Charles Kingsley ......................................................................................................................................1

Dedication. ...............................................................................................................................................1

I CANNOT forego the pleasure of dedicating this little book to you; excepting of course the opening

exhortation (needless enough in your case) to those who have not yet discovered the value of Natural History.

Accept it as a memorial of pleasant hours spent by us already, and as an earnest, I trust, of pleasant hours to

be spent hereafter (perhaps, too, beyond this life in the nobler world to come), in examining together the

You are going down, perhaps, by railway, to pass your usual six weeks at some wateringplace along the

coast, and as you roll along think more than once, and that not overcheerfully, of what you shall do when

you get there. You are halftired, halfashamed, of making one more in the ignoble army of idlers, who

saunter about the cliffs, and sands, and quays; to whom every wharf is but a "wharf of Lethe," by which they

rot "dull as the oozy weed." You foreknow your doom by sad experience. A great deal of dressing, a lounge

in the clubroom, a stare out of the window with the telescope, an attempt to take a bad sketch, a walk up one

parade and down another, interminable reading of the silliest of novels, over which you fall asleep on a bench

in the sun, and probably have your umbrella stolen; a purposeless fineweather sail in a yacht, accompanied

by many ineffectual attempts to catch a mackerel, and the consumption of many cigars; while your boys

deafen your ears, and endanger your personal safety, by blazing away at innocent gulls and willocks, who go

off to die slowly; a sport which you feel to be wanton, and cowardly, and cruel, and yet cannot find in your

heart to stop, because "the lads have nothing else to do, and at all events it keeps them out of the

billiardroom;" and after all, and worst of all, at night a soulless RECHAUFFE of thirdrate London

frivolity: this is the lifeindeath in which thousands spend the golden weeks of summer, and in which you

but does it not seem to you, that there must surely be many a thing worth looking at earnestly, and thinking

over earnestly, in a world like this, about the making of the least part whereof God has employed ages and

ages, further back than wisdom can guess or imagination picture, and upholds that least part every moment by

laws and forces so complex and so wonderful, that science, when it tries to fathom them, can only learn how

little it can learn? And does it not seem to you that six weeks' rest, free from the cares of town business and

the whirlwind of town pleasure, could not be better spent than in examining those wonders a little, instead of

wandering up and down like the many, still wrapt up each in his little world of vanity and selfinterest,

unconscious of what and where they really are, as they gaze lazily around at earth and sea and sky, and have

Why not, then, try to discover a few of the Wonders of the Shore? For wonders there are there around you at

every step, stranger than ever opiumeater dreamed, and yet to be seen at no greater expense than a very little

Perhaps you smile, in answer, at the notion of becoming a "Naturalist:" and yet you cannot deny that there

must be a fascination in the study of Natural History, though what it is is as yet unknown to you. Your

daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing "Pteridomania," and are collecting and buying ferns,

with Ward's cases wherein to keep them (for which you have to pay), and wrangling over unpronounceable

names of species (which seem to he different in each new Fernbook that they buy), till the Pteridomania

seems to you somewhat of a bore: and yet you cannot deny that they find an enjoyment in it, and are more

active, more cheerful, more selfforgetful over it, than they would have been over novels and gossip, crochet

and Berlinwool. At least you will confess that the abomination of "Fancywork" that standing cloak for

dreamy idleness (not to mention the injury which it does to poor starving needlewomen) has all but

vanished from your drawingroom since the "Ladyferns" and "Venus's hair" appeared; and that you could

not help yourself looking now and then at the said "Venus's hair," and agreeing that Nature's real beauties

were somewhat superior to the ghastly woollen caricatures which they had superseded.

You cannot deny, I say, that there is a fascination in this same Natural History. For do not you, the London

merchant, recollect how but last summer your douce and portly headclerk was seized by two keepers in the

act of wandering in Epping Forest at dead of night, with a dark lantern, a jar of strange sweet compound, and

innumerable pocketfuls of pillboxes; and found it very difficult to make either his captors or you believe

that he was neither going to burn wheatricks, nor poison pheasants, but was simply "sugaring the trees for

moths," as a blameless entomologist? And when, in selfjustification, he took you to his house in Islington,

and showed you the glazed and corked drawers full of delicate insects, which had evidently cost him in the

collecting the spare hours of many busy years, and many a pound, too, out of his small salary, were you not a

little puzzled to make out what spell there could be in those "useless" moths, to draw out of his warm bed,

twenty miles down the Eastern Counties Railway, and into the damp forest like a deerstealer, a sober

whiteheaded Tim Linkinwater like him, your very best man of business, given to the reading of Scotch

political economy, and gifted with peculiarly clear notions on the currency question?

It is puzzling, truly. I shall be very glad if these pages help you somewhat toward solving the puzzle.

We shall agree at least that the study of Natural History has become nowadays an honourable one. A

Cromarty stonemason was till lately God rest his noble soul! the most important man in the City of

Edinburgh, by dint of a work on fossil fishes; and the successful investigator of the minutest animals takes

place unquestioned among men of genius, and, like the philosopher of old Greece, is considered, by virtue of

his science, fit company for dukes and princes. Nay, the study is now more than honourable; it is (what to

many readers will be a far higher recommendation) even fashionable. Every welleducated person is eager to

know something at least of the wonderful organic forms which surround him in every sunbeam and every

pebble; and books of Natural History are finding their way more and more into drawingrooms and

schoolrooms, and exciting greater thirst for a knowledge which, even twenty years ago, was considered

What a change from the temper of two generations since, when the naturalist was looked on as a harmless

enthusiast, who went "bug hunting," simply because he had not spirit to follow a fox! There are those alive

who can recollect an amiable man being literally bullied out of the New Forest, because he dared to make a

collection (at this moment, we believe, in some unknown abyss of that great Avernus, the British Museum) of

fossil shells from those very Hordwell Cliffs, for exploring which there is now established a society of

subscribers and correspondents. They can remember, too, when, on the first appearance of Bewick's "British

Birds," the excellent sportsman who brought it down to the Forest was asked, Why on earth he had bought a

book about "cock sparrows"? and had to justify himself again and again, simply by lending the book to his

brother sportsmen, to convince them that there were rather more than a dozen sorts of birds (as they then

held) indigenous to Hampshire. But the book, perhaps, which turned the tide in favour of Natural History,

among the higher classes at least, in the south of England, was White's "History of Selborne." A Hampshire

gentleman and sportsman, whom everybody knew, had taken the trouble to write a book about the birds and

the weeds in his own parish, and the everyday things which went on under his eyes, and everyone else's.

And all gentlemen, from the Weald of Kent to the Vale of Blackmore, shrugged their shoulders mysteriously,

and said, "Poor fellow!" till they opened the book itself, and discovered to their surprise that it read like any

novel. And then came a burst of confused, but honest admiration; from the young squire's "Bless me! who

would have thought that there were so many wonderful things to be seen in one's own park!" to the old

squire's more morally valuable "Bless me! why, I have seen that and that a hundred times, and never thought

There were great excuses, though, of old, for the contempt in which the naturalist was held; great excuses for

the pitying tone of banter with which the Spectator talks of "the ingenious" Don Saltero (as no doubt the

Neapolitan gentleman talked of Ferrante Imperato the apothecary, and his museum); great excuses for

Voltaire, when he classes the collection of butterflies among the other "bizarreries de l'esprit humain." For, in

the last generation, the needs of the world were different. It had no time for butterflies and fossils. While

Buonaparte was hovering on the Boulogne coast, the pursuits and the education which were needed were

such as would raise up men to fight him; so the coarse, fierce, hardhanded training of our grandfathers came

when it was wanted, and did the work which was required of it, else we had not been here now. Let us be

thankful that we have had leisure for science; and show now in war that our science has at least not

Moreover, Natural History, if not fifty years ago, certainly a hundred years ago, was hardly worthy of men of

practical common sense. After, indeed, Linne, by his invention of generic and specific names, had made

classification possible, and by his own enormous labours had shown how much could be done when once a

method was established, the science has grown rapidly enough. But before him little or nothing had been put

into form definite enough to allure those who (as the many always will) prefer to profit by others' discoveries,

than to discover for themselves; and Natural History was attractive only to a few earnest seekers, who found

too much trouble in disencumbering their own minds of the dreams of bygone generations (whether facts, like

cockatrices, basilisks, and krakens, the breeding of bees out of a dead ox, and of geese from barnacles; or

theories, like those of elements, the VIS PLASTRIX in Nature, animal spirits, and the other musty heirlooms

of Aristotleism and Neoplatonism), to try to make a science popular, which as yet was not even a science at

all. Honour to them, nevertheless. Honour to Ray and his illustrious contemporaries in Holland and France.

Honour to Seba and Aldrovandus; to Pomet, with his "Historie of Drugges;" even to the ingenious Don

Saltero, and his tavernmuseum in Cheyne Walk. Where all was chaos, every man was useful who could

contribute a single spot of organized standing ground in the shape of a fact or a specimen. But it is a question

whether Natural History would have ever attained its present honours, had not Geology arisen, to connect

every other branch of Natural History with problems as vast and awful as they are captivating to the

imagination. Nay, the very opposition with which Geology met was of as great benefit to the sister sciences

as to itself. For, when questions belonging to the most sacred hereditary beliefs of Christendom were

supposed to be affected by the verification of a fossil shell, or the proving that the Maestricht "homo diluvii

testis" was, after all, a monstrous eft, it became necessary to work upon Conchology, Botany, and

Comparative Anatomy, with a care and a reverence, a caution and a severe induction, which had been never

before applied to them; and thus gradually, in the last halfcentury, the whole choir of cosmical sciences

have acquired a soundness, severity, and fulness, which render them, as mere intellectual exercises, as

But how very lately have they attained that firm and honourable standing ground! It is a question whether,

even twenty years ago, Geology, as it then stood, was worth troubling one's head about, so little had been

really proved. And heavy and uphill was the work, even within the last fifteen years, of those who stedfastly

set themselves to the task of proving and of asserting at all risks, that the Maker of the coal seam and the

diluvial cave could not be a "Deus quidam deceptor," and that the facts which the rock and the silt revealed

were sacred, not to be warped or trifled with for the sake of any cowardly and hasty notion that they

contradicted His other messages. When a few more years are past, Buckland and Sedgwick, Murchison and

Lyell, Delab�che and Phillips, Forbes and Jamieson, and the group of brave men who accompanied and

followed them, will be looked back to as moral benefactors of their race; and almost as martyrs, also, when it

is remembered how much misunderstanding, obloquy, and plausible folly they had to endure from

wellmeaning fanatics like Fairholme or Granville Penn, and the respectable mob at their heels who tried (as

is the fashion in such cases) to make a hollow compromise between fact and the Bible, by twisting facts just

enough to make them fit the fancied meaning of the Bible, and the Bible just enough to make it fit the fancied

meaning of the facts. But there were a few who would have no compromise; who laboured on with a noble

recklessness, determined to speak the thing which they had seen, and neither more nor less, sure that God

could take better care than they of His own everlasting truth. And now they have conquered: the facts which

were twenty years ago denounced as contrary to Revelation, are at last accepted not merely as consonant

with, but as corroborative thereof; and sound practical geologists like Hugh Miller, in his "Footprints of the

Creator," and Professor Sedgwick, in the invaluable notes to his "Discourse on the Studies of Cambridge"

have wielded in defence of Christianity the very science which was faithlessly and cowardly expected to

But if you seek, reader, rather for pleasure than for wisdom, you can find it in such studies, pure and

Happy, truly, is the naturalist. He has no time for melancholy dreams. The earth becomes to him transparent;

everywhere he sees significancies, harmonies, laws, chains of cause and effect endlessly interlinked, which

draw him out of the narrow sphere of selfinterest and selfpleasing, into a pure and wholesome region of

solemn joy and wonder. He goes up some Snowdon valley; to him it is a solemn spot (though unnoticed by

his companions), where the stag'shorn clubmoss ceases to straggle across the turf, and the tufted alpine

clubmoss takes its place: for he is now in a new world; a region whose climate is eternally influenced by

some fresh law (after which he vainly guesses with a sigh at his own ignorance), which renders life

impossible to one species, possible to another. And it is a still more solemn thought to him, that it was not

always so; that aeons and ages back, that rock which he passed a thousand feet below was fringed, not as now

with fern and blue bugle, and white brambleflowers, but perhaps with the alp rose and the "gemsenkraut"

of Mont Blanc, at least with Alpine Saxifrages which have now retreated a thousand feet up the mountain

side, and with the blue SnowGentian, and the Canadian Sedum, which have all but vanished out of the

British Isles. And what is it which tells him that strange story? Yon smooth and rounded surface of rock,

polished, remark, across the strata and against the grain; and furrowed here and there, as if by iron talons,

with long parallel scratches. It was the crawling of a glacier which polished that rockface; the stones fallen

from Snowdon peak into the halfliquid lake of ice above, which ploughed those furrows. AEons and aeons

those marks were there; the records of the "Age of ice;" slight, truly; to be effaced by the next farmer who

needs to build a wall; but unmistakeable, boundless in significance, like Crusoe's one savage footprint on the

seashore; and the naturalist acknowledges the fingermark of God, and wonders, and worships.

Happy, especially, is the sportsman who is also a naturalist: for as he roves in pursuit of his game, over hills

or up the beds of streams where no one but a sportsman ever thinks of going, he will be certain to see things

noteworthy, which the mere naturalist would never find, simply because he could never guess that they were

there to be found. I do not speak merely of the rare birds which may be shot, the curious facts as to the habits

of fish which may be observed, great as these pleasures are. I speak of the scenery, the weather, the

geological formation of the country, its vegetation, and the living habits of its denizens. A sportsman, out in

all weathers, and often dependent for success on his knowledge of "what the sky is going to do," has

opportunities for becoming a meteorologist which no one beside but a sailor possesses; and one has often

longed for a scientific gamekeeper or huntsman, who, by discovering a law for the mysterious and seemingly

capricious phenomena of "scent," might perhaps throw light on a hundred dark passages of hygrometry. The

fisherman, too, what an inexhaustible treasury of wonder lies at his feet, in the subaqueous world of the

commonest mountain burn! All the laws which mould a world are there busy, if he but knew it, fattening his

trout for him, and making them rise to the fly, by strange electric influences, at one hour rather than at

another. Many a good geognostic lesson, too, both as to the nature of a country's rocks, and as to the laws by

which strata are deposited, may an observing man learn as he wades up the bed of a trout stream; not to

mention the strange forms and habits of the tribes of waterinsects. Moreover, no good fisherman but knows,

to his sorrow, that there are plenty of minutes, ay, hours, in each day's fishing in which he would be right glad

What to do, then? You are sitting, perhaps, in your coracle, upon some mountain tarn, waiting for a wind, and

You paddle to the shore on the side whence the wind ought to come, if it had any spirit in it; tie the coracle to

a stone, light your cigar, lie down on your back upon the grass, grumble, and finally fall asleep. In the

meanwhile, probably, the breeze has come on, and there has been halfanhour's lively fishing curl; and you

wake just in time to see the last ripple of it sneaking off at the other side of the lake, leaving all as deadcalm

Now how much better, instead of falling asleep, to have walked quietly round the lake side, and asked of your

own brains and of Nature the question, "How did this lake come here? What does it mean?"

It is a hole in the earth. True, but how was the hole made? There must have been huge forces at work to form

such a chasm. Probably the mountain was actually opened from within by an earthquake; and when the strata

fell together again, the portion at either end of the chasm, being perhaps crushed together with greater force,

remained higher than the centre, and so the water lodged between them. Perhaps it was formed thus. You will

at least agree that its formation must have been a grand sight enough, and one during which a spectator would

And when you learn that this convulsion probably took plus at the bottom of an ocean hundreds of thousands

of years ago, you have at least a few thoughts over which to ruminate, which will make you at once too busy

Yet, after all, I hardly think the lake was formed in this way, and suspect that it may have been dry for ages

after it emerged from the primeval waves, and Snowdonia was a palmfringed island in a tropic sea. Let us

You see the lake is nearly circular; on the side where we stand the pebbly beach is not six feet above the

water, and slopes away steeply into the valley behind us, while before us it shelves gradually into the lake;

forty yards out, as you know, there is not ten feet water; and then a steep bank, the edge whereof we and the

big trout know well, sinks suddenly to unknown depths. On the opposite side, that flattopped wall of rock

towers up shoreless into the sky, seven hundred feet perpendicular; the deepest water of all we know is at its

very foot. Right and left, two shoulders of down slope into the lake. Now turn round and look down the

gorge. Remark that this pebble bank on which we stand reaches some fifty yards downward: you see the

loose stones peeping out everywhere. We may fairly suppose that we stand on a dam of loose stones, a

But why loose stones? and if so, what matter? and what wonder? There are rocks cropping out everywhere

Because if you will take up one of these stones and crack it across, you will see that it is not of the same stuff

as those said rocks. Step into the next field and see. That rock is the common Snowdon slate, which we see

everywhere. The two shoulders of down, right and left, are slate, too; you can see that at a glance. But the

stones of the pebble bank are a closegrained, yellowspotted rock. They are Syenite; and (you may believe

me or not, as you will) they were once upon a time in the condition of a hasty pudding heated to some 800

degrees of Fahrenheit, and in that condition shoved their way up somewhere or other through these slates. But

where? whence on earth did these Syenite pebbles come? Let us walk round to the cliff on the opposite side

and see. It is worth while; for even if my guess be wrong, there is good spinning with a brass minnow round

Now see. Between the clifffoot and the sloping down is a crack, ending in a gully; the nearer side is of slate,

and the further side, the cliff itself, is why, the whole cliff is composed of the very same stone as the pebble

Now, my good friend, how did these pebbles get three hundred yards across the lake? Hundreds of tons, some

of them three feet long: who carried them across? The old Cymry were not likely to amuse themselves by

making such a breakwater up here in Noman'sland, two thousand feet above the sea: but somebody or

Shot out of a volcano? As you seem determined to have a prodigy, it may as well be a sufficiently huge one.

Well these stones lie altogether; and a volcano would have hardly made so compact a shot, not being in the

habit of using Eley's wire cartridges. Our next hope of a solution lies in John Jones, who carried up the

coracle. Hail him, and ask him what is on the top of that cliff . . . So, "Plainshe and pogshe, and another

Llyn." Very good. Now, does it not strike you that this whole cliff has a remarkably smooth and plastered

look, like a hare's run up an earthbank? And do you not see that it is polished thus only over the lake? that as

soon as the cliff abuts on the downs right and left, it forms pinnacles, caves, broken angular boulders? Syenite

usually does so in our damp climate, from the "weathering" effect of frost and rain: why has it not done so

over the lake? On that part something (giants perhaps) has been scrambling up or down on a very large scale,

and so rubbed off every corner which was inclined to come away, till the solid core of the rock was bared.

And may not those mysterious giants have had a hand in carrying the stones across the lake? . . . Really, I am

not altogether jesting. Think a while what agent could possibly have produced either one or both of these

There is but one; and that, if you have been an Alpine traveller much more if you have been a Chamois

hunter you have seen many a time (whether you knew it or not) at the very same work.

Ice? Yes; ice; Hrymir the frostgiant, and no one else. And if you will look at the facts, you will see how ice

may have done it. Our friend John Jones's report of plains and bogs and a lake above makes it quite possible

that in the "Ice age" (Glacial Epoch, as the bigwordmongers call it) there was above that cliff a great neve,

or snowfield, such as you have seen often in the Alps at the head of each glacier. Over the face of this cliff a

glacier has crawled down from that neve, polishing the face of the rock in its descent: but the snow, having

no large and deep outlet, has not slid down in a sufficient stream to reach the vale below, and form a glacier

of the first order; and has therefore stopped short on the other side of the lake, as a glacier of the second

order, which ends in an icecliff hanging high up on the mountain side, and kept from further progress by

daily melting. If you have ever gone up the Mer de Glace to the Tacul, you saw a magnificent specimen of

this sort on your right hand, just opposite the Tacul, in the Glacier de Trelaporte, which comes down from the

This explains our pebbleridge. The stones which the glacier rubbed off the cliff beneath it it carried forward,

slowly but surely, till they saw the light again in the face of the icecliff, and dropped out of it under the

melting of the summer sun, to form a huge dam across the ravine; till, the "Ice age" past, a more genial

climate succeeded, and neve and glacier melted away: but the "moraine" of stones did not, and remains to this

There is my explanation. If you can find a better, do: but remember always that it must include an answer to

Now, reader, we have had no abstruse science here, no long words, not even a microscope or a book: and yet

we, as two plain sportsmen, have gone back, or been led back by fact and common sense, into the most awful

and sublime depths, into an epos of the destruction and recreation of a former world.

This is but a single instance; I might give hundreds. This one, nevertheless, may have some effect in

awakening you to the boundless world of wonders which is all around you, and make you ask yourself

seriously, "What branch of Natural History shall I begin to investigate, if it be but for a few weeks, this

To which I answer, Try "the Wonders of the Shore." There are along every seabeach more strange things to

be seen, and those to be seen easily, than in any other field of observation which you will find in these

islands. And on the shore only will you have the enjoyment of finding new species, of adding your mite to the

For not only the English ferns, but the natural history of all our land species, are now wellnigh exhausted.

Our home botanists and ornithologists are spending their time now, perforce, in verifying a few obscure

species, and bemoaning themselves, like Alexander, that there are no more worlds left to conquer. For the

geologist, indeed, and the entomologist, especially in the remoter districts, much remains to be done, but only

at a heavy outlay of time, labour, and study; and the dilettante (and it is for dilettanti, like myself, that I

principally write) must be content to tread in the tracks of greater men who have preceded him, and accept at

But this is most unsatisfactory; for in giving up discovery, one gives up one of the highest enjoyments of

Natural History. There is a mysterious delight in the discovery of a new species, akin to that of seeing for the

first time, in their native haunts, plants or animals of which one has till then only read. Some, surely, who

read these pages have experienced that latter delight; and, though they might find it hard to define whence the

pleasure arose, know well that it was a solid pleasure, the memory of which they would not give up for hard

cash. Some, surely, can recollect, at their first sight of the Alpine Soldanella, the Rhododendron, or the black

Orchis, growing upon the edge of the eternal snow, a thrill of emotion not unmixed with awe; a sense that

they were, as it were, brought face to face with the creatures of another world; that Nature was independent of

them, not merely they of her; that trees were not merely made to build their houses, or herbs to feed their

cattle, as they looked on those wild gardens amid the wreaths of the untrodden snow, which had lifted their

gay flowers to the sun year after year since the foundation of the world, taking no heed of man, and all the

And even, to take a simpler instance, there are those who will excuse, or even approve of, a writer for saying

that, among the memories of a month's eventful tour, those which stand out as beaconpoints, those round

which all the others group themselves, are the first wolftrack by the roadside in the Kyllwald; the first

sight of the blue and green Rollerbirds, walking behind the plough like rooks in the tobaccofields of

Wittlich; the first ball of Olivine scraped out of the volcanic slagheaps of the Dreisser Weiher; the first pair

of the Lesser Bustard flushed upon the downs of the Moselkopf; the first sight of the cloud of white

Ephemerae, fluttering in the dusk like a summer snowstorm between us and the black cliffs of the Rheinstein,

while the broad Rhine beneath flashed bloodred in the blaze of the lightning and the fires of the

Mausenthurm a lurid Acheron above which seemed to hover ten thousand unburied ghosts; and last, but not

least, on the lip of the vast Moselkopf crater just above the point where the weight of the fiery lake has

burst the side of the great slagcup, and rushed forth between two cliffs of clinkstone across the downs, in a

clanging stream of fire, damming up rivulets, and blasting its path through forests, far away toward the valley

of the Moselle the sight of an object for which was forgotten for the moment that battlefield of the Titans

at our feet, and the glorious panorama, Hundsruck and Taunus, Siebengebirge and Ardennes, and all the

But what is even this to the delight of finding a new species? of rescuing (as it seems to you) one more

thought of the Divine mind from Hela, and the realms of the unknown, unclassified, uncomprehended? As it

seems to you: though in reality it only seems so, in a world wherein not a sparrow falls to the ground

The truth is, the pleasure of finding new species is too great; it is morally dangerous; for it brings with it the

temptation to look on the thing found as your own possession, all but your own creation; to pride yourself on

it, as if God had not known it for ages since; even to squabble jealously for the right of having it named after

you, and of being recorded in the Transactions of I knownotwhat Society as its first discoverer: as if all

the angels in heaven had not been admiring it, long before you were born or thought of.

But to be forewarned is to be forearmed; and I seriously counsel you to try if you cannot find something new

this summer along the coast to which you are going. There is no reason why you should not be so successful

as a friend of mine who, with a very slight smattering of science, and very desultory research, obtained in one

winter from the Torbay shores three entirely new species, beside several rare animals which had escaped all

naturalists since the lynxeye of Colonel Montagu discerned them forty years ago.

And do not despise the creatures because they are minute. No doubt we should most of us prefer discovering

monstrous apes in the tropical forests of Borneo, or stumbling upon herds of gigantic Ammon sheep amid the

rhododendron thickets of the Himalaya: but it cannot be; and "he is a fool," says old Hesiod, "who knows not

how much better half is than the whole." Let us be content with what is within our reach. And doubt not that

The zoophytes and microscopic animalcules which people every shore and every drop of water, have been

now raised to a rank in the human mind more important, perhaps, than even those gigantic monsters whose

models fill the lake at the Crystal Palace. The research which has been bestowed, for the last century, upon

these once unnoticed atomies has well repaid itself; for from no branch of physical science has more been

learnt of the SCIENTIA SCIENTIARUM, the priceless art of learning; no branch of science has more utterly

confounded a wisdom of the wise, shattered to pieces systems and theories, and the idolatry of arbitrary

names, and taught man to be silent while his Maker speaks, than this apparent pedantry of zoophytology, in

which our old distinctions of "animal," "vegetable," and "mineral" are trembling in the balance, seemingly

ready to vanish like their fellows "the four elements" of fire, earth, air, and water. No branch of science has

helped so much to sweep away that sensuous idolatry of mere size, which tempts man to admire and respect

objects in proportion to the number of feet or inches which they occupy in space. No branch of science,

moreover, has been more humbling to the boasted rapidity and omnipotence of the human reason, or has

more taught those who have eyes to see, and hearts to understand, how weak and wayward, staggering and

slow, are the steps of our fallen race (rapid and triumphant enough in that broad road of theories which leads

to intellectual destruction) whensoever they tread the narrow path of true science, which leads (if I may be

allowed to transfer our Lord's great parable from moral to intellectual matters) to Life; to the living and

permanent knowledge of living things and of the laws of their existence. Humbling, truly, to one who looks

back to the summer of 1754, when good Mr. Ellis, the wise and benevolent West Indian merchant, read

before the Royal Society his paper proving the animal nature of corals, and followed it up the year after by

that "Essay toward a Natural History of the Corallines, and other like Marine Productions of the British

Coasts," which forms the groundwork of all our knowledge on the subject to this day. The chapter in Dr. G.

Johnston's "British Zoophytes," p. 407, or the excellent little RESUME thereof in Dr. Landsborough's book

on the same subject, is really a saddening one, as one sees how loth were, not merely dreamers like, Marsigli

or Bonnet, but sound headed men like Pallas and Linne, to give up the old sensebound fancy, that these

corals were vegetables, and their polypes some sort of living flowers. Yet, after all, there are excuses for

them. Without our improved microscopes, and while the sciences of comparative anatomy and chemistry

were yet infantile, it was difficult to believe what was the truth; and for this simple reason: that, as usual, the

truth, when discovered, turned out far more startling and prodigious than the dreams which men had hastily

substituted for it; more strange than Ovid's old story that the coral was soft under the sea, and hardened by

exposure to air; than Marsigli's notion, that the coralpolypes were its flowers; than Dr. Parsons'

contemptuous denial, that these complicated forms could be "the operations of little, poor, helpless, jellylike

animals, and not the work of more sure vegetation;" than Baker the microscopist's detailed theory of their

being produced by the crystallization of the mineral salts in the seawater, just as he had seen "the particles

of mercury and copper in aquafortis assume treelike forms, or curious delineations of mosses and minute

shrubs on slates and stones, owing to the shooting of salts intermixed with mineral particles:" one smiles at

it now: yet these men were no less sensible than we; and if we know better, it is only because other men, and

those few and far between, have laboured amid disbelief, ridicule, and error; needing again and again to

retrace their steps, and to unlearn more than they learnt, seeming to go backwards when they were really

progressing most: and now we have entered into their labours, and find them, as I have just said, more

wondrous than all the poetic dreams of a Bonnet or a Darwin. For who, after all, to take a few broad instances

(not to enlarge on the great rootwonder of a number of distinct individuals connected by a common life, and

forming a seeming plant invariable in each species), would have dreamed of the "bizarreries" which these

You go down to any shore after a gale of wind, and pick up a few delicate little seaferns. You have two in

your hand, which probably look to you, even under a good pocket magnifier, identical or nearly so. (1) But

you are told to your surprise, that however like the dead horny polypidoms which you hold may be, the two

species of animal which have formed them are at least as far apart in the scale of creation as a quadruped is

from a fish. You see in some Musselburgh dredger's boat the phosphorescent seapen (unknown in England),

a living feather, of the look and consistency of a cock's comb; or the still stranger searush (VIRGULARIA

MIRABILIS), a spine a foot long, with hundreds of rosy flowerets arranged in halfrings round it from end to

end; and you are told that these are the congeners of the great stony Venus's fan which hangs in seamen's

cottages, brought home from the West Indies. And ere you have done wondering, you hear that all three are

congeners of the ugly, shapeless, white "dead man's hand," which you may pick up after a storm on any

shore. You have a beautiful madrepore or brainstone on your mantelpiece, brought home from some

Pacific coralreef. You are to believe that its first cousins are the soft, slimy seaanemones which you see

expanding their living flowers in every rockpool bags of seawater, without a trace of bone or stone. You

must believe it; for in science, as in higher matters, he who will walk surely, must "walk by faith and not by

These are but a few of the wonders which the classification of marine animals affords; and only drawn from

one class of them, though almost as common among every other family of that submarine world whereof

But these few examples will be sufficient to account both for the slow pace at which the knowledge of

seaanimals has progressed, and for the allurement which men of the highest attainments have found, and

still find, in it. And when to this we add the marvels which meet us at every step in the anatomy and the

reproduction of these creatures, and in the chemical and mechanical functions which they fulfil in the great

economy of our planet, we cannot wonder at finding that books which treat of them carry with them a certain

charm of romance, and feed the play of fancy, and that love of the marvellous which is inherent in man, at the

same time that they lead the reader to more solemn and lofty trains of thought, which can find their full

satisfaction only in selfforgetful worship, and that hymn of praise which goes up ever from land and sea, as

well as from saints and martyrs and the heavenly host, "O all ye works of the Lord, and ye, too, spirits and

I have said, that there were excuses for the old contempt of the study of Natural History. I have said, too, it

may be hoped, enough to show that contempt to be now illfounded. But still, there are those who regard it as

a mere amusement, and that as a somewhat effeminate one; and think that it can at best help to while away a

leisure hour harmlessly, and perhaps usefully, as a substitute for coarser sports, or for the reading of novels.

Those, however, who have followed it out, especially on the sea shore, know better. They can tell from

experience, that over and above its accessory charms of pure seabreezes, and wild rambles by cliff and loch,

the study itself has had a weighty moral effect upon their hearts and spirits. There are those who can well

understand how the good and wise John Ellis, amid all his philanthropic labours for the good of the West

Indies, while he was spending his intellect and fortune in introducing into our tropic settlements the

breadfruit, the mangosteen, and every plant and seed which he hoped might be useful for medicine,

agriculture, and commerce, could yet feel himself justified in devoting large portions of his ever wellspent

time to the fighting the battle of the corallines against Parsons and the rest, and even in measuring pens with

There are those who can sympathise with the gallant old Scotch officer mentioned by some writer on

seaweeds, who, desperately wounded in the breach at Badajos, and a sharer in all the toils and triumphs of

the Peninsular war, could in his old age show a rare seaweed with as much triumph as his wellearned

medals, and talk over a tiny sporecapsule with as much zest as the records of sieges and battles. Why not?

That temper which made him a good soldier may very well have made him a good naturalist also. The late

illustrious geologist, Sir Roderick Murchison, was also an old Peninsular officer. I doubt not that with him,

too, the experiences of war may have helped to fit him for the studies of peace. Certainly, the best naturalist,

as far as logical acumen, as well as earnest research, is concerned, whom England has ever seen, was the

Devonshire squire, Colonel George Montagu, of whom the late E. Forbes well says, that "had he been

educated a physiologist" (and not, as he was, a soldier and a sportsman), "and made the study of Nature his

aim and not his amusement, his would have been one of the greatest names in the whole range of British

science." I question, nevertheless, whether he would not have lost more than he would have gained by a

different training. It might have made him a more learned systematizer; but would it have quickened in him

that "seeing" eye of the true soldier and sportsman, which makes Montagu's descriptions indelible word

pictures, instinct with life and truth? "There is no question," says E. Forbes, after bewailing the vagueness of

most naturalists, "about the identity of any animal Montagu described. . . . He was a forwardlooking

philosopher; he spoke of every creature as if one exceeding like it, yet different from it, would be washed up

by the waves next tide. Consequently his descriptions are permanent." Scientific men will recognize in this

the highest praise which can be bestowed, because it attributes to him the highest faculty The Art of Seeing;

but the study and the book would not have given that. It is God's gift wheresoever educated: but its true

school room is the camp and the ocean, the prairie and the forest; active, selfhelping life, which can

grapple with Nature herself: not merely with printedbooks about her. Let no one think that this same Natural

History is a pursuit fitted only for effeminate or pedantic men. I should say, rather, that the qualifications

required for a perfect naturalist are as many and as lofty as were required, by old chivalrous writers, for the

perfect knighterrant of the Middle Ages: for (to sketch an ideal, of which I am happy to say our race now

affords many a fair realization) our perfect naturalist should be strong in body; able to haul a dredge, climb a

rock, turn a boulder, walk all day, uncertain where he shall eat or rest; ready to face sun and rain, wind and

frost, and to eat or drink thankfully anything, however coarse or meagre; he should know how to swim for his

life, to pull an oar, sail a boat, and ride the first horse which comes to hand; and, finally, he should be a

thoroughly good shot, and a skilful fisherman; and, if he go far abroad, be able on occasion to fight for his

For his moral character, he must, like a knight of old, be first of all gentle and courteous, ready and able to

ingratiate himself with the poor, the ignorant, and the savage; not only because foreign travel will be often

otherwise impossible, but because he knows how much invaluable local information can be only obtained

from fishermen, miners, hunters, and tillers of the soil. Next, he should be brave and enterprising, and withal

patient and undaunted; not merely in travel, but in investigation; knowing (as Lord Bacon might have put it)

that the kingdom of Nature, like the kingdom of heaven, must be taken by violence, and that only to those

who knock long and earnestly does the great mother open the doors of her sanctuary. He must be of a

reverent turn of mind also; not rashly discrediting any reports, however vague and fragmentary; giving man

credit always for some germ of truth, and giving Nature credit for an inexhaustible fertility and variety, which

will keep him his life long always reverent, yet never superstitious; wondering at the commonest, but not

surprised by the most strange; free from the idols of size and sensuous loveliness; able to see grandeur in the

minutest objects, beauty, in the most ungainly; estimating each thing not carnally, as the vulgar do, by its size

or its pleasantness to the senses, but spiritually, by the amount of Divine thought revealed to Man therein;

holding every phenomenon worth the noting down; believing that every pebble holds a treasure, every bud a

revelation; making it a point of conscience to pass over nothing through laziness or hastiness, lest the vision

once offered and despised should be withdrawn; and looking at every object as if he were never to behold it

Moreover, he must keep himself free from all those perturbations of mind which not only weaken energy, but

darken and confuse the inductive faculty; from haste and laziness, from melancholy, testiness, pride, and all

the passions which make men see only what they wish to see. Of solemn and scrupulous reverence for truth;

of the habit of mind which regards each fact and discovery, not as our own possession, but as the possession

of its Creator, independent of us, our tastes, our needs, or our vainglory, I hardly need to speak; for it is the

very essence of a nature's faculty the very tenure of his existence: and without truthfulness science would

And last, but not least, the perfect naturalist should have in him the very essence of true chivalry, namely,

selfdevotion; the desire to advance, not himself and his own fame or wealth, but knowledge and mankind.

He should have this great virtue; and in spite of many shortcomings (for what man is there who liveth and

sinneth not?), naturalists as a class have it to a degree which makes them stand out most honourably in the

midst of a selfseeking and mammonite generation, inclined to value everything by its money price, its

private utility. The spirit which gives freely, because it knows that it has received freely; which

communicates knowledge without hope of reward, without jealousy and rivalry, to fellow students and to

the world; which is content to delve and toil comparatively unknown, that from its obscure and seemingly

worthless results others may derive pleasure, and even build up great fortunes, and change the very face of

cities and lands, by the practical use of some stray talisman which the poor student has invented in his

laboratory; this is the spirit which is abroad among our scientific men, to a greater degree than it ever has

been among any body of men for many a century past; and might well be copied by those who profess deeper

purposes and a more exalted calling, than the discovery of a new zoophyte, or the classification of a moorland

And it is these qualities, however imperfectly they may be realized in any individual instance, which make

our scientific men, as a class, the wholesomest and pleasantest of companions abroad, and at home the most

blameless, simple, and cheerful, in all domestic relations; men for the most part of manful heads, and yet of

childlike hearts, who have turned to quiet study, in these late piping times of peace, an intellectual health and

courage which might have made them, in more fierce and troublous times, capable of doing good service with

I have been sketching an ideal: but one which I seriously recommend to the consideration of all parents; for,

though it be impossible and absurd to wish that every young man should grow up a naturalist by profession,

yet this age offers no more wholesome training, both moral and intellectual, than that which is given by

instilling into the young an early taste for outdoor physical science. The education of our children is now

more than ever a puzzling problem, if by education we mean the development of the whole humanity, not

merely of some arbitrarily chosen part of it. How to feed the imagination with wholesome food, and teach it

to despise French novels, and that sugared slough of sentimental poetry, in comparison with which the old

fairytales and ballads were manful and rational; how to counteract the tendency to shallowed and conceited

sciolism, engendered by hearing popular lectures on all manner of subjects, which can only be really learnt by

stern methodic study; how to give habits of enterprise, patience, accurate observation, which the

countinghouse or the library will never bestow; above all, how to develop the physical powers, without

engendering brutality and coarseness are questions becoming daily more and more puzzling, while they

need daily more and more to be solved, in an age of enterprise, travel, and emigration, like the present. For

the truth must be told, that the great majority of men who are now distinguished by commercial success, have

had a training the directly opposite to that which they are giving to their sons. They are for the most part men

who have migrated from the country to the town, and had in their youth all the advantages of a sturdy and

manful hillside or seaside training; men whose bodies were developed, and their lungs fed on pure breezes,

long before they brought to work in the city the bodily and mental strength which they had gained by loch

and moor. But it is not so with their sons. Their business habits are learnt in the countinghouse; a good

school, doubtless, as far as it goes: but one which will expand none but the lowest intellectual faculties;

which will make them accurate accountants, shrewd computers and competitors, but never the originators of

daring schemes, men able and willing to go forth to replenish the earth and subdue it. And in the hours of

relaxation, how much of their time is thrown away, for want of anything better, on frivolity, not to say on

secret profligacy, parents know too well; and often shut their eyes in very despair to evils which they know

not how to cure. A frightful majority of our middleclass young men are growing up effeminate, empty of all

knowledge but what tends directly to the making of a fortune; or rather, to speak correctly, to the keeping up

the fortunes which their fathers have made for them; while of the minority, who are indeed thinkers and

readers, how many women as well as men have we seen wearying their souls with study undirected, often

misdirected; craving to learn, yet not knowing how or what to learn; cultivating, with unwholesome energy,

the head at the expense of the body and the heart; catching up with the most capricious selfwill one mania

after another, and tossing it away again for some new phantom; gorging the memory with facts which no one

has taught them to arrange, and the reason with problems which they have no method for solving; till they

fret themselves in a chronic fever of the brain, which too often urge them on to plunge, as it were, to cool the

inward fire, into the everrestless seas of doubt or of superstition. It is a sad picture. There are many who

may read these pages whose hearts will tell them that it is a true one. What is wanted in these cases is a

methodic and scientific habit of mind; and a class of objects on which to exercise that habit, which will fever

neither the speculative intellect nor the moral sense; and those physical science will give, as nothing else can

Moreover, to revert to another point which we touched just now, man has a body as well as a mind; and with

the vast majority there will be no MENS SANA unless there be a CORPUS SANUM for it to inhabit. And

what outdoor training to give our youths is, as we have already said, more than ever puzzling. This difficulty

is felt, perhaps, less in Scotland than in England. The Scotch climate compels hardiness; the Scotch bodily

strength makes it easy; and Scotland, with her mountaintours in summer, and her frozen lochs in winter, her

labyrinth of seashore, and, above all, that priceless boon which Providence has bestowed on her, in the

contiguity of her great cities to the loveliest scenery, and the hills where every breeze is health, affords

facilities for healthy physical life unknown to the Englishman, who has no Arthur's Seat towering above his

London, no Western Islands sporting the ocean firths beside his Manchester. Field sports, with the invaluable

have become impossible for the greater number: and athletic exercises are now, in England at least, becoming

more and more artificialized and expensive; and are confined more and more with the honourable exception

of the football games in Battersea Park to our Public Schools and the two elder Universities. All honour,

meanwhile, to the Volunteer movement, and its moral as well as its physical effects. But it is only a

comparatively few of the very sturdiest who are likely to become effective Volunteers, and so really gain the

benefits of learning to be soldiers. And yet the young man who has had no substitute for such occupations

will cut but a sorry figure in Australia, Canada, or India; and if he stays at home, will spend many a pound in

doctors' bills, which could have been better employed elsewhere. "Taking a walk" as one would take a pill

or a draught seems likely soon to become the only form of outdoor existence possible for too many

inhabitants of the British Isles. But a walk without an object, unless in the most lovely and novel of scenery,

is a poor exercise; and as a recreation, utterly nil. I never knew two young lads go out for a "constitutional,"

who did not, if they were commonplace youths, gossip the whole way about things better left unspoken; or, if

they were clever ones, fall on arguing and brainsbeating on politics or metaphysics from the moment they left

the door, and return with their wits even more heated and tired than they were when they set out. I cannot

help fancying that Milton made a mistake in a certain celebrated passage; and that it was not "sitting on a hill

apart," but tramping four miles out and four miles in along a turnpikeroad, that his hapless spirits discoursed

Seriously, if we wish rural walks to do our children any good, we must give them a love for rural sights, an

object in every walk; we must teach them and we can teach them to find wonder in every insect,

sublimity in every hedgerow, the records of past worlds in every pebble, and boundless fertility upon the

barren shore; and so, by teaching them to make full use of that limited sphere in which they now are, make

them faithful in a few things, that they may be fit hereafter to be rulers over much.

I may seem to exaggerate the advantages of such studies; but the question after all is one of experience: and I

have had experience enough and to spare that what I say is true. I have seen the young man of fierce passions,

and uncontrollable daring, expend healthily that energy which threatened daily to plunge him into

recklessness, if not into sin, upon hunting out and collecting, through rock and bog, snow and tempest, every

bird and egg of the neighbouring forest. I have seen the cultivated man, craving for travel and for success in

life, pent up in the drudgery of London work, and yet keeping his spirit calm, and perhaps his morals all the

more righteous, by spending over his microscope evenings which would too probably have gradually been

wasted at the theatre. I have seen the young London beauty, amid all the excitement and temptation of luxury

and flattery, with her heart pure and her mind occupied in a boudoir full of shells and fossils, flowers and

seaweeds; keeping herself unspotted from the world, by considering the lilies of the field, how they grow.

And therefore it is that I hail with thankfulness every fresh book of Natural History, as a fresh boon to the

The greatest difficulty in the way of beginners is (as in most things) how "to learn the art of learning." They

go out, search, find less than they expected, and give the subject up in disappointment. It is good to begin,

therefore, if possible, by playing the part of "jackal" to some practised naturalist, who will show the tyro

where to look, what to look for, and, moreover, what it is that he has found; often no easy matter to discover.

Forty years ago, during an autumn's work of deadleafsearching in the Devon woods for poor old Dr.

Turton, while he was writing his book on British landshells, the present writer learnt more of the art of

observing than he would have learnt in three years' desultory hunting on his own account; and he has often

regretted that no naturalist has established shorelectures at some wateringplace, like those up hill and down

dale fieldlectures which, in pleasant bygone Cambridge days, Professor Sedgwick used to give to young

In the meanwhile, to show you something of what may be seen by those who care to see, let me take you, in

imagination, to a shore where I was once at home, and for whose richness I can vouch, and choose our season

and our day to start forth, on some glorious September or October morning, to see what last night's

equinoctial gale has swept from the populous shallows of Torbay, and cast up, high and dry, on Paignton

Torbay is a place which should be as much endeared to the naturalist as to the patriot and to the artist. We

cannot gaze on its blue ring of water, and the great limestone bluffs which bound it to the north and south,

without a glow passing through our hearts, as we remember the terrible and glorious pageant which passed by

in the glorious July days of 1588, when the Spanish Armada ventured slowly past Berry Head, with

Elizabeth's gallant pack of Devon captains (for the London fleet had not yet joined) following fast in its

wake, and dashing into the midst of the vast line, undismayed by size and numbers, while their kin and

friends stood watching and praying on the cliffs, spectators of Britain's Salamis. The white line of houses,

too, on the other side of the bay, is Brixham, famed as the landingplace of William of Orange; the stone on

the pierhead, which marks his first footsteps on British ground, is sacred in the eyes of all true English

Whigs; and close by stands the castle of the settler of Newfoundland, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Raleigh's

halfbrother, most learned of all Elizabeth's admirals in life, most pious and heroic in death. And as for

scenery, though it can boast of neither mountain peak nor dark fiord, and would seem tame enough in the

eyes of a western Scot or Irishman, yet Torbay surely has a soft beauty of its own. The rounded hills slope

gently to the sea, spotted with squares of emerald grass, and rich red fallow fields, and parks full of stately

timber trees. Long lines of tall elms run down to the very water's edge, their boughs unwarped by any blast;

here and there apple orchards are bending under their loads of fruit, and narrow strips of watermeadow line

the glens, where the red cattle are already lounging in richest pastures, within ten yards of the rocky pebble

beach. The shore is silent now, the tide far out: but six hours hence it will be hurling columns of rosy foam

high into the sunlight, and sprinkling passengers, and cattle, and trim gardens which hardly know what frost

and snow may be, but see the flowers of autumn meet the flowers of spring, and the old year linger smilingly

No wonder that such a spot as Torquay, with its delicious Italian climate, and endless variety of rich

woodland, flowery lawn, fantastic rockcavern, and broad bright tidesand, sheltered from every wind of

heaven except the soft southeast, should have become a favourite haunt, not only for invalids, but for

naturalists. Indeed, it may well claim the honour of being the original home of marine zoology and botany in

England, as the Firth of Forth, under the auspices of Sir J. G. Dalyell, has been for Scotland. For here worked

Montagu, Turton, and Mrs. Griffith, to whose extraordinary powers of research English marine botany almost

owes its existence, and who survived to an age long beyond the natural term of man, to see, in her cheerful

and honoured old age, that knowledge become popular and general which she pursued for many a year

unassisted and alone. Here, too, the scientific succession is still maintained by Mr. Pengelly and Mr. Gosse,

the latter of whom by his delightful and, happily, wellknown books has done more for the study of marine

zoology than any other living man. Torbay, moreover, from the variety of its rocks, aspects, and seafloors,

where limestones alternate with traps, and traps with slates, while at the valleymouth the soft sandstones and

hard conglomerates of the new red series slope down into the tepid and shallow waves, affords an abundance

and variety of animal and vegetable life, unequalled, perhaps, in any other part of Great Britain. It cannot

boast, certainly, of those strange deepsea forms which Messrs. Alder, Goodsir, and Laskey dredge among

the lochs of the western Highlands, and the submarine mountain glens of the Zetland sea; but it has its own

varieties, its own everfresh novelties: and in spite of all the research which has been lavished on its shores, a

naturalist cannot, I suspect, work there for a winter without discovering forms new to science, or meeting

with curiosities which have escaped all observers, since the lynx eye of Montagu espied them full fifty years

equipages, along the broad road beneath the sunny limestone cliff, tufted with golden furze; past the huge

oaks and green slopes of Tor Abbey; and past the fantastic rocks of Livermead, scooped by the waves into a

labyrinth of double and triple caves, like Hindoo temples, upborne on pillars banded with yellow and white

and red, a week's study, in form and colour and chiarooscuro, for any artist; and a mile or so further along a

pleasant road, with landlocked glimpses of the bay, to the broad sheet of sand which lies between the village

of Paignton and the sea sands trodden a hundred times by Montagu and Turton, perhaps, by Dillwyn and

Gaertner, and many another pioneer of science. And once there, before we look at anything else, come down

straight to the sea marge; for yonder lies, just left by the retiring tide, a mass of life such as you will seldom

see again. It is somewhat ugly, perhaps, at first sight; for ankledeep are spread, for some ten yards long by

five broad, huge dirty bivalve shells, as large as the hand, each with its loathly grey and black siphons

hanging out, a confused mass of slimy death. Let us walk on to some cleaner heap, and leave these, the great

Lutraria Elliptica, which have been lying buried by thousands in the sandy mud, each with the point of its

long siphon above the surface, sucking in and driving out again the salt water on which it feeds, till last

night's groundswell shifted the seabottom, and drove them up hither to perish helpless, but not useless, on

See, close by is another shell bed, quite as large, but comely enough to please any eye. What a variety of

forms and colours are there, amid the purple and olive wreaths of wrack, and bladder weed, and tangle

(oreweed, as they call it in the south), and the delicate green ribbons of the Zostera (the only English

flowering plant which grows beneath the sea). What are they all? What are the long white razors? What are

the delicate greengrey scimitars? What are the tapering brown spires? What the tufts of delicate yellow

plants like squirrels' tails, and lobsters' horns, and tamarisks, and firtrees, and all other finely cut animal and

vegetable forms? What are the groups of grey bladders, with something like a little bud at the tip? What are

the hundreds of little pinkstriped pears? What those tiny babies' heads, covered with grey prickles instead of

hair? The great red starfish, which Ulster children call "the bad man's hands;" and the great whelks, which

the youth of Musselburgh know as roaring buckies, these we have seen before; but what, oh what, are the red

Yes, what are the red capsicums? and why are they poking, snapping, starting, crawling, tumbling wildly over

each other, rattling about the huge mahogany cockles, as big as a child's two fists, out of which they are

protruded? Mark them well, for you will perhaps never see them again. They are a Mediterranean species, or

rather three species, left behind upon these extreme southwestern coasts, probably at the vanishing of that

warmer ancient epoch, which clothed the Lizard Point with the Cornish heath, and the Killarney mountains

with Spanish saxifrages, and other relics of a flora whose home is now the Iberian peninsula and the sunny

cliffs of the Riviera. Rare on every other shore, even in the west, it abounds in Torbay at certain, or rather

uncertain, times, to so prodigious an amount, that the dredge, after five minutes' scrape, will sometimes come

up choked full of this great cockle only. You will see hundreds of them in every cove for miles this day; a

seeming waste of life, which would be awful, in our eyes, were not the Divine Ruler, as His custom is,

making this destruction the means of fresh creation, by burying them in the sands, as soon as washed on

shore, to fertilize the strata of some future world. It is but a shellfish truly; but the great Cuvier thought it

remarkable enough to devote to its anatomy elaborate descriptions and drawings, which have done more

perhaps than any others to illustrate the curious economy of the whole class of bivalve, or doubleshelled,

That red capsicum is the foot of the animal contained in the cockleshell. By its aid it crawls, leaps, and

burrows in the sand, where it lies drinking in the salt water through one of its siphons, and discharging it

again through the other. Put the shell into a rock pool, or a basin of water, and you will see the siphons

clearly. The valves gape apart some threequarters of an inch. The semipellucid orange "mantle" fills the

intermediate space. Through that mantle, at the end from which the foot curves, the siphons protrude; two

thick short tubes joined side by side, their lips fringed with pearly cirri, or fringes; and very beautiful they

are. The larger is always open, taking in the water, which is at once the animal's food and air, and which,

flowing over the delicate inner surface of the mantle, at once oxygenates its blood, and fills its stomach with

minute particles of decayed organized matter. The smaller is shut. Wait a minute, and it will open suddenly

and discharge a jet of clear water, which has been robbed, I suppose, of its oxygen and its organic matter.

But, I suppose, your eyes will be rather attracted by that same scarlet and orange foot, which is being drawn

in and thrust out to a length of nearly four inches, striking with its point against any opposing object, and

sending the whole shell backwards with a jerk. The point, you see, is sharp and tonguelike; only flattened,

not horizontally, like a tongue, but perpendicularly, so as to form, as it was intended, a perfect sandplough,

by which the animal can move at will, either above or below the surface of the sand. (2)

But for colour and shape, to what shall we compare it? To polished cornelian, says Mr. Gosse. I say, to one of

the great red capsicums which hang drying in every Coventgarden seedsman's window. Yet is either simile

better than the guess of a certain lady, who, entering a room wherein a couple of Cardium tuberculatum were

waltzing about a plate, exclaimed, "Oh dear! I always heard that my pretty red coral came out of a fish, and

"C. tuberculatum," says Mr. Gosse (who described it from specimens which I sent him in 1854), "is far the

finest species. The valves are more globose and of a warmer colour; those that I have seen are even more

spinous." Such may have been the case in those I sent: but it has occurred to me now and then to dredge

specimens of C. aculeatum, which had escaped that rolling on the sand fatal in old age to its delicate spines,

and which equalled in colour, size, and perfectness the noble one figured in poor dear old Dr. Turton's

"British Bivalves." Besides, aculeatum is a far thinner and more delicate shell. And a third species, C.

echinatum, with curves more graceful and continuous, is to be found now and then with the two former. In it,

each point, instead of degenerating into a knot, as in tuberculatum, or developing from delicate flat briar

prickles into long straight thorns, as in aculeatum, is closeset to its fellow, and curved at the point

transversely to the shell, the whole being thus horrid with hundreds of strong tenterhooks, making his castle

impregnable to the raveners of the deep. For we can hardly doubt that these prickles are meant as weapons of

defence, without which so savoury a morsel as the mollusc within (cooked and eaten largely on some parts of

our south coast) would be a staple article of food for seabeasts of prey. And it is noteworthy, first, that the

defensive thorns which are permanent on the two thinner species, aculeatum and echinatum, disappear

altogether on the thicker one, tuberculatum, as old age gives him a solid and heavy globose shell; and next,

that he too, while young and tender, and liable therefore to be bored through by whelks and such murderous

univalves, does actually possess the same briar prickles, which his thinner cousins keep throughout life.

Nevertheless, prickles, in all three species, are, as far as we can see, useless in Torbay, where no wolffish

(Anarrhichas lupus) or other owner of shellcrushing jaws wanders, terrible to lobster and to cockle.

Originally intended, as we suppose, to face the strong toothed monsters of the Mediterranean, these

foreigners have wandered northward to shores where their armour is not now needed; and yet centuries of

idleness and security have not been able to persuade them to lay it by. This if my explanation is the right

one is but one more case among hundreds in which peculiarities, useful doubtless to their original

possessors, remain, though now useless, in their descendants. Just so does the tame ram inherit the now

superfluous horns of his primeval wild ancestors, though he fights now if he fights at all not with his

Enough of Cardium tuberculatum. Now for the other animals of the heap; and first, for those long white

razors. They, as well as the grey scimitars, are Solens, Razorfish (Solen siliqua and S. ensis), burrowers in

the sand by that foot which protrudes from one end, nimble in escaping from the Torquay boys, whom you

will see boring for them with a long iron screw, on the sands at low tide. They are very good to eat, these

razorfish; at least, for those who so think them; and abound in millions upon all our sandy shores. (3)

Now for the tapering brown spires. They are Turritellae, snail like animals (though the form of the shell is

different), who crawl and browse by thousands on the beds of Zostera, or grass wrack, which you see thrown

about on the beach, and which grows naturally in two or three fathoms water. Stay: here is one which is

"more than itself." On its back is mounted a cluster of barnacles (Balanus Porcatus), of the same family as

those which stud the tiderocks in millions, scratching the legs of hapless bathers. Of them, I will speak

presently; for I may have a still more curious member of the family to show you. But meanwhile, look at the

mouth of the shell; a long grey worm protrudes from it, which is not the rightful inhabitant. He is dead long

since, and his place has been occupied by one Sipunculus Bernhardi; a wight of low degree, who connects

"radiate" with annulate forms in plain English, sea cucumbers (of which we shall see some soon) with

seaworms. But however low in the scale of comparative anatomy, he has wit enough to take care of himself;

mean ugly little worm as he seems. For finding the mouth of the Turritella too big for him, he has plastered it

up with sand and mud (Heaven alone knows how), just as a wryneck plasters up a hole in an appletree

when she intends to build therein, and has left only a round hole, out of which he can poke his proboscis. A

curious thing is this proboscis, when seen through the magnifier. You perceive a ring of tentacles round the

mouth, for picking up I know not what; and you will perceive, too, if you watch it, that when he draws it in,

he turns mouth, tentacles and all, inwards, and so down into his stomach, just as if you were to turn the finger

of a glove inward from the tip till it passed into the hand; and so performs, every time he eats, the clown's as

So much have we seen on one little shell. But there is more to see close to it. Those yellow plants which I

likened to squirrels' tails and lobsters' horns, and what not, are zoophytes of different kinds. Here is Sertularia

argentea (true squirrel's tail); here, S. filicula, as delicate as tangled threads of glass; here, abietina; here,

rosacea. The lobsters' horns are Antennaria antennina; and mingled with them are Plumulariae, always to be

distinguished from Sertulariae by polypes growing on one side of the branch, and not on both. Here is falcata,

with its roots twisted round a seaweed. Here is cristata, on the same weed; and here is a piece of the

beautiful myriophyllum, which has been battered in its long journey out of the deep water about the ore rock.

For all these you must consult Johnson's "Zoophytes," and for a dozen smaller species, which you would

probably find tangled among them, or parasitic on the seaweed. Here are Flustrae, or seamats. This, which

smells very like Verbena, is Flustra coriacea (Pl. I. Fig. 2). That scurf on the frond of oreweed is F. lineata

(Pl. Fig. 1). The glass bells twined about this Sertularia are Campanularia syringa (Pl. I. Fig. 9); and here is a

tiny plant of Cellularia ciliata (Pl. I. Fig. 8). Look at it through the fieldglass; for it is truly wonderful. Each

polype cell is edged with whiplike spines, and on the back of some of them is what is it, but a live

Nay, reader, I am here to show you what can be seen: but as for telling you what can be known, much more

what cannot, I decline; and refer you to Johnson's "Zoophytes," wherein you will find that several species of

polypes carry these same birds' heads: but whether they be parts of the polype, and of what use they are, no

Next, what are the striped pears? They are seaanemones, and of a species only lately well known, Sagartia

viduata, the snakelocked anemone (Pl. V. Fig. 3(5)). They have been washed off the loose stones to which

they usually adhere by the pitiless roll of the groundswell; however, they are not so far gone, but that if you

take one of them home, and put it in a jar of water, it will expand into a delicate compound flower, which can

neither be described nor painted, of long pellucid tentacles, hanging like a thin bluish cloud over a disk of

Here, adhering to this large whelk, is another, but far larger and coarser. It is Sagartia parasitica, one of our

largest British species; and most singular in this, that it is almost always (in Torbay, at least,) found adhering

to a whelk: but never to a live one; and for this reason. The live whelk (as you may see for yourself when the

tide is out) burrows in the sand in chase of hapless bivalve shells, whom he bores through with his sharp

tongue (always, cunning fellow, close to the hinge, where the fish is), and then sucks out their life. Now, if

the anemone stuck to him, it would be carried under the sand daily, to its own disgust. It prefers, therefore,

the dead whelk, inhabited by a soldier crab, Pagurus Bernhardi (Pl. II. Fig. 2), of which you may find a dozen

anywhere as the tide goes out; and travels about at the crab's expense, sharing with him the offal which is his

food. Note, moreover, that the soldier crab is the most hasty and blundering of marine animals, as active as a

monkey, and as subject to panics as a horse; wherefore the poor anemone on his back must have a hard life of

it; being knocked about against rocks and shells, without warning, from morn to night and night to morn.

Against which danger, kind Nature, ever MAXIMA IN MINIMIS, has provided by fitting him with a stout

Next, for the babies' heads, covered with prickles, instead of hair. They are seaurchins, Amphidotus

cordatus, which burrow by thousands in the sand. These are of that Spatangoid form, which you will often

find fossil in the chalk, and which shepherd boys call snakes' heads. We shall soon find another sort, an

Echinus, and have time to talk over these most strange (in my eyes) of all living animals.

There are a hundred more things to be talked of here: but we must defer the examination of them till our

return; for it wants an hour yet of the dead low springtide; and ere we go home, we will spend a few minutes

at least on the rocks at Livermead, where awaits us a strongbacked quarryman, with a strongbacked

crowbar, as is to be hoped (for he snapped one right across there yesterday, falling miserably on his back into

"When once we have begun to look with curiosity on the strange things that ordinary people pass over

without notice, our wonder is continually excited by the variety of phase, and often by the uncouthness of

form, under which some of the meaner creatures are presented to us. And this is very specially the case with

the inhabitants of the sea. We can scarcely poke or pry for an hour among the rocks, at lowwater mark, or

walk, with an observant downcast eye, along the beach after a gale, without finding some oddlyfashioned,

suspiciouslooking being, unlike any form of life that we have seen before. The dark concealed interior of

the sea becomes thus invested with a fresh mystery; its vast recesses appear to be stored with all imaginable

forms; and we are tempted to think there must be multitudes of living creatures whose very figure and

These words have more than fulfilled themselves since they were written. Those DeepSea dredgings, of

which a detailed account will be found in Dr. Wyville Thomson's new and most beautiful book, "The Depths

of the Sea," have disclosed, of late years, wonders of the deep even more strange and more multitudinous

than the wonders of the shore. The time is past when we thought ourselves bound to believe, with Professor

Edward Forbes, that only some hundred fathoms down, the inhabitants of the seabottom "become more and

more modified, and fewer and fewer, indicating our approach towards an abyss where life is either

Neither now need we indulge in another theory which had a certain grandeur in it, and was not so absurd as it

looks at first sight, namely, that, as Dr. Wyville Thomson puts it, picturesquely enough, "in going down the

sea water became, under the pressure, gradually heavier and heavier, and that all the loose things floated at

different levels, according to their specific weight, skeletons of men, anchors and shot and cannon, and last

of all the broad gold pieces lost in the wreck of many a galleon off the Spanish Main; the whole forming a

kind of 'false bottom' to the ocean, beneath which there lay all the depth of clear still water, which was

The facts are; first that water, being all but incompressible, is hardly any heavier, and just as liquid, at the

greatest depth, than at the surface; and that therefore animals can move as freely in it in deep as in shallow

water; and next, that as the fluids inside the body of a sea animal must be at the same pressure as that of the

water outside it, the two pressures must balance each other; and the body, instead of being crushed in, may be

unconscious that it is living under a weight of two or three miles of water. But so it is; as we gather our

curiosities at lowtide mark, or haul the dredge a mile or two out at sea, we may allow our fancy to range

freely out to the westward, and down over the subaqueous cliffs of the hundredfathom line, which mark the

old shore of the British Isles, or rather of a time when Britain and Ireland were part of the continent, through

water a mile, and two, and three miles deep, into total darkness, and icy cold, and a pressure which, in the

open air, would crush any known living creature to a jelly; and be certain that we shall find the oceanfloor

teeming everywhere with multitudinous life, some of it strangely like, some strangely unlike, the creatures

Some strangely like. You may find, for instance, among the sea weed, here and there, a little black

seaspider, a Nymphon, who has this peculiarity, that possessing no body at all to speak of, he carries his

needful stomach in long branches, packed inside his legs. The specimens which you will find will probably

be half an inch across the legs. An almost exactly similar Nymphon has been dredged from the depths of the

You may find also a quaint little shrimp, CAPRELLA, clinging by its hind claws to seaweed, and waving its

gaunt grotesque body to and fro, while it makes mesmeric passes with its large fore claws, one of the most

ridiculous of Nature's many ridiculous forms. Those which you will find will be some quarter of an inch in

length; but in the cold area of the North Atlantic, their cousins, it is now found, are nearly three inches long,

and perch in like manner, not on seaweeds, for there are none so deep, but on branching sponges.

These are but two instances out of many of forms which were supposed to be peculiar to shallow shores

repeating themselves at vast depths: thus forcing on us strange questions about changes in the distribution and

depth of the ancient seas; and forcing us, also, to reconsider the old rules by which rocks were distinguished

As for the new forms, and even more important than them, the ancient forms, supposed to have been long

extinct, and only known as fossils, till they were lately rediscovered alive in the nether darkness, for them

you must consult Dr. Wyville Thomson's book, and the notices of the "Challenger's" dredgings which appear

from time to time in the columns of "Nature;" for want of space forbids my speaking of them here.

But if you have no time to read "The Depths of the Sea," go at least to the British Museum, or if you be a

northern man, to the admirable public museum at Liverpool; ask to be shown the deepsea forms; and there

feast your curiosity and your sense of beauty for an hour. Look at the Crinoids, or stalked starfishes, the

"Lilies of living stone," which swarmed in the ancient seas, in vast variety, and in such numbers that whole

beds of limestone are composed of their disjointed fragments; but which have vanished out of our modern

seas, we know not why, till, a few years since, almost the only known living species was the exquisite and

rare Pentacrinus asteria, from deep water off the Windward Isles of the West Indies.

Of this you will see a specimen or two both at Liverpool and in the British Museum; and near them, probably,

specimens of the newold Crinoids, discovered of late years by Professor Sars, Mr. Gwyn Jeffreys, Dr.

Carpenter, Dr. Wyville Thomson, and the other deep sea disciples of the mythic Glaucus, the fisherman,

who, enamoured of the wonders of the sea, plunged into the blue abyss once and for all, and became himself

Next look at the corals, and Gorgonias, and all the seafern tribe of branching polypidoms, and last, but not

least, at the glass sponges; first at the Euplectella, or Venus's flowerbasket, which lives embedded in the

mud of the seas of the Philippines, supported by a glass frill "standing up round it like an Elizabethan ruff."

Twenty years ago there was but one specimen in Europe: now you may buy one for a pound in any curiosity

shop. I advise you to do so, and to keep as I have seen done under a glass case, as a delight to your eyes,

Then look at the Hyalonemas, or glassrope ocean floor by a twisted wisp of strong flexible flint needles,

somewhat on the principle of a screwpile. So strange and complicated is their structure, that naturalists for a

long while could literally make neither head nor tail of them, as long as they had only Japanese specimens to

study, some of which the Japanese dealers had, of malice prepense, stuck upside down into Pholasborings in

stones. Which was top and which bottom; which the thing itself, and which special parasites growing on it;

whether it was a sponge, or a zoophyte, or something else; at one time even whether it was natural, or

artificial and a make up, could not be settled, even till a year or two since. But the discovery of the same,

or a similar, species in abundance from the Butt of the Lows down to Setubal on the Portuguese coast, where

the deepwater shark fishers call it "seawhip," has given our savants specimens enough to make up their

minds that they really know little or nothing about it, and probably will never know.

And do not forget, lastly, to ask, whether at Liverpool or at the British Museum, for the Holtenias and their

congeners, hollow sponges built up of glassy spicules, and rooted in the mud by glass hairs, in some cases

between two and three feet long, as flexible and graceful as tresses of snowwhite silk.

Look at these, and a hundred kindred forms, and then see how nature is not only "maxima in minimis"

greatest in her least, but often "pulcherrima in abditis" fairest in her most hidden works; and how the

Creative Spirit has lavished, as it were, unspeakable artistic skill on lowlyorganized creature, never till now

beheld by man, and buried, not only in foul mud, but in their own unsightly heap of living jelly.

But so it was from the beginning; and this planet was not made for man alone. Countless ages before we

appeared on earth the depths of the old chalkocean teemed with forms as beautiful and perfect as those, their

lineal descendants, which the dredge now brings up from the Atlantic seafloor; and if there were as my

reason tells me that there must have been final moral causes for their existence, the only ones which we

have a right to imagine are these that all, down to the lowest Rhizopod, might delight themselves, however

Thus, much alas! how little about the wonders of the deep. We, who are no deepsea dredgers, must

return humbly to the wonders of the shore. And first, as after descending the gap in the seawall we walk

along the ribbed floor of hard yellow sand, let me ask you to give a sharp lookout for a round grey disc,

about as big as a pennypiece, peeping out on the surface. No; that is not it, that little lump: open it, and you

will find within one of the common little Venus gallina. The closet collectors have given it some new name

now, and no thanks to them: they are always changing the names, instead of studying the live animals where

Nature has put them, in which case they would have no time for wordinventing. Nay, I verify suspect that

the names grow, like other things; at least, they get longer and longer and more jawbreaking every year. The

little bivalve, however, finding itself left by the tide, has wisely shut up its siphons, and, by means of its foot

and its edges, buried itself in a comfortable bath of cool wet sand, till the sea shall come back, and make it

safe to crawl and lounge about on the surface, smoking the seawater instead of tobacco. Neither is that

depression what we seek. Touch it, and out poke a pair of astonished and inquiring horns: it is a longarmed

crab, who saw us coming, and wisely shovelled himself into the sand by means of his netherend. Corystes

Cassivelaunus is his name, which he is said to have acquired from the marks on his back, which are

somewhat like a human face. "Those long antennae," says my friend, Mr. Lloyd (6) I have not verified the

fact, but believe it, as he knows a great deal about crabs, and I know next to nothing "form a tube through

which a current of water passes into the crab's gills, free from the surrounding sand." Moreover, it is only the

male who has those strangely long forearms and claws; the female contenting herself with limbs of a more

moderate length. Neither is that, though it might be, the hole down which what we seek has vanished: but that

burrow contains one of the long white razors which you saw cast on shore at Paignton. The boys close by are

boring for them with iron rods armed with a screw, and taking them in to sell in Torquay market, as excellent

food. But there is one, at last a grey disc pouting up through the sand. Touch it, and it is gone down, quick

as light. We must dig it out, and carefully, for it is a delicate monster. At last, after ten minutes' careful work,

we have brought up, from a foot depth or more what? A thick, dirty, slimy worm, without head or tail, form

or colour. A slug has more artistic beauty about him. Be it so. At home in the aquarium (where, alas! he will

live but for a day or two, under the new irritation of light) he will make a very different figure. That is one of

the rarest of British sea animals, Peachia hastata (Pl. XII. Fig. 1), which differs from most other British

Actiniae in this, that instead of having like them a walking disc, it has a free open lower end, with which (I

know not how) it buries itself upright in the sand, with its mouth just above the surface. The figure on the left

of the plate represents a curious cluster of papillae which project from one side of the mouth, and are the

opening of the oviduct. But his value consists, not merely in his beauty (though that, really, is not small), but

in his belonging to what the long wordmakers call an "interosculant" group, a party of genera and species

which connect families scientifically far apart, filling up a fresh link in the great chain, or rather the great

network, of zoological classification. For here we have a simple, and, as it were, crude form; of which, if we

dared to indulge in reveries, we might say that the Creative Mind realized it before either Actiniae or

Holothurians, and then went on to perfect the idea contained in it in two different directions; dividing it into

two different families, and making on its model, by adding new organs, and taking away old ones, in one

direction the whole family of Actiniae (sea anemones), and in a quite opposite one the Holothuriae, those

strange seacucumbers, with their mouthfringe of feathery gills, of which you shall see some anon. Thus

there has been, in the Creative Mind, as it gave life to new species, a development of the idea on which older

species were created, in order we may fancy that every mesh of the great net might gradually be supplied,

and there should be no gaps in the perfect variety of Nature's forms. This development is one which we must

believe to be at least possible, if we allow that a Mind presides over the universe, and not a mere brute

necessity, a Law (absurd misnomer) without a Lawgiver; and to it (strangely enough coinciding here and

there with the Platonic doctrine of Eternal Ideas existing in the Divine Mind) all fresh inductive discovery

Let me speak freely a few words on this important matter. Geology has disproved the old popular belief that

the universe was brought into being as it now exists by a single fiat. We know that the work has been gradual;

And we know, also, that these forms, "seeming random" as they are, have appeared according to a law which,

as far as we can judge, has been on the whole one of progress, lower animals (though we cannot yet say,

the lowest) appearing first, and man, the highest mammal, "the roof and crown of things," one of the latest in

the series. We have no more right, let it be observed, to say that man, the highest, appeared last, than that the

lowest appeared first. It was probably so, in both cases; but there is as yet no positive proof of either; and as

we know that species of animals lower than those which already existed appeared again and again during the

various eras, so it is quite possible that they may be appearing now, and may appear hereafter: and that for

every extinct Dodo or Moa, a new species may be created, to keep up the equilibrium of the whole. This is

but a surmise: but it may be wise, perhaps, just now, to confess boldly, even to insist on, its possibility, lest

any should fancy, from our unwillingness to allow it, that there would be ought in it, if proved, contrary to

I am, I must honestly confess, more and more unable to perceive anything which an orthodox Christian may

not hold, in those physical theories of "evolution," which are gaining more and more the assent of our best

zoologists and botanists. All that they ask us to believe is, that "species" and "families," and indeed the whole

of organic nature, have gone through, and may still be going through, some such development from a lowest

germ, as we know that every living individual, from the lowest zoophyte to man himself, does actually go

through. They apply to the whole of the living world, past, present, and future, the law which is undeniably at

work on each individual of it. They may be wrong, or they may be right: but what is there in such a

conception contrary to any doctrine at least of the Church of England? To say that this cannot be true; that

species cannot vary, because God, at the beginning, created each thing "according to its kind," is really to beg

the question; which is Does the idea of "kind" include variability or not? and if so, how much variability?

Now, "kind," or "species," as we call it, is defined nowhere in the Bible. What right have we to read our own

definition into the word? and that against the certain fact, that some "kinds" do vary, and that widely,

mankind, for instance, and the animals and plants which he domesticates. Surely that latter fact should be

significant, to those who believe, as I do, that man was created in the likeness of God. For if man has the

power, not only of making plants and animals vary, but of developing them into forms of higher beauty and

usefulness than their wild ancestors possessed, why should not the God in whose image he is made possess

the same power? If the old theological rule be true "There is nothing in man which was not first in God"

(sin, of course, excluded) then why should not this imperfect creative faculty in man be the very guarantee

Such at least is the conclusion of one who, studying certain families of plants, which indulge in the most

fantastic varieties of shape and size, and yet through all their vagaries retain as do the Palms, the Orchids,

the Euphorbiaceae one organ, or form of organs, peculiar and highly specialized, yet constant throughout

the whole of each family, has been driven to the belief that each of these three families, at least, has "sported

off" from one common ancestor one archetypal Palm, one archetypal Orchid, one archetypal Euphorbia,

simple, it may be, in itself, but endowed with infinite possibilities of new and complex beauty, to be

developed, not in it, but in its descendants. He has asked himself, sitting alone amid the boundless wealth of

tropic forests, whether even then and there the great God might not be creating round him, slowly but surely,

new forms of beauty? If he chose to do it, could He not do it? That man found himself none the worse

Christian for the thought. He has said and must be allowed to say again, for he sees no reason to alter his

words in speaking of the wonderful variety of forms in the Euphorbiaceae, from the weedy English

Euphorbias, the Dog's Mercuries, and the Box, to the pricklystemmed Scarlet Euphorbia of Madagascar, the

succulent Cactuslike Euphorbias of the Canaries and elsewhere; the Galelike Phyllanthus; the

manyformed Crotons; the Hemplike Maniocs, Physicnuts, Castoroils, the scarlet Poinsettia, the little

pink and yellow Dalechampia, the poisonous Manchineel, and the gigantic Hura, or sandbox tree, of the West

Indies, all so different in shape and size, yet all alike in their most peculiar and complex fructification, and

in their acrid milky juice, "What if all these forms are the descendants of one original form? Would that be

one whit the more wonderful than the theory that they were, each and all, with the minute, and often

imaginary, shades of difference between certain cognate species among them, created separately and at once?

But if it be so which I cannot allow what would the theologian have to say, save that God's works are

even more wonderful than he always believed them to be? As for the theory being impossible that is to be

decided by men of science, on strict experimental grounds. As for us theologians, who are we, that we should

limit, � priori, the power of God? 'Is anything too hard for the Lord?' asked the prophet of old; and we have

a right to ask it as long as the world shall last. If it be said that 'natural selection,' or, as Mr. Herbert Spencer

better defines it, the 'survival of the fittest,' is too simple a cause to produce such fantastic variety that,

again, is a question to be settled exclusively by men of science, on their own grounds. We, meanwhile,

always knew that God works by very simple, or seemingly simple, means; that the universe, as far as we

could discern it, was one organization of the most simple means. It was wonderful or should have been in

our eyes, that a shower of rain should make the grass grow, and that the grass should become flesh, and the

flesh food for the thinking brain of man. It was or ought to have been more wonderful yet to us that a

child should resemble its parents, or even a butterfly resemble, if not always, still usually, its parents

likewise. Ought God to appear less or more august in our eyes if we discover that the means are even simpler

than we supposed? We held Him to be Almighty and Allwise. Are we to reverence Him less or more if we

find Him to be so much mightier, so much wiser, than we dreamed, that He can not only make all things, but

the very perfection of creative power MAKE ALL THINGS MAKE THEMSELVES? We believed that

His care was over all His works; that His providence worked perpetually over the universe. We were taught

some of us at least by Holy Scripture, that without Him not a sparrow fell to the ground, and that the very

hairs of our head were all numbered; that the whole history of the universe was made up, in fact, of an infinite

network of special providences. If, then, that should be true which a great naturalist writes, 'It may be

metaphorically said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every

variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently

and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic

being, in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life,' if this, I say, were proved to be true, ought

God's care and God's providence to seem less or more magnificent in our eyes? Of old it was said by Him

without whom nothing is made 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' Shall we quarrel with physical

And understand it well the grand passage I have just quoted need not be accused of substituting "natural

selection for God." In any case natural selection would be only the means or law by which God works, as He

does by other natural laws. We do not substitute gravitation for God, when we say that the planets are

sustained in their orbits by the law of gravitation. The theory about natural selection may be untrue, or

imperfect, as may the modern theories of the "evolution and progress" of organic forms: let the man of

science decide that. But if true, the theories seem to me perfectly to agree with, and may be perfectly

explained by, the simple old belief which the Bible sets before us, of a LIVING GOD: not a mere past will,

such as the Koran sets forth, creating once and for all, and then leaving the universe, to use Goethe's simile,

"to spin round his finger;" nor again, an "allpervading spirit," words which are mere contradictory jargon,

concealing, from those who utter them, blank Materialism: but One who works in all things which have

obeyed Him to will and to do of His good pleasure, keeping His abysmal and selfperfect purpose, yet

altering the methods by which that purpose is attained, from aeon to aeon, ay, from moment to moment, for

ever various, yet for ever the same. This great and yet most blessed paradox of the Changeless God, who yet

can say "It repenteth me," and "Behold, I work a new thing on the earth," is revealed no less by nature than

by Scripture; the changeableness, not of caprice or imperfection, but of an Infinite Maker and "Poietes,"

drawing ever fresh forms out of the inexhaustible treasury of His primaeval Mind; and yet never throwing

away a conception to which He has once given actual birth in time and space, (but to compare reverently

small things and great) lovingly repeating it, reapplying it; producing the same effects by endlessly different

methods; or so delicately modifying the method that, as by the turn of a hair, it shall produce endlessly

diverse effects; looking back, as it were, ever and anon over the great work of all the ages, to retouch it, and

fill up each chasm in the scheme, which for some good purpose had been left open in earlier worlds; or

leaving some open (the forms, for instance, necessary to connect the bimana and the quadrumana) to be filled

up perhaps hereafter when the world needs them; the handiwork, in short, of a living and loving Mind, perfect

in His own eternity, but stooping to work in time and space, and there rejoicing Himself in the work of His

own hands, and in His eternal Sabbaths ceasing in rest ineffable, that He may look on that which He hath

I speak, of course, under correction; for this conclusion is emphatically matter of induction, and must be

verified or modified by everfresh facts: but I meet with many a Christian passage in scientific books, which

seems to me to go, not too far, but rather not far enough, in asserting the God of the Bible, as Saint Paul says,

"not to have left Himself without witness," in nature itself, that He is the God of grace. Why speak of the God

of nature and the God of grace as two antithetical terms? The Bible never, in a single instance, makes the

distinction; and surely, if God be (as He is) the Eternal and Unchangeable One, and if (as we all confess) the

universe bears the impress of His signet, we have no right, in the present infantile state of science, to put

arbitrary limits of our own to the revelation which He may have thought good to make of Himself in nature.

Nay, rather, let us believe that, if our eyes were opened, we should fulfil the requirement of Genius, to "see

the universal in the particular," by seeing God's whole likeness, His whole glory, reflected as in a mirror even

in the meanest flower; and that nothing but the dulness of our own souls prevents them from seeing day and

night in all things, however small or trivial to human eclecticism, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself fulfilling His

To me it seems (to sum up, in a few words, what I have tried to say) that such development and progress as

have as yet been actually discovered in nature, bear every trace of having been produced by successive acts of

thought and will in some personal mind; which, however boundlessly rich and powerful, is still the Archetype

of the human mind; and therefore (for to this I confess I have been all along tending) probably capable,

without violence to its properties, of becoming, like the human mind, incarnate.

But to descend from these perhaps too daring speculations, there is another, and more human, source of

interest about the animal who is writhing feebly in the glass jar of salt water; for he is one of the many

curiosities which have been added to our fauna by that humble hero Mr. Charles Peach, the selftaught

naturalist, of whom, as we walk on toward the rocks, something should be said, or rather read; for Mr.

Chambers, in an oftenquoted passage from his Edinburgh Journal, which I must have the pleasure of

"But who is that little intelligentlooking man in a faded naval uniform, who is so invariably to be seen in a

particular central seat in this section? That, gentle reader, is perhaps one of the most interesting men who

attend the British Association. He is only a private in the mounted guard (preventive service) at an obscure

part of the Cornwall coast, with four shillings a day, and a wife and nine children, most of whose education

he has himself to conduct. He never tastes the luxuries which are so common in the middle ranks of life, and

even amongst a large portion of the working classes. He has to mend with his own hands every sort of thing

that can break or wear in his house. Yet Mr. Peach is a votary of Natural History; not a student of the science

in books, for he cannot afford books; but an investigator by sea and shore, a collector of Zoophytes and

Echinodermata strange creatures, many of which are as yet hardly known to man. These he collects,

preserves, and describes; and every year does he come up to the British Association with a few novelties of

this kind, accompanied by illustrative papers and drawings: thus, under circumstances the very opposite of

those of such men as Lord Enniskillen, adding, in like manner, to the general stock of knowledge. On the

present occasion he is unusually elated, for he has made the discovery of a Holothuria with twenty tentacula,

a species of the Echinodermata which Professor Forbes, in his book on StarFishes, has said was never yet

observed in the British seas. It may be of small moment to you, who, mayhap, know nothing of Holothurias:

but it is a considerable thing to the Fauna of Britain, and a vast matter to a poor private of the Cornwall

mounted guard. And accordingly he will go home in a few days, full of the glory of his exhibition, and strong

anew by the kind notice taken of him by the masters of the science, to similar inquiries, difficult as it may be

to prosecute them, under such a complication of duties, professional and domestic. Honest Peach! humble as

is thy home, and simple thy bearing, thou art an honour even to this assemblage of nobles and doctors: nay,

more, when we consider everything, thou art an honour to human nature itself; for where is the heroism like

that of virtuous, intelligent, independent poverty? And such heroism is thine!" CHAMBERS' EDIN.

Mr. Peach has been since rewarded in part for his long labours in the cause of science, by having been

removed to a more lucrative post on the north coast of Scotland; the earnest, it is to be hoped, of still further

I mentioned just now Synapta; or, as Montagu called it, Chirodota: a much better name, and, I think, very

uselessly changed; for Chirodota expresses the peculiarity of the beast, which consists in start not, reader

twelve hands, like human hands, while Synapta expresses merely its power of clinging to the fingers, which it

possesses in common with many other animals. It is, at least, a beast worth talking about; as for finding one, I

Colonel Montagu found them here some forty years ago; and after him, Mr. Alder, in 1845. I found hundreds

of them, but only once, in 1854 after a heavy southeastern gale, washed up among the great Lutrariae in a

cove near Goodrington; but all my dredging outside failed to procure a specimen Mr. Alder, however, and

Mr. Cocks (who find everything, and will at last certainly catch Midgard, the great seaserpent, as Thor did,

by baiting for him with a bull's head), have dredged them in great numbers; the former, at Helford in

Cornwall, the latter on the west coast of Scotland. It seems, however, to be a southern monster, probably a

remnant, like the great cockle, of the Mediterranean fauna; for Mr. MacAndrew finds them plentifully in

But what is it like? Conceive a very fat short earthworm; not ringed, though, like the earthworm, but

smooth and glossy, dappled with darker spots, especially on one side, which may be the upper one. Put round

its mouth twelve little arms, on each a hand with four ragged fingers, and on the back of the hand a stump of

a thumb, and you have Synapta Digitata (Plates IV. and V., from my drawings of the live animal). These

hands it puts down to its mouth, generally in alternate pairs, but how it obtains its food by them is yet a

mystery, for its intestines are filled, like an earthworm's, with the mud in which it lives, and from which it

You will find it stick to your fingers by the whole skin, causing, if your hand be delicate, a tingling sensation;

and if you examine the skin under the microscope, you will find the cause. The whole skin is studded with

minute glass anchors, some hanging freely from the surface, but most imbedded in the skin. Each of these

anchors is jointed at its root into one end of a curious cribriform plate, in plain English, one pierced like a

sieve, which lies under the skin, and reminds one of the similar plates in the skin of the White Cucumaria,

which I will show you presently; and both of these we must regard as the first rudiments of an Echinoderm's

outside skeleton, such as in the Seaurchins covers the whole body of the animal. (See on Echinus Millaris,

p. 89.) (7) Somewhat similar anchorplates, from a Red Sea species, Synapta Vittata, may be seen in any

The animal, when caught, has a strange habit of selfdestruction, contracting its skin at two or three different

points, and writhing till it snaps itself into "junks," as the sailors would say, and then dies. My specimens, on

breaking up, threw out from the wounded part long "ovarian filaments" (whatsoever those may be), similar to

those thrown out by many of the Sagartian anemones, especially S. parasitica. Beyond this, I can tell you

nothing about Synapta, and only ask you to consider its hands, as an instance of that fantastic play of Nature

which repeats, in families widely different, organs of similar form, though perhaps of by no means similar

use; nay, sometimes (as in those beautiful clearwing hawkmoths which you, as they hover round the

rhododendrons, mistake for bumblebees) repeats the outward form of a whole animal, for no conceivable

But here we are at the old bank of boulders, the ruins of an antique pier which the monks of Tor Abbey built

for their convenience, while Torquay was but a knot of fishing huts within a lonely limestone cove. To get to

it, though, we have passed many a hidden treasure; for every ledge of these flat Newredsandstone rocks, if

torn up with the crowbar, discloses in its cracks and crannies nests of strange forms which shun the light of

day; beautiful Actiniae fill the tiny caverns with living flowers; great Pholades (Plate X. figs. 3, 4) bore by

hundreds in the softer strata; and wherever a thin layer of muddy sand intervenes between two slabs, long

Annelid worms of quaintest forms and colours have their horizontal burrows, among those of that curious and

rare radiate animal, the Spoonworm, (8) an eyeless bag about an inch long, half bluish grey, half pink, with a

strange scalloped and wrinkled proboscis of saffron colour, which serves, in some mysterious way, soft as it

See, at the extreme lowwater mark, where the broad olive fronds of the Laminariae, like fanpalms, droop

and wave gracefully in the retiring ripples, a great boulder which will serve our purpose. Its upper side is a

whole forest of seaweeds, large and small; and that forest, if you examined it closely, as full of inhabitants

as those of the Amazon or the Gambia. To "beat" that dense cover would be an endless task: but on the under

side, where no sea weeds grow, we shall find full in view enough to occupy us till the tide returns. For the

slab, see, is such a one as seabeasts love to haunt. Its weedcovered surface shows that the surge has not

shifted it for years past. It lies on other boulders clear of sand and mud, so that there is no fear of dead

seaweed having lodged and decayed under it, destructive to animal life. We can see dark crannies and caves

beneath; yet too narrow to allow the surge to wash in, and keep the surface clean. It will be a fine menagerie

Now the crowbar is well under it; heave, and with a will; and so, after five minutes' tugging, propping,

slipping, and splashing, the boulder gradually tips over, and we rush greedily upon the spoil.

A muddy dripping surface it is, truly, full of cracks and hollows, uninviting enough at first sight: let us look it

round leisurely, to see if there are not materials enough there for an hour's lecture.

The first object which strikes the eye is probably a group of milk white slugs, from two to six inches long,

cuddling snugly together (Plate IX. fig. 1). You try to pull them off, and find that they give you some trouble,

such a firm hold have the delicate white sucking arms, which fringe each of their five edges. You see at the

head nothing but a yellow dimple; for eating and breathing are suspended till the return of tide; but once

settled in a jar of saltwater, each will protrude a large chocolatecoloured head, tipped with a ring of ten

feathery gills, looking very much like a head of "curled kale," but of the loveliest white and primrose; in the

centre whereof lies perdu a mouth with sturdy teeth if indeed they, as well as the whole inside of the beast,

have not been lately got rid of, and what you see be not a mere bag, without intestine or other organ: but only

for the time being. For hear it, wornout epicures, and old Indians who bemoan your livers, this little

Holothuria knows a secret which, if he could tell it, you would be glad to buy of him for thousands sterling.

To him blue pill and muriatic acid are superfluous, and travels to German Brunnen a waste of time. Happy

Holothuria! who possesses really the secret of everlasting youth, which ancient fable bestowed on the serpent

and the eagle. For when his teeth ache, or his digestive organs trouble him, all he has to do is just to cast up

forthwith his entire inside, and, faisant maigre for a month or so, grow a fresh set, and then eat away as

merrily as ever. His name, if you wish to consult so triumphant a hygeist, is Cucumaria Pentactes: but he has

many a stout cousin round the Scotch coast, who knows the antibilious panacea as well as he, and submits,

among the northern fishermen, to the rather rude and undeserved name of seapuddings; one of which grows

in Shetland to the enormous length of three feet, rivalling there his huge congeners, who display their

Next, what are those bright little buds, like salmoncoloured Banksia roses half expanded, sitting closely on

the stone? Touch them; the soft part is retracted, and the orange flower of flesh is transformed into a pale pink

flower of stone. That is the Madrepore, Caryophyllia Smithii (Plate V. fig. 2); one of our south coast rarities:

and see, on the lip of the last one, which we have carefully scooped off with the chisel, two little pink towers

of stone, delicately striated; drop them into this small bottle of seawater, and from the top of each tower

issues every halfsecond what shall we call it? a hand or a net of finest hairs, clutching at something

invisible to our grosser sense. That is the Pyrgoma, parasitic only (as far as we know) on the lip of this same

rare Madrepore; a little "cirrhipod," the cousin of those tiny barnacles which roughen every rock (a larger sort

whereof I showed you on the Turritella), and of those larger ones also who burrow in the thick hide of the

whale, and, borne about upon his mighty sides, throw out their tiny casting nets, as this Pyrgoma does, to

catch every passing animalcule, and sweep them into the jaws concealed within its shell. And this creature,

rooted to one spot through life and death, was in its infancy a free swimming animal, hovering from place to

place upon delicate ciliae, till, having sown its wild oats, it settled down in life, built itself a good stone

house, and became a landowner, or rather a glebae adscriptus, for ever and a day. Mysterious destiny! yet

not so mysterious as that of the free medusoid young of every polype and coral, which ends as a rooted tree

of horn or stone, and seems to the eye of sensuous fancy to have literally degenerated into a vegetable. Of

them you must read for yourself in Mr. Gosse's book; in the meanwhile he shall tell you something of the

beautiful Madrepores themselves. His description, (10) by far the best yet published, should be read in full;

"Doubtless you are familiar with the stony skeleton of our Madrepore, as it appears in museums. It consists of

a number of thin calcareous plates standing up edgewise, and arranged in a radiating manner round a low

centre. A little below the margin their individuality is lost in the deposition of rough calcareous matter. . . .

The general form is more or less cylindrical, commonly wider at top than just above the bottom. . . . This is

but the skeleton; and though it is a very pretty object, those who are acquainted with it alone, can form but a

very poor idea of the beauty of the living animal. . . . Let it, after being torn from the rock, recover its

equanimity; then you will see a pellucid gelatinous flesh emerging from between the plates, and little

exquisitely formed and coloured tentacula, with white clubbed tips fringing the sides of the cupshaped

cavity in the centre, across which stretches the oval disc marked with a star of some rich and brilliant colour,

surrounding the central mouth, a slit with white crenated lips, like the orifice of one of those elegant cowry

shells which we put upon our mantelpieces. The mouth is always more or less prominent, and can be

protruded and expanded to an astonishing extent. The space surrounding the lips is commonly fawn colour, or

rich chestnutbrown; the star or vandyked circle rich red, pale vermilion, and sometimes the most brilliant

And what does this exquisitely delicate creature do with its pretty mouth? Alas for fact! It sips no

honeydew, or fruits from paradise. "I put a minute spider, as large as a pin's head, into the water, pushing

it down to the coral. The instant it touched the tip of a tentacle, it adhered, and was drawn in with the

surrounding tentacles between the plates. With a lens I saw the small mouth slowly open, and move over to

that side, the lips gaping unsymmetrically; while with a movement as imperceptible as that of the hour hand

of a watch, the tiny prey was carried along between the plates to the corner of the mouth. The mouth,

however, moved most, and at length reached the edges of the plates, gradually closed upon the insect, and

Mr. Gosse next tried the fairy of the walking mouth with a house fly, who escaped only by hard fighting;

and at last the gentle creature, after swallowing and disgorging various large pieces of shellfish, found

viands to its taste in "the lean of cooked meat and portions of earthworms," filling up the intervals by a

perpetual dessert of microscopic animalcules, whirled into that lovely avernus, its mouth, by the currents of

the delicate ciliae which clothe every tentacle. The fact is, that the Madrepore, like those glorious

seaanemones whose living flowers stud every pool, is by profession a scavenger and a feeder on carrion;

and being as useful as he is beautiful, really comes under the rule which he seems at first to break, that

Another species of Madrepore (11) was discovered on our Devon coast by Mr. Gosse, more gaudy, though

not so delicate in hue as our Caryophyllia. Mr. Gosse's locality, for this and numberless other curiosities, is

Ilfracombe, on the north coast of Devon. My specimens came from Lundy Island, in the mouth of the Bristol

Channel, or more properly from that curious "Rat Island" to the south of it, where still lingers the black

longtailed English rat, exterminated everywhere else by his sturdier brown cousin of the Hanoverian

Look, now, at these tiny saucers of the thinnest ivory, the largest not bigger than a silver threepence, which

contain in their centres a milkwhite crust of stone, pierced, as you see under the magnifier, into a thousand

cells, each with its living architect within. Here are two kinds: in one the tubular cells radiate from the centre,

giving it the appearance of a tiny compound flower, daisy or groundsel; in the other they are crossed with

waving grooves, giving the whole a peculiar fretted look, even more beautiful than that of the former species.

They are Tubulipora patina and Tubulipora hispida; and stay break off that tiny rough red wart, and look

at its cells also under the magnifier: it is Cellepora pumicosa; and now, with the Madrepore, you hold in your

hand the principal, at least the commonest, British types of those famed coral insects, which in the tropics are

the architects of continents, and the conquerors of the ocean surge. All the world, since the publication of

Darwin's delightful "Voyage of the Beagle,"' and of Williams' "Missionary Enterprises," knows, or ought to

know, enough about them: for those who do not, there are a few pages in the beginning of Dr.

There are a few other true cellepore corals round the coast. The largest of all, Cervicornis, may be dredged a

few miles outside on the Exmouth bank, with a few more Tubulipores: but all tiny things, the lingering and,

as it were, expiring remnants of that great coralworld which, through the abysmal depths of past ages,

formed here in Britain our limestone hills, storing up for generations yet unborn the materials of agriculture

and architecture. Inexpressibly interesting, even solemn, to those who will think, is the sight of those puny

parasites which, as it were, connect the ages and the aeons: yet not so solemn and full of meaning as that tiny

relic of an older world, the little pear shaped Turbinolia (cousin of the Madrepores and Seaanemones),

found fossil in the Suffolk Crag, and yet still lingering here and there alive in the deep water of Scilly and the

west coast of Ireland, possessor of a pedigree which dates, perhaps, from ages before the day in which it was

said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." To think that the whole human race, its joys and its

sorrows, its virtues and its sins, its aspirations and its failures, has been rushing out of eternity and into

eternity again, as Arjoon in the Bhagavad Gita beheld the race of men issuing from Kreeshna's flaming

mouth, and swallowed up in it again, "as the crowds of insects swarm into the flame, as the homeless streams

leap down into the ocean bed," in an everlasting heartpulse whose blood is living souls and all that while,

and ages before that mystery began, that humble coral, unnoticed on the dark seafloor, has been "continuing

as it was at the beginning," and fulfilling "the law which cannot be broken," while races and dynasties and

Yes; it is this vision of the awful permanence and perfection of the natural world, beside the wild flux and

confusion, the mad struggles, the despairing cries of the world of spirits which man has defiled by sin, which

would at moments crush the naturalist's heart, and make his brain swim with terror, were it not that he can see

but above them a living loving countenance, human and yet Divine; and can hear a voice which said at first,

"Let us make man in our image;" and hath said since then, and says for ever and for ever, "Lo, I am with you

But now, friend, who listenest, perhaps instructed, and at least amused if, as Professor Harvey well says,

the simpler animals represent, as in a glass, the scattered organs of the higher races, which of your organs is

represented by that "sca'd man's head," which the Devon children more gracefully, yet with less adherence to

plain likeness, call "mermaid's head," (12) which we picked up just now on Paignton Sands? Or which, again,

by its more beautiful little congener, (13) five or six of which are adhering tightly to the slab before us, a ball

covered with delicate spines of lilac and green, and stuck over (cunning fellows!) with stripes of dead

seaweed to serve as improvised parasols? One cannot say that in him we have the first type of the human

skull: for the resemblance, quaint as it is, is only sensuous and accidental, (in the logical use of that term,)

and not homological, I.E. a lower manifestation of the same idea. Yet how is one tempted to say, that this was

Nature's first and lowest attempt at that use of hollow globes of mineral for protecting soft fleshy parts, which

she afterwards developed to such perfection in the skulls of vertebrate animals! But even that conceit, pretty

as it sounds, will not hold good; for though Radiates similar to these were among the earliest tenants of the

abyss, yet as early as their time, perhaps even before them, had been conceived and actualized, in the sharks,

and in Mr. Hugh Miller's pets the old red sandstone fishes, that very true vertebrate skull and brain, of which

this is a mere mockery. (14) Here the whole animal, with his extraordinary feeding mill, (for neither teeth nor

jaws is a fit word for it,) is enclosed within an evergrowing limestone castle, to the architecture of which the

Eddystone and the Crystal Palace are bungling heaps; without arms or legs, eyes or ears, and yet capable, in

spite of his perpetual imprisonment, of walking, feeding, and breeding, doubt it not, merrily enough. But this

result has been attained at the expense of a complication of structure, which has baffled all human analysis

and research into final causes. As much concerning this most miraculous of families as is needful to be

known, and ten times more than you are likely to understand, may be read in Harvey's "SeaSide Book," pp.

142 148, pages from which you will probably arise with a sense of the infinity and complexity of Nature,

even in what we are pleased to call her "lower" forms, and the simplest and, as it were, easiest forms of life.

Conceive a Crystal Palace, (for mere difference in size, as both the naturalist and the metaphysician know,

has nothing to do with the wonder,) whereof each separate joist, girder, and pane grows continually without

altering the shape of the whole; and you have conceived only one of the miracles embodied in that little

seaegg, which the Creator has, as it were, to justify to man His own immutability, furnished with a shell

capable of enduring fossil for countless ages, that we may confess Him to have been as great when first His

Spirit brooded on the deep, as He is now and will be through all worlds to come.

But we must make haste; for the tide is rising fast, and our stone will be restored to its eleven hours' bath,

long before we have talked over half the wonders which it holds. Look though, ere you retreat, at one or two

What is that little brown thing whom you have just taken off the rock to which it adhered so stoutly by his

suckingfoot? A limpet? Not at all: he is of quite a different family and structure; but, on the whole, a

limpetlike shell would suit him well enough, so he had one given him: nevertheless, owing to certain

anatomical peculiarities, he needed one aperture more than a limpet; so one, if you will examine, has been

given him at the top of his shell. (15) This is one instance among a thousand of the way in which a scientific

knowledge of objects must not obey, but run counter to, the impressions of sense; and of a custom in nature

which makes this caution so necessary, namely, the repetition of the same form, slightly modified, in totally

different animals, sometimes as if to avoid waste, (for why should not the same conception be used in two

different cases, if it will suit in both?) and sometimes (more marvellous by far) when an organ, fully

developed and useful in one species, appears in a cognate species but feeble, useless, and, as it were, abortive;

and gradually, in species still farther removed, dies out altogether; placed there, it would seem, at first sight,

merely to keep up the family likeness. I am half jesting; that cannot be the only reason, perhaps not the reason

at all; but the fact is one of the most curious, and notorious also, in comparative anatomy.

Look, again, at those seaslugs. One, some three inches long, of a bright lemonyellow, clouded with purple;

another of a dingy grey; (16) another exquisite little creature of a pearly French White, (17) furred all over

the back with what seem arms, but are really gills, of ringed white and grey and black. Put that yellow one

into water, and from his head, above the eyes, arise two serrated horns, while from the afterpart of his back

springs a circular PrinceofWales'sfeather of gills, they are almost exactly like those which we saw just

now in the white Cucumaria. Yes; here is another instance of the same custom of repetition. The Cucumaria

is a low radiate animal the seaslug a far higher mollusc; and every organ within him is formed on a

different type; as indeed are those seemingly identical gills, if you come to examine them under the

microscope, having to oxygenate fluids of a very different and more complicated kind; and, moreover, the

Cucumaria's gills were put round his mouth, the Doris's feathers round the other extremity; that grey Eolis's,

again, are simple clubs, scattered over his whole back, and in each of his nudibranch congeners these same

gills take some new and fantastic form; in Melibaea those clubs are covered with warts; in Scyllaea, with

tufted bouquets; in the beautiful Antiopa they are transparent bags; and in many other English species they

take every conceivable form of leaf, tree, flower, and branch, bedecked with every colour of the rainbow, as

you may see them depicted in Messrs. Alder and Hancock's unrivalled Monograph on the Nudibranch

And now, worshipper of final causes and the mere useful in nature, answer but one question, Why this

prodigal variety? All these Nudibranchs live in much the same way: why would not the same mould have

done for them all? And why, again, (for we must push the argument a little further,) why have not all the

butterflies, at least all who feed on the same plant, the same markings? Of all unfathomable triumphs of

design, (we can only express ourselves thus, for honest induction, as Paley so well teaches, allows us to

ascribe such results only to the design of some personal will and mind,) what surpasses that by which the

scales on a butterfly's wing are arranged to produce a certain pattern of artistic beauty beyond all painter's

skill? What a waste of power, on any utilitarian theory of nature! And once more, why are those strange

microscopic atomies, the Diatomaceae and Infusoria, which fill every stagnant pool; which fringe every

branch of seaweed; which form banks hundreds of miles long on the Arctic seafloor, and the strata of

whole moorlands; which pervade in millions the mass of every iceberg, and float aloft in countless swarms

amid the clouds of the volcanic dust; why are their tiny shells of flint as fantastically various in their quaint

mathematical symmetry, as they are countless beyond the wildest dreams of the Poet? Mystery inexplicable

on the conceited notion which, making man forsooth the centre of the universe, dares to believe that this

variety of forms has existed for countless ages in abysmal seadepths and untrodden forests, only that some

few individuals of the Western races might, in these latter days, at last discover and admire a corner here and

there of the boundless realms of beauty. Inexplicable, truly, if man be the centre and the object of their

existence; explicable enough to him who believes that God has created all things for Himself, and rejoices in

His own handiwork, and that the material universe is, as the wise man says, "A platform whereon His Eternal

Spirit sports and makes melody." Of all the blessings which the study of nature brings to the patient observer,

let none, perhaps, be classed higher than this: that the further he enters into those fairy gardens of life and

birth, which Spenser saw and described in his great poem, the more he learns the awful and yet most

comfortable truth, that they do not belong to him, but to One greater, wiser, lovelier than he; and as he stands,

silent with awe, amid the pomp of Nature's everbusy rest, hears, as of old, "The Word of the Lord God

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

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 housespider. At all

events, whether we were intruding or not, in turning this stone, we must pay a fine for having done so; for

there lies an animal as foul and monstrous to the eye as "hydra, gorgon, or chimaera dire," and yet so

wondrously fitted to its work, that we must needs endure for our own instruction to handle and to look at it.

Its name, if you wish for it, is Nemertes; probably N. Borlasii; (18) a worm of very "low" organization,

though well fitted enough for its own work. You see it? That black, shiny, knotted lump among the gravel,

small enough to be taken up in a dessert spoon. Look now, as it is raised and its coils drawn out. Three feet

six nine, at least: with a capability of seemingly endless expansion; a slimy tape of living caoutchouc, some

eighth of an inch in diameter, a dark chocolate black, with paler longitudinal lines. Is it alive? It hangs,

helpless and motionless, a mere velvet string across the hand. Ask the neighbouring Annelids and the fry of

the rock fishes, or put it into a vase at home, and see. It lies motionless, trailing itself among the gravel; you

cannot tell where it begins or ends; it may be a dead strip of seaweed, 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 bellshaped 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 endforemost 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,

There; we must come away now, for the tide is over our ankles; but touch, before you go, one of those little

red mouths which peep out of the stone. A tiny jet of water shoots up almost into your face.

The bivalve (20) who has burrowed into the limestone knot (the softest part of the stone to his jaws, though

the hardest to your chisel) is scandalized at having the soft mouths of his siphons so rudely touched, and

taking your finger for some bothering Annelid, who wants to nibble him, is defending himself; shooting you,

as naturalists do hummingbirds, 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

strawcoloured scallops (Hinnites pusio, Plate X. fig. 1), who have gradually incorporated the layers of their

lower valve with the roughnesses of the stone, destroying thereby the beautiful form which belongs to their

race, but not their delicate colour. There are a few more bivalves too, adhering to the stone, and those rare

ones, and two or three delicate Mangeliae and Nassae (21) are trailing their graceful spires up and down in

search of food. That little bright red and yellow pea, too, touch it the brilliant coloured cloak is withdrawn,

and, instead, you have a beautiful ribbed pink cowry, (22) our only European representative of that grand

tropical family. Cast one wondering glance, too, at the forest of zoophytes and corals, Lepraliae and Flustrae,

and those quaint blue stars, set in brown jelly, which are no zoophytes, but respectable molluscs, each with

his well formed mouth and intestines, (23) but combined in a peculiar form of Communism, of which all

one can say is, that one hopes they like it; and that, at all events, they agree better than the heroes and

Now away, and as a specimen of the fertility of the waterworld, look at this rough list of species, (24) the

greater part of which are on this very stone, and all of which you might obtain in an hour, would the rude tide

wait for zoologists: and remember that the number of individuals of each species of polype must be counted

by tens of thousands; and also, that, by searching the forest of seaweeds which covers the upper surface, we

A goodly catalogue this, surely, of the inhabitants of three or four large stones; and yet how small a specimen

From the bare rocks above highwater 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 springtides and high gales, have their peculiar

little univalves, their crisp lichenlike seaweed, in myriads; lower down, the region of the Fuci

(bladderweeds) has its own tribes of periwinkles and limpets; below again, about the neaptide mark, the

region of the corallines and Algae furnishes food for yet other species who graze on its watery meadows; and

beneath all, only uncovered at low springtide, the zone of the Laminariae (the great tangles and oreweeds)

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 halftide level, deep

rockbasins, 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 tableland of Mexico,

down whose awful cliffs, swept by cool seabreezes, the traveller looks from among the plants and animals

of the temperate zone, and sees far below, dim through their everlasting vapourbath of rank hot steam, the

"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

"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 bananalike 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 tidepools. The broad leaves of the Ulva, finer than the finest cambric, and of the

brightest emeraldgreen, adorn the hollows at the highest level, while, at the lowest, wave tiny forests of the

feathery Ptilota and Dasya, and large leaves, cut into fringes and furbelows, of rosy Rhodymeniae. All these

are lovely to behold; but I think I admire as much as any of them, one of the commonest of our marine plants,

Chondrus crispus. It occurs in the greatest profusion on this coast, in every pool between tidemarks; and

everywhere except in those of the highest level, where constant exposure to light dwarfs the plant, and turns

it of a dull umberbrown tint it is elegant in form and brilliant in colour. The expanding fanshaped 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 swordblade." GOSSE'S DEVONSHIRE

And the seabottom, 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 waterousel 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 semihuman 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

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 seaworld with a human life

and beauty. For, after all, starfishes and sea anemones are dull substitutes for Sirens and Tritons; the lamps

of the seanymphs, those glorious phosphorescent medusae whose beauty Mr. Gosse sets forth so well with

pen and pencil, are not as attractive as the seanymphs 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 sealherd,

probably too with the same result as the worldfamous 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 waterworld as our present appliances afford us are full enough of

pleasure; and we will not envy Glaucus: we will not even be overanxious 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

fiftyfathom line: we will be content with the wonders of the shore and of the seafloor, 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 waterworld, 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. Seaweeds are no mere playthings for children; and to buy at a shop some thirty pretty kinds, pasted

on paper, with long names (probably misspelt) written under each, is not by any means to possess a

collection of them. Putting aside the number and the obscurity of their species, the questions which arise in

studying their growth, reproduction, and organic chemistry are of the very deepest and most important in the

whole range of science; and it will need but a little study of such a book as Harvey's "Algae," to show the

wise man that he who has comprehended (which no man yet does) the mystery of a single spore or

tissuecell, 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 selfreprovingly, as he discovers that man is not the measure of all things, and that in much learning may

be vanity and vexation of spirit, and in much study a weariness of the flesh; and all our deeper physical

science only brings the same question more awfully near. "Vilior alg�," more worthless than the very

seaweed, says the old Roman: and yet no torn scrap of that very seaweed, which tomorrow may manure

the nearest garden, but says to us, "Proud man! talking of spores and vesicles, if thou darest for a moment to

fancy that to have seen spores and vesicles is to have seen me, or to know what I am, answer this. Knowest

thou how the bones do grow in the womb? Knowest thou even how one of these tiny black dots, which thou

callest spores, grow on my fronds?" And to that question what answer shall we make? We see tissues divide,

cells develop, processes go on but How and Why? These are but phenomena; but what are phenomena save

effects? Causes, it may be, of other effects; but still effects of other causes. And why does the cause cause

that effect? Why should it not cause something else? Why should it cause anything at all? Because it obeys a

law. But why does it obey the law? and how does it obey the law? And, after all, what is a law? A mere

custom of Nature. We see the same phenomenon happen a great many times; and we infer from thence that it

has a custom of happening; and therefore we call it a law: but we have not seen the law; all we have seen is

the phenomenon which we suppose to indicate the law. We have seen things fall: but we never saw a little

flying thing pulling them down, with "gravitation" labelled on its back; and the question, why things fall, and

HOW, is just where it was before Newton was born, and is likely to remain there. All we can say is, that

Nature has her customs, and that other customs ensue, when those customs appear: but that as to what

connects cause and effect, as to what is the reason, the final cause, or even the CAUSA CAUSANS, of any

phenomenon, we know not more but less than ever; for those laws or customs which seem to us simplest

("endosmose," for instance, or "gravitation"), are just the most inexplicable, logically unexpected, seemingly

arbitrary, certainly supernatural miraculous, if you will; for no natural and physical cause whatsoever can

be assigned for them; while if anyone shall argue against their being miraculous and supernatural on the

ground of their being so common, I can only answer, that of all absurd and illogical arguments, this is the

most so. For what has the number of times which the miracle occurs to do with the question, save to increase

the wonder? Which is more strange, that an inexplicable and unfathomable thing should occur once and for

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 selftorture 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 (miscalled the

Confessor) fled from her hymns of praise, in the old legend of Haveringattebower, 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 fostermother 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

He is not here: He is risen. Good reader, you will probably agree that to know that saying, is to know the

keynote 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 seaweed 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 searocks and sandhills. Even if you do

not find the delicate lilylike Trichonema of the Channel Islands and Dawlish, or the almost as beautiful

Squill of the Cornish cliffs, or the sealavender 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

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 tideflats 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

But to return to the waterworld, and to dredging; which of all seaside 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

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 scrapinglip 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 bagnet 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

draggingrope 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 widemouthed bottles for the more delicate monsters, and a couple

of buckets, to receive the large lumps of oysters and serpulae which you will probably bring to the surface.

As for a dredging ground, one may be found, I suppose, off every wateringplace. 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

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 wellknown 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 Oarerock, 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 seabottom thus stored with treasures scraped up from deeper water in

Hastings is, I fear, but a poor spot for dredging. Its friable cliffs and strong tides produce a changeable and

barren seafloor. 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

tidemarks; 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 saltwater tanks of the Zoological

An hour or two's dredging round the rocks to the eastward, would probably yield many delicate and brilliant

little fishes; Gobies, brilliant Labri, blue, yellow, and orange, with tiny rabbit mouths, and powerful

protruding teeth; pipe fishes (Syngnathi) (25) with strange snipebills (which they cannot open) and

snakelike bodies; small cuttlefish (Sepiolae) of a white jelly mottled with brilliant metallic hues, with a ring

of suckered arms round their tiny parrots' beaks, who, put into a jar, will hover and dart in the water, as the

skylark does in air, by rapid winnowings of their glassy sidefins, while they watch you with bright

lizardeyes; 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 seaslugs and bivalve shells, you will

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

whitehorned Hesperus, the orangehorned 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 oldfashioned backhair combs, of a metallic lustre,

which will astonish you. With these combs the worm seems to burrow head downward into the sand; but

whether he always remains in that attitude I cannot say. His name is Pectinaria Belgica. He is an Annelid, or

true worm, connected with the Serpulea and Sabellae of which I have spoken already, and holds himself in

his case like them, by hooks and bristles set on each ring of his body. In confinement he will probably come

out of his case and die; when you may dissect him at your leisure, and learn a great deal more about him

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,

On the Diamond you will find many, or most of those gay creatures which attract your eye in the central row

of tanks at the Zoological Gardens: great twisted masses of Serpulae, (26) those white tubes of stone, from

the mouth of which protrude pairs of rosecoloured or orange fans, flashing in, quick as light, the moment

You will dredge, too, the twelverayed sunstar (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 suckingfeet 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 hearturchin (Spatangus

purpureus), clothed in pale lilac horny spines, and other Echinoderms, for which you must consult Forbes's

"British Starfishes:" but perhaps the species among them which will interest you most, will be the common

brittlestar (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 Chinaasters 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 stoneflower of the deep, with its daisylike 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 gemlike eyes which borders their

"cloak," lying along the extreme out edge of the shell as the valves are half open, but for the sake of the

parasites outside: corallines of exquisite delicacy, Plumulariae and Sertulariae, dead men's hands (Alcyonia),

lumps of white or orange jelly, which will protrude a thousand starlike 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 southwest gale, and think long over them before you

determine whether the oatlike 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 seaanemones, of quite different forms from any which we have found along the rocks. One of

them will certainly be the Dianthus, (27) which will open into a furbelowed flower, furred with innumerable

delicate tentacula; and in the centre a mouth of the most delicate orange, the size of the whole animal being

perhaps eight inches high and five across. Perhaps it will be of a satiny grey, perhaps pale rose, perhaps pure

white; whatever its colour, it is the very maiden queen of all the beautiful tribe, and one of the loveliest gems

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 fishmonger 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

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

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 oysterboat 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 deepsea lines and lobsterpots, 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

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 seavermin. 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

It was neaptide, too, and therefore nothing could be done among the rocks. So, in despair, finding an old

coastguard friend starting for his lobsterpots, 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 deerpark 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 readmitted 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

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

hoopingcough, 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 heavensent 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

lifegiving 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 lifegiving garment of perpetual

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 selfsatisfied clumsiness, and

tell him, that if the House of Commons would but summon one of the little Paramecia from any Thames'

sewermouth, to give his evidence before their next Cholera Committee, sanitary bluebooks, 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

Nay, in the boat at the minute of which I have been speaking, silent and neglected, sat a fellowpassenger,

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 fellowworkers, 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 oreweed (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

twentyfour 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 forcepumps, 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 handmagnifier, 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

roundbodied, spindleshanked, 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

selfsacrifice 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 rosecoloured polype, like

On that leg grows, amid another copse of the grey polypes, a delicate strawcoloured Sertularia, branch on

branch of tiny double combs, each tooth of the comb being a tube containing a living flower; on another leg

another Sertularia, coarser, but still beautiful; and round it again has trained itself, parasitic on the parasite,

plant upon plant of glass ivy, bearing crystal bells, (29) each of which, too, protrudes its living flower; on

another leg is a fresh species, like a little heatherbush of whitest ivory, (30) and every needle leaf a polype

cell let us stop before the imagination grows dizzy with the contemplation of those myriads of beautiful

atomies. And what is their use? Each living flower, each polype mouth is feeding fast, sweeping into itself,

by the perpetual currents caused by the delicate fringes upon its rays (so minute these last, that their motion

only betrays their presence), each tiniest atom of decaying matter in the surrounding water, to convert it, by

some wondrous alchemy, into fresh cells and buds, and either build up a fresh branch in their thousand

tenanted tree, or form an eggcell, from whence when ripe may issue, not a fixed zoophyte, but a free

And in the meanwhile, among this animal forest grows a vegetable one of delicatest seaweeds, green and

brown and crimson, whose office is, by their everlasting breath, to reoxygenate the impure water, and render

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 lobsterpots, 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

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, seaweeds 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

But all the seaweeds, in common with other vegetables, perform this function continually, and thus maintain

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

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 seaside? Nay more, even to them, must not the glories of the waterworld 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 seaworld for a few days; much more

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 saltwater, filled with living plants

and seaweeds, maintaining each other in perfect health, and each following, as far as is possible in a

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 rockpool, by keeping it for eight weeks in unchanged saltwater, 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 reoxygenated it from

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

seawater, 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

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 seaanimals, 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 saltwater "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 drawingroom ornaments, flowergardens which never

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

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 lefthand

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 starfishes 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.

"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

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 soldiercrab, (31) to show them how much there is to

be seen, and how full Nature is also of that ludicrous element of which we spoke above. And, indeed, it is in

this form of Natural History: not in mere classification, and the finding out of means, and quarrellings as to

the first discovery of that beetle or this buttercup, too common, alas! among mere closetcollectors,

"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

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

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 seaanimals 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 lodginghouse at the most cockney of

Buy at any glassshop 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 saltwater, 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

Go down at low springtide to the nearest ledge of rocks, and with a hammer and chisel chip off a few pieces

of stone covered with growing seaweed. 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 lowwater 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 fanshaped sheets, as thin as the

finest silverpaper. The smallest bits of stone are sufficient, provided the seaweeds 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

weedstems; if they have, drag them out; for they will surely die, and as surely spoil all by sulphuretted

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 crossgrained

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. 1719, 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 seaweeds which have appeared

spontaneously in the tanks from unsuspected spores floating in the seawater. On the other hand, Mr. Lloyd

lays much stress on the necessity of a�rating the water, by keeping it in perpetual motion; a process not easy

to be carried out in small aquaria; at least to that perfection which has been attained at the Crystal Palace,

where the water is kept in continual circulation by steampower. For a jaraquarium, it will be enough to

Now for the live stock. In the crannies of every rock you will find seaanemones (Actiniae); and a dozen of

these only will be enough to convert your little vase into the most brilliant of living flowergardens. 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 siennayellow; another all

but white. Take them from their rock; you can do it easily by slipping under them your fingernail, 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 seaweed; when you get

home turn them into a dish full of water and leave them for the night, and go to look at them tomorrow.

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 hundredpetalled flower,

crimson, pink, purple, or orange; touch one, and it shrinks together like a sensitive plant, displaying at the

root of the petals a ring of brilliant turquoise beads. That is the commonest of all the Actiniae

(Mesembryanthemum); you may have him when and where you will: but if you will search those rocks

somewhat closer, you will find even more gorgeous species than him. See in that pool some dozen large ones,

in full bloom, and quite six inches across, some of them. If their cousins whom we found just now were like

Chrysanthemums, these are like quilled Dahlias. Their arms are stouter and shorter in proportion than those

of the last species, but their colour is equally brilliant. One is a brilliant bloodred; another a delicate

seablue 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 tomorrow.

Let your Actiniae stand for a day or two in the dish, and then, picking out the liveliest and handsomest,

detach them once more from their hold, drop them into your vase, right them with a bit of stick, so that the

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 seadaisy, of which there is an excellent description and plates in Mr. Gosse's "Rambles in

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 starlike 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

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 lowwater 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 seaweeds, 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

That last word is no figure of speech. Look among the beds of sea weed for a few of the bright yellow or

green seasnails (Nerita), or Conical Tops (Trochus), especially that beautiful pink one spotted with brown

(Ziziphinus), which you are sure to find about shaded rockledges at dead low tide, and put them into your

aquarium. For the present, they will only nibble the green ulvae; but when the film of young weed begins to

form, you will see it mown off every morning as fast as it grows, in little semicircular sweeps, just as if a

And a scythe has been at work; none other than the tongue of the little shellfish; a description of its

extraordinary mechanism (too long to quote here, but which is well worth reading) may be found in Gosse's

A prawn or two, and a few minute starfish, will make your aquarium complete; though you may add to it

endlessly, as one glance at the saltwater tanks of the Zoological Gardens, and the strange and beautiful

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 lifegiving 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 halfinch 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 seaweeds will neither thrive nor

keep the water sweet. With plenty of light you will see, to quote Mr. Gosse once more, (33) "thousands of

tiny globules forming on every plant, and even all over the stones, where the infant vegetation is beginning to

grow; and these globules presently rise in rapid succession to the surface all over the vessel, and this process

"Now these globules consist of PURE OXYGEN, given out by the plants under the stimulus of light; and to

this oxygen the animals in the tank owe their life. The difference between the profusion of oxygenbubbles

produced on a sunny day, and the paucity of those seen on a dark cloudy day, or in a northern aspect, is very

marked." Choose, therefore, a south or east window, but draw down the blind, or throw a handkerchief over

all if the heat become fierce. The water should always feel cold to your hand, let the temperature outside be

Next, you must make up for evaporation by FRESH water (a very little will suffice), as often as in summer

you find the water in your vase sink below its original level, and prevent the water from getting too salt. For

the salts, remember, do not evaporate with the water; and if you left the vase in the sun for a few weeks, it

The simplest plan which I have found successful is an earthen jar. You may buy them with a cover which

screws on with two iron clasps. If you do not find such, a piece of oilskin tied over the mouth is enough. But

do not fill the jar full of water; leave about a quarter of the contents in empty air, which the water may

absorb, and so keep itself fresh. And any pieces of stone, or oysters, which you send up, hang by a string

from the mouth, that they may not hurt tender animals by rolling about the bottom. With these simple

precautions, anything which you are likely to find will well endure fortyeight hours of travel.

Then Mr. Gosse's artificial seawater will form a perfect substitute. You may buy the requisite salts (for there

are more salts than "salt" in seawater) from any chemist to whom Mr. Gosse has entrusted his discovery,

One more hint before we part. If, after all, you are not going down to the seaside this year, and have no

opportunities of testing "the wonders of the shore," you may still study Natural History in your own

I am not jesting; a freshwater aquarium, though by no means as beautiful as a saltwater one, is even more

easily established. A glass jar, floored with two or three inches of pondmud (which should be covered with

fine gravel to prevent the mud washing up); a specimen of each of two waterplants which you may buy now

at any good shop in Covent Garden, Vallisneria spiralis (which is said to give to the Canvasbacked duck of

America its peculiar richness of flavour), and Anacharis alsinastrum, that magical weed which, lately

introduced from Canada among timber, has multiplied, self sown, to so prodigious an extent, that it bid fair,

a few years since, to choke the navigation not only of our canals and fen rivers, but of the Thames itself:

(34) or, in default of these, some of the more delicate pondweeds; such as Callitriche, Potamogeton

pusillum, and, best of all, perhaps, the beautiful WaterMilfoil (Myriophyllium), whose comblike leaves are

the haunts of numberless rare and curious animalcules: these (in themselves, from the transparency of their

circulation, interesting microscopic objects) for oxygenbreeding vegetables; and for animals, the pickings of

any pond; a minnow or two, an eft; a few of the delicate pondsnails (unless they devour your plants too

rapidly): waterbeetles, of activity inconceivable, and that wondrous bug the Notonecta, who lies on his back

all day, rowing about his boatshaped body, with one long pair of oars, in search of animalcules, and the

moment the lights are out, turns head over heels, rights himself, and opening a pair of handsome wings, starts

to fly about the dark room in company with his friend the water beetle, and (I suspect) catch flies; and then

slips back demurely into the water with the first streak of dawn. But perhaps the most interesting of all the

tribes of the Naiads, (in default, of course, of those semihuman nymphs with which our Teutonic

forefathers, like the Greeks, peopled each "sacred fountain,") are the little "watercrickets," which may be

found running under the pebbles, or burrowing in little galleries in the banks: and those "caddises," which

crawl on the bottom in the stiller waters, enclosed, all save the head and legs, in a tube of sand or pebbles,

shells or sticks, green or dead weeds, often arranged with quaint symmetry, or of very graceful shape. Their

aspect in this state may be somewhat uninviting, but they compensate for their youthful ugliness by the

strangeness of their transformations, and often by the delicate beauty of the perfect insects, as the "caddises,"

rising to the surface, become flying Phryganeae (caperers and sand flies), generally of various shades of

fawncolour; and the water crickets (though an unscientific eye may be able to discern but little difference

in them in the "larva," or imperfect state) change into flies of the most various shapes; one, perhaps, into

the great sluggish olive "Stonefly" (Perla bicaudata); another into the delicate lemoncoloured "Yellow

Sally" (Chrysoperla viridis); another into the dark chocolate "Alder" (Sialis lutaria): and the majority into

duns and drakes (Ephemerae); whose grace of form, and delicacy of colour, give them a right to rank among

the most exquisite of God's creations, from the tiny "Spinners" (Ba�tis or Chloron) of incandescent glass,

with gorgeous rainbowcoloured eyes, to the great Green Drake (Ephemera vulgata), known to all fishermen

as the prince of troutflies. These animals, their habits, their miraculous transformations, might give many an

hour's quiet amusement to an invalid, laid on a sofa, or imprisoned in a sickroom, and debarred from

reading, unless by some such means, any page of that great green book outside, whose pen is the finger of

God, whose covers are the fire kingdoms and the star kingdoms, and its leaves the heatherbells, and the

I said just now, that happy was the sportsman who was also a naturalist. And, having once mentioned these

curious waterflies, I cannot help going a little farther, and saying, that lucky is the fisherman who is also a

naturalist. A fair scientific knowledge of the flies which he imitates, and of their habits, would often ensure

him sport, while other men are going home with empty creels. One would have fancied this a selfevident

fact; yet I have never found any sound knowledge of the natural waterflies which haunt a given stream,

except among cunning old fishermen of the lower class, who get their living by the gentle art, and bring to

indoors baskets of trout killed on flies, which look as if they had been tied with a pair of tongs, so rough and

ungainly are they; but which, nevertheless, kill, simply because they are (in COLOUR, which is all that fish

really care for) exact likenesses of some obscure local species, which happen to be on the water at the time.

Among gentlemenfishermen, on the other hand, so deep is the ignorance of the natural fly, that I have

known good sportsmen still under the delusion that the great green Mayfly comes out of a caddisbait; the

gentlemen having never seen, much less fished with, that most deadly bait the "Watercricket," or free

creeping larva of the Mayfly, which may be found in May under the river banks. The consequence of this

ignorance is that they depend for good patterns of flies on mere chance and experiment; and that the shop

patterns, originally excellent, deteriorate continually, till little or no likeness to their living prototype remains,

being tied by town girls, who have no more understanding of what the feathers and mohair in their hands

represent than they have of what the National Debt represents. Hence follows many a failure at the

streamside; because the "Caperer," or "Dun," or "Yellow Sally," which is produced from the flybook,

though, possibly, like the brood which came out three years since on some stream a hundred miles away, is

quite unlike the brood which is out today on one's own river. For not only do most of these flies vary in

colour in different soils and climates, but many of them change their hue during life; the Ephemerae,

especially, have a habit of throwing off the whole of their skins (even, marvellously enough, to the skin of the

eyes and wings, and the delicate "whisks" at their tail), and appearing in an utterly new garb after ten minutes'

The natural history of these flies, I understand from Mr. Stainton (one of our most distinguished

entomologists), has not yet been worked out, at least for England. The only attempt, I believe, in that

direction is one made by a charming book, "The Flyfisher's Entomology," which should be in every good

angler's library; but why should not a few fishermen combine to work out the subject for themselves, and

study for the interests both of science and their own sport, "The Wonders of the Bank?" The work, petty as it

may seem, is much too great for one man, so prodigal is Nature of her forms, in the stream as in the ocean;

but what if a correspondence were opened between a few fishermen of whom one should live, say, by the

Hampshire or Berkshire chalk streams; another on the slates and granites of Devon; another on the limestones

of Yorkshire or Derbyshire; another among the yet earlier slates of Snowdonia, or some mountain part of

Wales; and more than one among the hills of the Border and the lakes of the Highlands? Each would find (I

suspect), on comparing his insects with those of the others, that he was exploring a little peculiar world of his

own, and that with the exception of a certain number of typical forms, the flies of his county were unknown a

hundred miles away, or, at least, appeared there under great differences of size and colour; and each, if he

would take the trouble to collect the caddises and watercrickets, and breed them into the perfect fly in an

aquarium, would see marvels in their transformations, their instincts, their anatomy, quite as great (though

not, perhaps, as showy and startling) as I have been trying to point out on the seashore. Moreover, each and

every one of the party, I will warrant, will find his fellowcorrespondents (perhaps previously unknown to

him) men worth knowing; not, it may be, of the meditative and half saintly type of dear old Izaak Walton

(who, after all, was no fly fisher, but a sedentary "popjoy" guilty of float and worm), but rather, like his

flyfishing disciple Cotton, good fellows and men of the world, and, perhaps, something better over and

The suggestion has been made. Will it ever be taken up, and a "Naiad Club" formed, for the combination of

And, now, how can this desultory little treatise end more usefully than in recommending a few books on

Natural History, fit for the use of young people; and fit to serve as introductions to such deeper and larger

works as Yarrell's "Birds and Fishes," Bell's "Quadrupeds" and "Crustacea," Forbes and Hanley's "Mollusca,"

Owen's "Fossil Mammals and Birds," and a host of other admirable works? Not that this list will contain all

the best; but simply the best of which the writer knows; let, therefore, none feel aggrieved, if, as it may

First and foremost, certainly, come Mr. Gosse's books. There is a playful and genial spirit in them, a brilliant

power of word painting combined with deep and earnest religious feeling, which makes them as morally

valuable as they are intellectually interesting. Since White's "History of Selborne," few or no writers on

Natural History, save Mr. Gosse, Mr. G. H. Lewes, and poor Mr. E. Forbes, have had the power of bringing

out the human side of science, and giving to seemingly dry disquisitions and animals of the lowest type, by

little touches of pathos and humour, that living and personal interest, to bestow which is generally the special

function of the poet: not that Waterton and Jesse are not excellent in this respect, and authors who should be

in every boy's library: but they are rather anecdotists than systematic or scientific inquirers; while Mr. Gosse,

in his "Naturalist on the Shores of Devon," his "Tour in Jamaica," his "Tenby," and his "Canadian Naturalist,"

has done for those three places what White did for Selborne, with all the improved appliances of a science

which has widened and deepened tenfold since White's time. Mr. Gosse's "Manual of the Marine Zoology of

the British Isles" is, for classification, by far the completest handbook extant. He has contrived in it to

compress more sound knowledge of vast classes of the animal kingdom than I ever saw before in so small a

Miss Anne Pratt's "Things of the Seacoast" is excellent; and still better is Professor Harvey's "Seaside

Book," of which it is impossible to speak too highly; and most pleasant it is to see a man of genius and

learning thus gathering the bloom of his varied knowledge, to put it into a form equally suited to a child and a

SAVANT. Seldom, perhaps, has there been a little book in which so vast a quantity of facts have been told so

gracefully, simply, without a taint of pedantry or cumbrousness an excellence which is the sure and only

mark of a perfect mastery of the subject. Mr. G. H. Lewes's "Seashore Studies" are also very valuable;

hardly perhaps a book for beginners, but from his admirable power of description, whether of animals or of

Two little "Popular" Histories one of British Zoophytes, the other of British Seaweeds, by Dr.

Landsborough (since dead of cholera, at Saltcoats, the scene of his energetic and pious ministry) are very

excellent; and are furnished, too, with well drawn and coloured plates, for the comfort of those to whom a

scientific nomenclature (as liable as any other human thing to be faulty and obscure) conveys but a vague

conception of the objects. These may serve well for the beginner, as introductions to Professor Harvey's large

work on British Algae, and to the new edition of Professor Johnston's invaluable "British Zoophytes," Miss

Gifford's "Marine Botanist," third edition, and Dr. Cocks's "Seaweed Collector's Guide," have also been

For general Zoology the best books for beginners are, perhaps, as a general introduction, the Rev. J. A. L.

Wood's "Popular Zoology," full of excellent plates; and for systematic Zoology, Mr. Gosse's four little books,

on Mammals, Birds, Reptiles, and Fishes, published with many plates, by the Christian Knowledge Society,

at a marvellously cheap rate. For miscroscopic animalcules, Miss Agnes Catlow's "Drops of Water" will

teach the young more than they will ever remember, and serve as a good introduction to those teeming

abysses of the unseen world, which must be afterwards traversed under the guidance of Hassall and

For Ornithology, there is no book, after all, like dear old Bewick, PASSE though he may be in a scientific

point of view. There is a good little British ornithology, too, published in Sir W. Jardine's "Naturalist's

Library," and another by Mr. Gosse. And Mr. Knox's "Ornithological Rambles in Sussex," with Mr. St. John's

"Highland Sports," and "Tour in Sutherlandshire," are the monographs of naturalists, gentlemen, and

sportsmen, which remind one at every page (and what higher praise can one give?) of White's "History of

Selborne." These last, with Mr. Gosse's "Canadian Naturalist," and his little book "The Ocean," not forgetting

Darwin's delightful "Voyage of the Beagle and Adventure," ought to be in the hands of every lad who is

For general Geology, Professor Ansted's Introduction is excellent; while, as a specimen of the way in which a

single district may be thoroughly worked out, and the universal method of induction learnt from a narrow

field of objects, what book can, or perhaps ever will, compare with Mr. Hugh Miller's "Old Red Sandstone"?

For this last reason, I especially recommend to the young the Rev. C. A. Johns's "Week at the Lizard," as

teaching a young person how much there is to be seen and known within a few square miles of these British

Isles. But, indeed, all Mr. Johns's books are good (as they are bound to be, considering his most accurate and

varied knowledge), especially his "Flowers of the Field," the best cheap introduction to systematic botany

which has yet appeared. Trained, and all but selftrained, like Mr. Hugh Miller, in a remote and narrow field

of observation, Mr. Johns has developed himself into one of our most acute and persevering botanists, and

has added many a new treasure to the Flora of these isles; and one person, at least, owes him a deep debt of

gratitude for first lessons in scientific accuracy and patience, lessons taught, not dully and dryly at the book

and desk, but livingly and genially, in adventurous rambles over the bleak cliffs and ferny woods of the wild

Mr. Henfrey's "Rudiments of Botany" might accompany Mr. Johns's books. Mr. Babington's "Manual of

British Botany" is also most compact and highly finished, and seems the best work which I know of from

which a student somewhat advanced in English botany can verify species; while for ferns, Moore's

For Entomology, which, after all, is the study most fit for boys (as Botany is for girls) who have no

opportunity for visiting the seashore, Catlow's "Popular British Entomology," having coloured plates (a

delight to young people), and saying something of all the orders, is, probably, still a good work for beginners.

Mr. Stainton's "Entomologist's Annual for 1855" contains valuable hints of that gentleman's on taking and

arranging moths and butterflies; as well as of Mr. Wollaston's on performing the same kind office for that far

more numerous, and not less beautiful class, the beetles. There is also an admirable "Manual of British

Butterflies and Moths," by Mr. Stainton, in course of publication; but, perhaps, the most interesting of all

entomological books which I have seen (and for introducing me to which I must express my hearty thanks to

Mr. Stainton), is "Practical Hints respecting Moths and Butterflies, forming a Calendar of Entomological

I would gladly devote more space than I can here spare to a review of this little book, so perfectly does it

corroborate every word which I have said already as to the moral and intellectual value of such studies.

Richard Shield, making himself a firstrate "lepidopterist," while working with his hands for a pound a week,

is the antitype of Mr. Peach, the coastguardsman, among his Cornish tiderocks. But more than this, there is

about Shield's book a tone as of Izaak Walton himself, which is very delightful; tender, poetical, and

religious, yet full of quiet quaintness and humour; showing in every page how the love for Natural History is

in him only one expression of a love for all things beautiful, and pure, and right. If any readers of these pages

fancy that I over praise the book, let them buy it, and judge for themselves. They will thus help the good

man toward pursuing his studies with larger and better appliances, and will be (as I expect) surprised to find

how much there is to be seen and done, even by a workingman, within a day's walk of smoky Babylon

itself; and how easily a man might, if he would, wash his soul clean for a while from all the turmoil and

intrigue, the vanity and vexation of spirit of that "toopopulous wilderness," by going out to be alone a while

with God in heaven, and with that earth which He has given to the children of men, not merely for the

material wants of their bodies, but as a witness and a sacrament that in Him they live and move, and have

their being, "not by bread alone, but by EVERY word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God."

Thus I wrote some twenty years ago, when the study of Natural History was confined mainly to several

Since then, I am glad to say, it has become a popular and common pursuit, owing, I doubt not, to the impulse

given to it by the many authors whose works I then recommended. I recommend them still; though a swarm

of other manuals and popular works have appeared since, excellent in their way, and almost beyond counting.

But all honour to those, and above all to Mr. Gosse and Mr. Johns, who first opened people's eyes to the

wonders around them all day long. Now, we have, in addition to amusing books on special subjects, serials

on Natural History more or less profound, and suited to every kind of student and every grade of knowledge.

I mention the names of none. For first, they happily need no advertisement from me; and next, I fear to be

unjust to any one of them by inadvertently omitting its name. Let me add, that in the advertising columns of

those serials, will be found notices of all the new manuals, and of all apparatus, and other matters, needed by

amateur naturalists, and of many who are more than amateurs. Microscopy, meanwhile, and the whole study

of "The Wonders of the Little," have made vast strides in the last twenty years; and I was equally surprised

and pleased, to find, three years ago, in each of two towns of a few thousand inhabitants, perhaps a dozen

good microscopes, all but hidden away from the public, worked by men who knew how to handle them, and

who knew what they were looking at; but who modestly refrained from telling anybody what they were doing

so well. And it was this very discovery of unsuspected microscopists which made me more desirous than ever

to see as I see now in many places scientific societies, by means of which the few, who otherwise would

work apart, may communicate their knowledge to each other, and to the many. These "Microscopic,"

"Naturalist," "Geological," or other societies, and the "Field Clubs" for excursions into the country, which are

usually connected with them, form a most pleasant and hopeful new feature in English Society; bringing

together, as they do, almost all ranks, all shades of opinion; and it has given me deep pleasure to see, in the

case at least of the Country Clubs with which I am acquainted, the clergy of the Church of England taking an

active, and often a leading, interest in their practical work. The town clergy are, for the most part, too utterly

overworked to follow the example of their country brethren. But I have reason to know that they regard such

societies, and Natural History in general, with no unfriendly eyes; and that there is less fear than ever that the

clergy of the Church of England should have to relinquish their ancient boast that since the formation of the

Royal Society in the seventeenth century, they have done more for sound physical science than any other

priesthood or ministry in the world. Let me advise anyone who may do me the honour of reading these pages,

to discover whether such a Club or Society exists in his neighbourhood, and to join it forthwith, certain that

if his experience be at all like mine he will gain most pleasant information and most pleasant

acquaintances, and pass most pleasant days and evenings, among people whom he will be glad to know, and

whom he never would have known save for the new and now, I hope, rapidly spreading freemasonry of

Meanwhile, I hope though I dare not say I trust to see the day when the boys of each of our large schools

shall join like those of Marlborough and Clifton the same freemasonry; and have their own Naturalists'

Clubs; nay more; when our public schools and universities shall awake to the real needs of the age, and

even to the curtailing of the time usually spent in not learning Latin and Greek teach boys the rudiments at

least of botany, zoology, geology, and so forth; and when the public opinion, at least of the refined and

educated, shall consider it as ludicrous to use no stronger word to be ignorant of the commonest facts and

laws of this living planet, as to be ignorant of the rudiments of two dead languages. All honour to the said

two languages. Ignorance of them is a serious weakness; for it implies ignorance of many things else; and

indeed, without some knowledge of them, the nomenclature of the physical sciences cannot be mastered. But

I have got to discover that a boy's time is more usefully spent, and his intellect more methodically trained, by

getting up Ovid's Fasti with an ulterior hope of being able to write a few Latin verses, than in getting up

Professor Rolleston's "Forms of Animal Life," or any other of the excellent Scientific Manuals for beginners,

May that day soon come; and an old dream of mine, and of my scientific friends, be fulfilled at last.

And so I end this little book, hoping, even praying, that it may encourage a few more labourers to go forth

into a vineyard, which those who have toiled in it know to be full of everfresh health, and wonder and