sea display their energy of organization, and prepare the life of the terrestrials, and above these, Mammiferæ, over which the lovely birds spread their wings and almost seem to be still singing! The multitude of visitors pass quickly and with small show of interest from the Madrepores, those elder born of the globe, and hasten to the light and to the presence of things of brightest beauty, mother of pearl, the richly painted wings of butterflies, and the plumage of birds. I, who stop longer below, often find myself quite alone in that dark little gallery.
I love that solemn crypt of the great scientific Church. There I best can feel the sacred soul, the still present spirit of our great masters, their great, their sublime effort, and the immortal audacity of our voyagers and travellers, the intrepid collectors of such a wealth of whatever is beautiful or instructive. Wherever their bones may lie they themselves are still present in the Museum by the treasures which they have bequeathed, treasures which some of them have paid for with their lives.
On the 15th of last October, having remained in that crypt somewhat late, I had some difficulty in reading the label on some Madrepores—that label bore the name of "Lamarck."
A sudden warmth, a religious glow, thrilled through my heart and brain.
"Lamarck!" Great name, and already antique! It is as though among the tombs of Saint Denis we should suddenly read the name of Clovis. The glory, the strifes, the royal triumphs, of his successor, have obscured somewhat the name of that blind Homer of the Museum, who, with the instinct of genius created, organized, and named the previously almost unknown class of Invertebrates; a class, nay, a whole world, a vast abyss of soft half organized life still destitute of vertebræ; that bony centralization and essential support of personality. These are all the more interestingbecause they are obviously the earliest of all—those humble and so long neglected tribes. Réaumur placed the Crocodiles among the insects. The proud Buffon deigned not to know even the names of humble Invertebrates, he excluded them altogether from the Olympus at Versailles which he erected to Nature. These great populations, so obscure, so confused, which, nevertheless, prepared everything and abound every where, remained exiled from the world of science until the coming of Lamarck. It was precisely the elders that were thus excluded, elders so numerous that to exclude them was, in some sort, to close the eyes and bar the gate against nature herself.
The genius of the Metamorphoses was emancipated by botany and chemistry. It was a bold but most precious thing to take Lamarck, from the Botany in which he had passed his life, and remove him to the vast world of animality. That ardent genius, trained in miracles by the transformations of plants, and full of faith in the unity of life, next drew the animals, and that vast animal, the Globe, from the state of petrifaction in which they so long had lain. Half blind, he intrepidly treated a thousand things which the clear sighted scarcely dared to approach. At least, he infused his fire into them, and Geoffroy, Cuvier and Blainville found them warm and living.
"All is living, or has been," said Lamarck; "everythingis life, either present or past." Great revolutionary effort, that, against inert matter; effort proceeding even to suppress and banish the inorganic! No longer any actual death. That which has lived may sleep; and yet preserve latent life, the capacity to revive. Who is really dead? No one. What? Nothing.
This dictum, so novel, and so bold, swelled the sails of our scientific age with a strong and a favoring gale; it has urged on enquiries, such as but for it we should never have dreamed of making. History, or Natural History, we demand of every thing, who are you—and every where the answer is, "I am Life," and, thus, Death retreats before the bold advance and eagle glance of science, and Mind moves onward still, conquering and to conquer.
Among these resuscitations, I first note my Madrepores, taking the interest of life, though previously scorned, or unnoticed, as dead stone. When Lamarck collected and explained them at the Museum, they were detected in the mystery of their activity, in their immense creations, and they exemplified how a world is made. That once known, it was at once suspected that if the earth makes the animal, the animal also makes the earth; and that each aids the other in the office of creation.
Animality is every where, filling every thing and peopling every thing. We find the remains or the imprintof it even in the minerals, as the statuary marble and alabaster, which have passed through the crucible of the most destructive fires. At every advance, in our knowledge of the existing, we discover an enormous past of animal life. As soon as our improvements in Optics enabled us to discover and to watch the Infusoriæ, we behold them making mountains and paving the ocean. The hard silex is a mass of animalcules, the sponge is an animated silex. Our limestones are all animals; Paris is built with infusoriæ, a part of Germany rests upon a newly buried bed of coral. Infusoriæ, coral, shells, chalk and lime. They are constantly taking from the Ocean, but the fish, which devour the coral, restore it as chalk, and restore it to the waters whence it came. Thus the Coral Sea in its labor of production, of upheaving, in its constructions incessantly augmented or diminished, built, ruined, and rebuilt, is an immense fabric of limestone which is continually oscillating between its two lives;—theactinglife of the day—the other life thatwill actto-morrow.
Foster quite justly decides that these circular islands are the craters of volcanoes, raised up by the polypes. He has been contradicted, but wrongly so. Upon no other hypothesis can we account for this identity of figure. There is always the same ring of about a hundred paces in diameter, very low, beaten on the outside by the waves, but enclosing a tranquil basin. A few plants ofthree or four species, here and there, crown the basin with verdure. The water is of the most beautiful green. The enclosing ring is of white sand, the residue of dissolved coral, contrasting with the blue of the Ocean. Beneath the salt water, our little laborers are at work, the stronger and bolder at the breakers, the weaker and more timid on the smoother sides.
This is not a very varied world. But wait. The winds and the currents are constantly at work to enrich it; come a good tempest, and all the neighboring isles will be laid under contribution to enrich this rising one. And in this is one of the most magnificent functions of the Tempest; the greater, the wilder, and the more sweeping, the more fecund it is. A water-spout passes over an island; the torrent that it produces carries with it slime, rubbish, plants, living or dead, and even whole forests, which the waves carry to the neighboring isles, raising, and at the same time enriching, their soil.
A great messenger of life, and one of the most transportable, is the solid cocoanut. Not only does it travel well, but, when thrown upon shoal or rock, if it find only a little poor white sand, which would support nothing else, the cocoanut contents itself there, finds brackish water not a jot less agreeable than the freshest; germinates, thrives, grows into a robust cocoa tree. A tree being thus planted, fresh water comes, falling leaves createearth, other trees follow, and at length we see the noble palm grove, which arrests the vapors, which at length form a rivulet or river, which, flowing from the center of the isle, make an opening of fresh water in the cincture of white sand, and thus keep the polypes, inhabitants only of salt water, at a respectful distance.
Of the rapidity with which the Polypes do their work, we have some curious proofs. In forty days' harboring at Rio Janeiro, boats were wholly destroyed; in a strait near Australia, there were formerly only twenty-six islets; there are already a hundred and fifty—well recognized: and the English admiralty believes that there are even more; and in twenty years hence the whole strait, forty leagues in length, will be so completely blocked up as to be unnavigable.
The eastern shoal of Australia is three hundred and sixty leagues, (one hundred and twenty-seven without any interruption,) and that of New Caledonia one hundred and forty-five leagues; the single shoal of the Maldives is almost five hundred miles long, and groups of isles in the Pacific are four hundred leagues long, by a hundred and fifty wide. To all this work of the Polypes, we must add, that the banks of the isle of France, and the shallows of the Red Sea, are continually rising. Tunis and its environs present a wholly animal world; and the rocks present forms so strange, and colors so splendid, that the spectator is amazed anddazzled. You see them in a space of several leagues of shallow sea water—probably not averaging more than a foot of depth, working calmly, but perseveringly at their business of creating.
Their first intelligent observer was Forster, companion of Cook, who found them at work, caught them in the very fact of their great conspiracy to make, noiselessly and marvellously, whole chains of islands, to be by degrees converted into a continent.
All this passed before his eyes, as it might have done in the first days of the world. From the submarine depths, the central fire throws up a dome or cone, which opens, and its lava forms a circular crater. But the volcanic strength becomes exhausted, and the cooling lava becomes covered with a living jelly, an animal multitude, whose perpetual exudation of mucus continually raises the circle higher and higher, to low water mark; no higher, or they would be dry; no lower, because they would lack the light. If they have no special organ with which to perceive the light, it circumfuses, penetrates, permeates their whole being. The glowing sun of the tropics, which traverses right through their transparent little frames, seems to have for them all the irresistible attraction of magnetism. When the tide ebbs and leaves them uncovered, they, nevertheless, remain open, and drink in the vivid light.
Dumont d'Urville, who so often coasted among theirlittle isles, says:—"It is a real pain to see, so near by the peace of that interior basin, and to see all around shallow waters, beneath which are the shelving rocks, tenanted by the coral insects, in perfect security, while we are enduring all the shocks of a raging tempest." But this amiable community and its edifice are a shoal, a terrible lee shore, scarcely hidden by the shallow waters; touch upon that shoal and you will be crushed. Trust not to anchors among those peaked and jagged rocks; your cables, however good, would soon wear and snap. The seaman's anxiety is extreme, in those long nights when the Southern surges drive him among these shoals, at once so rugged and yet as cutting as razors.
To such accusations as these, our innocent shoal-makers reply—"Time—give us only time, and these rocks will become hospitable, tenanted, fruitful. These banks, joined on to their neighboring banks, will no longer have these terrible threatenings for the seaman. We are preparing a spare world to replace your old one should it perish. Ingrates! Come some great and overwhelming catastrophe to your old world, if, as some one among you has said, the sea turns from one pole to the other in every ten thousand years, and you perchance will bless us, and hail with joy these southern isles which we are making, this huge southern continentthat we are preparing. Confess, now, that if, unhappily, ships do occasionally perish on these shoals, our work here, nevertheless, is useful, and good, and great. Our improvised world may not unjustly be proud. To say nothing about the beauty of its triumphant colors, before which those of your earth grow pale; to say nothing about the graceful curves and circles on which we pride ourselves,—how many are the problems, which, insolvable to you, find their solution among us! The division of labor, a charming variety combined with a great regularity, a geometrical order, softened and made graceful and gracious by a rising liberty—where, among you men, will you find these so combined as from the beginning we have combined them among us? Our incessant labor in relieving the sea-water of its salts, creates those currents which give it life and healthful power. We are the very spirits of the Sea, giving, as we do, her motion."
"And the sea is not ungrateful; she nourishes us at fixed periods; and not less punctually comes the glowing sun to caress us and dower us with brilliant colors. We are the beloved, the favored workers of the Deity, entrusted by him with the first rude sketches and outlines of his worlds, and all our juniors upon this globe, need us, and are indebted to us. Our friend the Cocoa tree, that inaugurates terrestrial life upon our isle,could not do so but from our dust. In its far back origin, vegetable life is our liberal gift, and, made rich by us, it nourishes the superior creation."
"But what need of other animals? We are within our own circle complete, harmonious and sufficing; with us the circle of creation might be closed. For as God crowns his isle on his old volcano of fire, he has created a volcano of life, and expansion of that living paradise. He has created all that he needs, and now He may repose."
Not yet, not yet. A creation must rise above yours, a thing which you do not fear. That rival is not the tempest, you would brave it; nor the fresh water, you would build beside it. It is not even the earth, which by degrees is invading your constructions. What, then, is that other power? In yourself, in Polypes, there is an ambition to cease to be one. In your Republic there is a certain creature who in constant anxiety and yearning, repeats that the perfection of this vegetating existence is not real life. It constantly dreams of a freer and more expanded life, navigating hither and thither, penetrating and viewing the unknown world even at the hazard of shipwreck;—that thing is—the Soul.
CHAPTER VI.
DAUGHTER OF THE SEAS.
I passed the early part of 1858 in the pleasant little town of Hyères which, from afar, gazes down on the sea, the islets and the peninsula by which its coast is sheltered. The sea, seen from this distance, is even more potently seductive than when one is on its very shore. The paths leading to it, whether we pass between gardens with their hedges of jasmin and myrtle, or, ascending some little, pass through the olive grounds and a little wood of pines and laurels, are exceedingly tempting. The wood by no means hinders us from catching, now and then, a glance of the bright sea. The place is, by no means unjustly, called Fair-Coast. Often in the fine days of its gentle winters we met there a most interesting invalid, a young foreign princess who had come thither from a distance of five hundred leagues, in the hope of adding some span to her fading and failing life. That life, short as it was, hadbeen a hard and sad one. Scarcely had she become a glad wife when she found herself rudely threatened by Death. And now she dragged on from day to day of suffering, supported and most tenderly treated by him who lived only for her and hoped not to survive her. If wishes and prayers could have preserved her she would still live; for all prayed for her, especially the poor. But spring came, and bloomed and ended, and on one of those April days whose genial influence revives every thing we saw the two shadows pass, pale as the wandering Elysian spectres of Virgil.
Sad at heart with sympathy, we reached the gulf. Between the bold rocks, the pools left by the sea contained some little creatures that had not been able to accompany the retreating tide. Some shelled creatures were there, self-concentrated and suffering from want of water, and amongst them, unshelled, unsheltered, lay the living parasol, that for some, anything, rather than good reason, we call theMedusa. Why has that name of terror been given to a creature so charming? Never before had my attention been attracted to those wrecked beauties, which we so often see high and dry upon the sea shore at low ebb tide. This especial one was small, not larger than my hand, but singularly beautiful, in its delicate colors, passing so lightly from tint to tint. It was of an opal whiteness, into which passed, as in a light cloud, a crown of the most delicate lilac.The wind had turned it over, so that its lilac filaments floated above, while the umbrella, that is to say, its proper body, lay upon the rock. Much bruised in that tender body, it was also wounded and mutilated in its fine filaments, or hairs, which are its sensitive organs of respiration, absorption, and even love. And the whole creature thus thrown upside down was receiving in full force the rays of the Provençal sun, severe in its first awakening and rendered still more severe by the dryness of the occasional gusts of the south-westerly winds, theMistralof our Provençal coasts. The transparent creature was thus doubly pierced, doubly tormented, accustomed as it was to the caressing sea, and unprovided with the resisting epidermis of land animals.
Close to her dried up lagune were other lagunes still full of water, and communicating with the sea. Within a few paces of her, then, was safety, but for her who had no organs of locomotion, excepting her undulating hairs, it was impossible to traverse even that petty distance, and it seemed that remaining under that fierce sun and exposed to the arid blasts of that wind she very speedily must faint, die, and be actually dissolved.
Nothing more ephemeral, more delicate than these daughters of the sea. Some of them are so fluid that they dissolve and disappear as soon as taken from thesea. Such is that slight band of azure called theGirdle of Venus. The Medusa, a little more solid has all the more trouble in dying. Was she dying or already dead? I do not readily believe in death, and believing that she still lived I resolved to convey her to a lagune of salt water. To say the truth I felt some repugnance to touching her. The delicious creature with her visible innocence, and rainbow of tender colors, looked like a trembling jelly which must slip from one's touch or dissolve in one's grasp. However, I conquered this repugnance, slid my hand gently beneath her and as I turned her over her hairs fell down into their natural position, when used in swimming. I thus carried her to the water, where she sank without giving the slightest sign of life. I walked about the shore, but in about ten minutes returned to look after my Medusa. She was swimming under water, her hairs undulating gracefully beneath her; and slowly, but safely, she had left the rock far behind her.
Poor creature, perhaps she got wrecked or stranded again, ere long, for it is impossible to navigate with weaker means or in a fashion more dangerous. The Medusæ fear the shore where so many hard substances hurt them, and in the open sea they are liable to be overturned at every gust of wind, in which case, their swimming-feathers being above instead of below theirbodies, they are carried hither and thither, at random, upon the waves, as the prey of fish or the delight of birds who find sport and profit in seizing them.