From the bare rocks above high-water mark, down to abysses deeper than ever plummet sounded, is life, everywhere life; fauna after fauna, and flora after flora, arranged in zones, according to the amount of light and warmth which each species requires, and to the amount of pressure which they are able to endure. The crevices of the highest rocks, only sprinkled with salt spray in spring-tides and high gales, have their peculiar little univalves, their crisp lichen-like sea-weed, in myriads; lower down, the region of the Fuci (bladder-weeds) has its own tribes of periwinkles and limpets; below again, about the neap-tide mark, the region of the corallines and Algae furnishes food for yet other species who graze on its watery meadows; and beneath all, only uncovered at low spring-tide, the zone of the Laminariae (the great tangles and ore-weeds) is most full of all of every imaginable form of life. So that as we descend the rocks, we may compare ourselves (likening small things to great) to those who, descending the Andes, pa.s.s in a single day from the vegetation of the Arctic zone to that of the Tropics. And here and there, even at half-tide level, deep rock-basins, shaded from the sun and always full of water, keep up in a higher zone the vegetation of a lower one, and afford in nature an a.n.a.logy to those deep "barrancos" which split the high table-land of Mexico, down whose awful cliffs, swept by cool sea-breezes, the traveller looks from among the plants and animals of the temperate zone, and sees far below, dim through their everlasting vapour-bath of rank hot steam, the mighty forms and gorgeous colours of a tropic forest.
"I do not wonder," says Mr. Gosse, in his charming "Naturalist"s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast" (p. 187), "that when Southey had an opportunity of seeing some of those beautiful quiet basins hollowed in the living rock, and stocked with elegant plants and animals, having all the charm of novelty to his eye, they should have moved his poetic fancy, and found more than one place in the gorgeous imagery of his Oriental romances. Just listen to him
"It was a garden still beyond all price, Even yet it was a place of paradise; And here were coral bowers, And grots of madrepores, And banks of sponge, as soft and fair to eye As e"er was mossy bed Whereon the wood-nymphs lie With languid limbs in summer"s sultry hours.
Here, too, were living flowers, Which, like a bud compacted, Their purple cups contracted; And now in open blossom spread, Stretch"d, like green anthers, many a seeking head.
And arborets of jointed stone were there, And plants of fibres fine as silkworm"s thread; Yea, beautiful as mermaid"s golden hair Upon the waves dispread.
Others that, like the broad banana growing, Raised their long wrinkled leaves of purple hue, Like streamers wide outflowing." - KEHAMA, xvi. 5.
"A hundred times you might fancy you saw the type, the very original of this description, tracing, line by line, and image by image, the details of the picture; and acknowledging, as you proceed, the minute truthfulness with which it has been drawn. For such is the loveliness of nature in these secluded reservoirs, that the accomplished poet, when depicting the gorgeous scenes of Eastern mythology - scenes the wildest and most extravagant that imagination could paint - drew not upon the resources of his prolific fancy for imagery here, but was well content to jot down the simple lineaments of Nature as he saw her in plain, homely England.
"It is a beautiful and fascinating sight for those who have never seen it before, to see the little shrubberies of pink coralline - "the arborets of jointed stone" - that fringe those pretty pools.
It is a charming sight to see the crimson banana-like leaves of the Delesseria waving in their darkest corners; and the purple fibrous tufts of Polysiphonia and Ceramia, "fine as silkworm"s thread."
But there are many others which give variety and impart beauty to these tide-pools. The broad leaves of the Ulva, finer than the finest cambric, and of the brightest emerald-green, adorn the hollows at the highest level, while, at the lowest, wave tiny forests of the feathery Ptilota and Dasya, and large leaves, cut into fringes and furbelows, of rosy Rhodymeniae. All these are lovely to behold; but I think I admire as much as any of them, one of the commonest of our marine plants, Chondrus crispus. It occurs in the greatest profusion on this coast, in every pool between tide-marks; and everywhere - except in those of the highest level, where constant exposure to light dwarfs the plant, and turns it of a dull umber-brown tint - it is elegant in form and brilliant in colour. The expanding fan-shaped fronds, cut into segments, cut, and cut again, make fine bushy tufts in a deep pool, and every segment of every frond reflects a flush of the most l.u.s.trous azure, like that of a tempered sword-blade." - GOSSE"S DEVONSHIRE COAST, pp. 187-189.
And the sea-bottom, also, has its zones, at different depths, and its peculiar forms in peculiar spots, affected by the currents and the nature of the ground, the riches of which have to be seen, alas! rather by the imagination than the eye; for such spoonfuls of the treasure as the dredge brings up to us, come too often rolled and battered, torn from their sites and contracted by fear, mere hints to us of what the populous reality below is like. Often, standing on the sh.o.r.e at low tide, has one longed to walk on and in under the waves, as the water-ousel does in the pools of the mountain burn, and see it all but for a moment; and a solemn beauty and meaning has invested the old Greek fable of Glaucus the fisherman: how eating of the herb which gave his fish strength to leap back into their native element, he was seized on the spot with a strange longing to follow them under the waves, and became for ever a companion of the fair semi-human forms with which the h.e.l.lenic poets peopled their sunny bays and firths, feeding "silent flocks" far below on the green Zostera beds, or basking with them on the sunny ledges in the summer noon, or wandering in the still bays on sultry nights amid the choir of Amphitrite and her sea- nymphs:-
"Joining the bliss of the G.o.ds, as they waken the coves with their laughter,"
in nightly revels, whereof one has sung, -
"So they came up in their joy; and before them the roll of the surges Sank, as the breezes sank dead, into smooth green foam-flecked marble Awed; and the crags of the cliffs, and the pines of the mountains, were silent.
So they came up in their joy, and around them the lamps of the sea- nymphs, Myriad fiery globes, swam heaving and panting, and rainbows, Crimson, and azure, and emerald, were broken in star-showers, lighting, Far in the wine-dark depths of the crystal, the gardens of Nereus, Coral, and sea-fan, and tangle, the blooms and the palms of the ocean.
So they went on in their joy, more white than the foam which they scattered, Laughing and singing and tossing and twining; while, eager, the Tritons Blinded with kisses their eyes, unreproved, and above them in worship Fluttered the terns, and the sea-gulls swept past them on silvery pinions, Echoing softly their laughter; around them the wantoning dolphins Sighed as they plunged, full of love; and the great sea-horses which bore them Curved up their crests in their pride to the delicate arms of their riders, Pawing the spray into gems, till a fiery rainfall, unharming, Sparkled and gleamed on the limbs of the maids, and the coils of the mermen.
So they went on in their joy, bathed round with the fiery coolness, Needing nor sun nor moon, self-lighted, immortal: but others, Pitiful, floated in silence apart; on their knees lay the sea-boys Whelmed by the roll of the surge, swept down by the anger of Nereus; Hapless, whom never again upon quay or strand shall their mothers Welcome with garlands and vows to the temples; but, wearily pining, Gaze over island and main for the sails which return not; they, heedless, Sleep in soft bosoms for ever, and dream of the surge and the sea- maids.
So they pa.s.sed by in their joy, like a dream, on the murmuring ripple."
Such a rhapsody may be somewhat out of order, even in a popular scientific book; and yet one cannot help at moments envying the old Greek imagination, which could inform the soulless sea-world with a human life and beauty. For, after all, star-fishes and sea- anemones are dull subst.i.tutes for Sirens and Tritons; the lamps of the sea-nymphs, those glorious phosph.o.r.escent medusae whose beauty Mr. Gosse sets forth so well with pen and pencil, are not as attractive as the sea-nymphs themselves would be; and who would not, like Menelaus, take the grey old man of the sea himself asleep upon the rocks, rather than one of his seal-herd, probably too with the same result as the world-famous combat in the Antiquary, between Hector and Phoca? And yet - is there no human interest in these pursuits, more humanity and more divine, than there would be even in those Triton and Nereid dreams, if realized to sight and sense? Heaven forbid that those should say so, whose wanderings among rock and pool have been mixed up with holiest pa.s.sages of friendship and of love, and the intercommunion of equal minds and sympathetic hearts, and the laugh of children drinking in health from every breeze and instruction at every step, running ever and anon with proud delight to add their little treasure to their parents" stock, and of happy friendly evenings spent over the microscope and the vase, in examining, arranging, preserving, noting down in the diary the wonders and the labours of the happy, busy day. No; such short glimpses of the water-world as our present appliances afford us are full enough of pleasure; and we will not envy Glaucus: we will not even be over-anxious for the success of his only modern imitator, the French naturalist who is reported to have fitted himself with a waterproof dress and breathing apparatus, in order to walk the bottom of the Mediterranean, and see for himself how the world goes on at the fifty-fathom line: we will be content with the wonders of the sh.o.r.e and of the sea-floor, as far as the dredge will discover them to us. We shall even thus find enough to occupy (if we choose) our lifetime. For we must recollect that this hasty sketch has hardly touched on that vegetable water-world, which is as wonderful and as various as the animal one. A hint or two of the beauty of the sea- weeds has been given; but s.p.a.ce has allowed no more. Yet we might have spent our time with almost as much interest and profit, had we neglected utterly the animals which we have found, and devoted our attention exclusively to the flora of the rocks. Sea-weeds are no mere playthings for children; and to buy at a shop some thirty pretty kinds, pasted on paper, with long names (probably mis-spelt) written under each, is not by any means to possess a collection of them. Putting aside the number and the obscurity of their species, the questions which arise in studying their growth, reproduction, and organic chemistry are of the very deepest and most important in the whole range of science; and it will need but a little study of such a book as Harvey"s "Algae," to show the wise man that he who has comprehended (which no man yet does) the mystery of a single spore or tissue-cell, has reached depths in the great "Science of Life" at which an Owen would still confess himself "blind by excess of light." "Knowest thou how the bones grow in the womb?" asks the Jewish sage, sadly, half self-reprovingly, as he discovers that man is not the measure of all things, and that in much learning may be vanity and vexation of spirit, and in much study a weariness of the flesh; and all our deeper physical science only brings the same question more awfully near. "Vilior alga," more worthless than the very sea-weed, says the old Roman: and yet no torn sc.r.a.p of that very sea-weed, which to-morrow may manure the nearest garden, but says to us, "Proud man! talking of spores and vesicles, if thou darest for a moment to fancy that to have seen spores and vesicles is to have seen me, or to know what I am, answer this. Knowest thou how the bones do grow in the womb? Knowest thou even how one of these tiny black dots, which thou callest spores, grow on my fronds?" And to that question what answer shall we make? We see tissues divide, cells develop, processes go on - but How and Why?
These are but phenomena; but what are phenomena save effects?
Causes, it may be, of other effects; but still effects of other causes. And why does the cause cause that effect? Why should it not cause something else? Why should it cause anything at all?
Because it obeys a law. But why does it obey the law? and how does it obey the law? And, after all, what is a law? A mere custom of Nature. We see the same phenomenon happen a great many times; and we infer from thence that it has a custom of happening; and therefore we call it a law: but we have not seen the law; all we have seen is the phenomenon which we suppose to indicate the law.
We have seen things fall: but we never saw a little flying thing pulling them down, with "gravitation" labelled on its back; and the question, why things fall, and HOW, is just where it was before Newton was born, and is likely to remain there. All we can say is, that Nature has her customs, and that other customs ensue, when those customs appear: but that as to what connects cause and effect, as to what is the reason, the final cause, or even the CAUSA CAUSANS, of any phenomenon, we know not more but less than ever; for those laws or customs which seem to us simplest ("endosmose," for instance, or "gravitation"), are just the most inexplicable, logically unexpected, seemingly arbitrary, certainly supernatural - miraculous, if you will; for no natural and physical cause whatsoever can be a.s.signed for them; while if anyone shall argue against their being miraculous and supernatural on the ground of their being so common, I can only answer, that of all absurd and illogical arguments, this is the most so. For what has the number of times which the miracle occurs to do with the question, save to increase the wonder? Which is more strange, that an inexplicable and unfathomable thing should occur once and for all, or that it should occur a million times every day all the world over?
Let those, however, who are too proud to wonder, do as seems good to them. Their want of wonder will not help them toward the required explanation: and to them, as to us, as soon as we begin asking, "HOW?" and "WHY?" the mighty Mother will only reply with that magnificent smile of hers, most genial, but most silent, which she has worn since the foundation of all worlds; that silent smile which has tempted many a man to suspect her of irony, even of deceit and hatred of the human race; the silent smile which Solomon felt, and answered in "Ecclesiastes;" which Goethe felt, and did not answer in his "Faust;" which Pascal felt, and tried to answer in his "Thoughts," and fled from into self-torture and superst.i.tion, 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 gla.s.s," and close beneath him the bottomless abyss of doubt, and the nether fires of moral retribution. He fled from Nature"s silent smile, as that poor old King Edward (mis-called the Confessor) fled from her hymns of praise, in the old legend of Havering-atte-bower, when he cursed the nightingales because their songs confused him in his prayers: but the wise man need copy neither, and fear neither the silence nor the laughter of the mighty mother Earth, if he will be but wise, and hear her tell him, alike in both - "Why call me mother?
Why ask me for knowledge which I cannot teach, peace which I cannot give or take away? I am only your foster-mother and your nurse - and I have not been an unkindly one. But you are G.o.d"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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d in nature, the living among the dead? He is not here: He is risen."
He is not here: He is risen. Good reader, you will probably agree that to know that saying, is to know the key-note of the world to come. Believe me, to know it, and all it means, is to know the keynote of this world also, from the fall of dynasties and the fate of nations, to the sea-weed which rots upon the beach.
It may seem startling, possibly (though I hope not, for my readers"
sake, irreverent), to go back at once after such thoughts, be they true or false, to the weeds upon the cliff above our heads. But He who is not here, but is risen, yet is here, and has appointed them their services in a wonderful order; and I wish that on some day, or on many days, when a quiet sea and offsh.o.r.e breezes have prevented any new objects from coming to land with the rising tide, you would investigate the flowers peculiar to our sea-rocks and sandhills. Even if you do not find the delicate lily-like Trichonema of the Channel Islands and Dawlish, or the almost as beautiful Squill of the Cornish cliffs, or the sea-lavender of North Devon, or any of those rare Mediterranean species which Mr.
Johns has so charmingly described in his "Week at the Lizard Point," yet an average cliff, with its carpeting of pink thrift and of bladder catchfly, and Lady"s finger, and elegant gra.s.ses, most of them peculiar to the sea marge, is often a very lovely flower- bed.
Not merely interesting, too, but brilliant in their vegetation are sandhills; and the seemingly desolate d.y.k.es 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 G.o.d was watching as carefully as He did the pleasant hills inland: perhaps even more carefully; for the uplands He has completed, and handed over to man, that he may dress and keep them: but the tide-flats below are still unfinished, dry land in the process of creation, to which every tide is adding the elements of fertility, which shall grow food, perhaps in some future state of our planet, for generations yet unborn.
But to return to the water-world, and to dredging; which of all sea-side pursuits is perhaps the most pleasant, combining as it does fine weather sailing with the discovery of new objects, to which, after all, the waifs and strays of the beach, whether "flotsom jetsom, or lagand," as the old Admiralty laws define them, are few and poor. I say particularly fine weather sailing; for a swell, which makes the dredge leap along the bottom, instead of sc.r.a.ping 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 amus.e.m.e.nt in which ladies, if they will, may share, and which will increase, and not interfere with, the amus.e.m.e.nts of a water-party.
The naturalist"s dredge, of which Mr. Gosse"s "Aquarium" gives a detailed account, should differ from the common oyster dredge in being smaller; certainly not more than four feet across the mouth; and instead of having but one iron sc.r.a.ping-lip like the oyster dredge, it should have two, one above and one below, so that it will work equally well on whichsoever side it falls, or how often soever it may be turned over by rough ground. The bag-net should be of strong spunyarn, or (still better) of hide "such as those hides of the wild cattle of the Pampas, which the tobacconists receive from South America," cut into thongs, and netted close. It should be loosely laced together with a thong at the tail edge in order to be opened easily, when brought on board, without canting the net over, and pouring the contents roughly out through the mouth. The dragging-rope should be strong, and at least three times as long as the perpendicular depth of the water in which you are working; if, indeed, there is much breeze, or any swell at all, still more line should be veered out. The inboard end should be made fast somewhere in the stern sheets, the dredge hove to windward, the boat put before the wind; and you may then amuse yourself as you will for the next quarter of an hour, provided that you have got ready various wide-mouthed bottles for the more delicate monsters, and a couple of buckets, to receive the large lumps of oysters and serpulae which you will probably bring to the surface.
As for a dredging ground, one may be found, I suppose, off every watering-place. The most fertile spots are in rough ground, in not less than five fathoms water. The deeper the water, the rarer and more interesting will the animals generally be: but a greater depth than fifteen fathoms is not easily reached on this side of Plymouth; and, on the whole, the beginner will find enough in seven or eight fathoms to stock an aquarium rivalling any of those in the "Tank-house" at the Zoological Gardens.
In general, the south coast of England, to the eastward of Portland, affords bad dredging ground. The friable cliffs, of comparatively recent formations, keep the sea shallow, and the bottom smooth and bare, by the vast deposits of sand and gravel.
Yet round the Isle of Wight, especially at the back of the Needles, there ought to be fertile spots; and Weymouth, according to Mr.
Gosse and other well-known naturalists, is a very garden of Nereus.
Torbay, as may well be supposed, is an admirable dredging spot; perhaps its two best points are round the isolated Thatcher and Oare-rock, and from the mouth of Brixham harbour to Berry Head; along which last line, for perhaps three hundred years, the decks of all Brixham trawlers have been washed down ere running into harbour, and the sea-bottom thus stored with treasures sc.r.a.ped up from deeper water in every direction for miles and miles.
Hastings is, I fear, but a poor spot for dredging. Its friable cliffs and strong tides produce a changeable and barren sea-floor.
Yet the immense quant.i.ties of Fl.u.s.tra thrown up after a storm indicate dredging ground at no great distance outside; its rocks, uninteresting as they are compared with our Devonians, have yielded to the industry and science of M. Tumanowicz a vast number of sea- weeds and sponges. Those three curious polypes, Valkeria cuscuta (Plate I. fig. 3), Notamia Bursaria, and Serialaria Lendigera, abound within tide-marks; and as the place is so much visited by Londoners, it may be worth while to give a few hints as to what might be done, by anyone whose curiosity has been excited by the salt-water tanks of the Zoological Gardens and the Crystal Palace.
An hour or two"s dredging round the rocks to the eastward, would probably yield many delicate and brilliant little fishes; Gobies, brilliant Labri, blue, yellow, and orange, with tiny rabbit mouths, and powerful protruding teeth; pipe fishes (Syngnathi) (25) with strange snipe-bills (which they cannot open) and snake-like bodies; small cuttlefish (Sepiolae) of a white jelly mottled with brilliant metallic hues, with a ring of suckered arms round their tiny parrots" beaks, who, put into a jar, will hover and dart in the water, as the skylark does in air, by rapid winnowings of their gla.s.sy side-fins, while they watch you with bright lizard-eyes; the whole animal being a combination of the vertebrate and the mollusc, so utterly fantastic and abnormal, that (had not the family been amongst the commonest, from the earliest geological epochs) it would have seemed, to man"s deductive intellect, a form almost as impossible as the mermaid, far more impossible than the sea- serpent. These, and perhaps a few handsome sea-slugs and bivalve sh.e.l.ls, you will be pretty sure to find: perhaps a great deal more.
Meanwhile, without dredging, you may find a good deal on the sh.o.r.e.
In the spring Doris bilineata comes to the rocks in thousands, to lay its strange white furbelows of sp.a.w.n 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 Hanc.o.c.k.
At the bottom of the rock pools, behind St. Leonard"s baths, may be found hundreds of the snipe"s feather Anemone (Sagartia troglodytes), of every line; from the common brown and grey snipe"s feather kind, to the white-horned Hesperus, the orange-horned Aurora, and a rich lilac and crimson variety, which does not seem to agree with either the Lilacinia or Rubicunda of Gosse. A more beautiful living bouquet could hardly be seen, than might be made of the varieties of this single species, from this one place.
On the outside sands between the end of the Marina and the Martello tower, you may find, at very low tides, great numbers of a sand- tube, about three inches long, standing up out of the sand. I do not mean the tubes of the Terebella, so common in all sands, which are somewhat flexible, and have their upper end fringed with a ragged ring of sandy arms: those I speak of are straight and stiff, and ending in a point upward. Draw them out of the sand - they will offer some resistance - and put them into a vase of water; you will see the worm inside expand two delicate golden combs, just like old-fashioned back-hair combs, of a metallic l.u.s.tre, which will astonish you. With these combs the worm seems to burrow head downward into the sand; but whether he always remains in that att.i.tude I cannot say. His name is Pectinaria Belgica. He is an Annelid, or true worm, connected with the Serpulea and Sabellae of which I have spoken already, and holds himself in his case like them, by hooks and bristles set on each ring of his body. In confinement he will probably come out of his case and die; when you may dissect him at your leisure, and learn a great deal more about him thereby than (I am sorry to say) I know.
But if you have courage to run out fifteen or twenty miles to the Diamond, you may find really rare and valuable animals. There is a risk, of course, of being blown over to the coast of France, by a change of wind; there is a risk also of not being able to land at night on the inhospitable Hastings beach, and of sleeping, as best you can, on board: but in the long days and settled fine weather of summer, the trip, in a stout boat, ought to be a safe and a pleasant one.
On the Diamond you will find many, or most of those gay creatures which attract your eye in the central row of tanks at the Zoological Gardens: great twisted ma.s.ses of Serpulae, (26) those white tubes of stone, from the mouth of which protrude pairs of rose-coloured or orange fans, flashing in, quick as light, the moment that your finger approaches them or your shadow crosses the water.
You will dredge, too, the twelve-rayed sun-star (Solaster papposa), with his rich scarlet armour; and more strange, and quite as beautiful, the bird"s foot star (Palmipes membranaceus), which you may see crawling by its thousand sucking-feet in the Crystal Palace tanks, a pentagonal webbed bird"s foot, of scarlet and orange s.h.a.green. With him, most probably, will be a specimen of the great purple heart-urchin (Spatangus purpureus), clothed in pale lilac h.o.r.n.y spines, and other Echinoderms, for which you must consult Forbes"s "British Star-fishes:" but perhaps the species among them which will interest you most, will be the common brittle-star (Ophiocoma rosula), of which a hundred or so, I can promise, shall come up at a single haul of the dredge, entwining their long spine- clad arms in a seemingly inextricable confusion of "kaleidoscope"
patterns (thanks to Mr. Gosse for the one right epithet), purple and azure, fawn, brown, green, grey, white and crimson; as if a whole bed of China-asters should have first come to life, and then gone mad, and fallen to fighting. But pick out, one by one, specimens from the tangled ma.s.s, and you will agree that no China- aster is so fair as this living stone-flower of the deep, with its daisy-like disc, and fine long p.r.i.c.kly arms, which never cease their graceful serpentine motion, and its colours hardly alike in any two specimens. Handle them not, meanwhile, too roughly, lest, whether modesty or in anger, they begin a desperate course of gradual suicide, and, breaking off arm after arm piecemeal, fling them indignantly at their tormentor. Along with these you will certainly obtain a few of that fine bivalve, the great Scallop, which you have seen lying on every fishmonger"s counter in Hastings. Of these you must pick out those which seem dirtiest and most overgrown with parasites, and place them carefully in a jar of salt water, where they may not be rubbed; for they are worth your examination, not merely for the sake of that ring of gem-like eyes which borders their "cloak," lying along the extreme out edge of the sh.e.l.l as the valves are half open, but for the sake of the parasites outside: corallines of exquisite delicacy, Plumulariae and Sertulariae, dead men"s hands (Alcyonia), lumps of white or orange jelly, which will protrude a thousand star-like polypes, and the Tubularia indivisa, twisted tubes of fine straw, which ought already to have puzzled you; for you may pick them up in considerable ma.s.ses on the Hastings beach after a south-west gale, and think long over them before you determine whether the oat-like stems and spongy roots belong to an animal, or a vegetable.
Animals they are, nevertheless, though even now you will hardly guess the fact, when you see at the mouth of each tube a little scarlet flower, connected with the pink pulp which fills the tube.
For a further description of this largest and handsomest of our Hydroid Polypes, I must refer you to Johnston, or, failing him, to Landsborough; and go on, to beg you not to despise those pink, or grey, or white lumps of jelly, which will expand in salt water into exquisite sea-anemones, of quite different forms from any which we have found along the rocks. One of them will certainly be the Dianthus, (27) which will open into a furbelowed flower, furred with innumerable delicate tentacula; and in the centre a mouth of the most delicate orange, the size of the whole animal being perhaps eight inches high and five across. Perhaps it will be of a satiny grey, perhaps pale rose, perhaps pure white; whatever its colour, it is the very maiden queen of all the beautiful tribe, and one of the loveliest gems with which it has pleased G.o.d to bedeck this lower world.
These and much more you will find on the scallops, or even more plentifully on any lump of ancient oysters; and if you do not dredge, it would be well worth your while to make interest with the fish-monger for a few oyster lumps, put into water the moment they are taken out of the trawl. Divide them carefully, clear out the oysters with a knife, and put the sh.e.l.ls into your aquarium, and you will find that an oyster at home is a very different thing from an oyster on a stall.
You ought, besides, to dredge many handsome species of sh.e.l.ls, 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.ls are found in this way, and in no other.
But if you cannot afford the expense of your own dredge and boat, and the time and trouble necessary to follow the occupation scientifically, yet every trawler and oyster-boat will afford you a tolerable satisfaction. Go on board one of these; and while the trawl is down, spend a pleasant hour or two in talking with the simple, honest, st.u.r.dy 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 G.o.d, and the providence of G.o.d, 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 sh.e.l.ls and zoophytes which remains behind about the decks, and you will find, if a landsman, enough to occupy you for a week to come. Nay, even if it be too calm for trawling, condescend to go out in a dingy, and help to haul some honest fellow"s deep-sea lines and lobster-pots, and you will find more and stranger things about them than even fish or lobsters: though they, to him who has eyes to see, are strange enough.
I speak from experience; for it was not so very long ago that, in the north of Devon, I found sermons, not indeed in stones, but in a creature reputed among the most worthless of sea-vermin. I had been lounging about all the morning on the little pier, waiting, with the rest of the village, for a trawling breeze which would not come. Two o"clock was past, and still the red mainsails of the skiffs hung motionless, and their images quivered head downwards in the gla.s.sy swell,
"As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean."
It was neap-tide, too, and therefore nothing could be done among the rocks. So, in despair, finding an old coast-guard friend starting for his lobster-pots, I determined to save the old man"s arms, by rowing him up the sh.o.r.e; and then paddled homeward again, under the high green northern wall, five hundred feet of cliff furred to the water"s edge with rich oak woods, against whose base the smooth Atlantic swell died whispering, as if curling itself up to sleep at last within that sheltered nook, tired with its weary wanderings. The sun sank lower and lower behind the deer-park point; the white stair of houses up the glen was wrapped every moment deeper and deeper in hazy smoke and shade, as the light faded; the evening fires were lighted one by one; the soft murmur of the waterfall, and the pleasant laugh of children, and the splash of homeward oars, came clearer and clearer to the ear at every stroke: and as we rowed on, arose the recollection of many a brave and wise friend, whose lot was cast in no such western paradise, but rather in the infernos of this sinful earth, toiling even then amid the festering alleys of Bermondsey and Bethnal Green, to palliate death and misery which they had vainly laboured to prevent, watching the strides of that very cholera which they had been striving for years to ward off, now re-admitted in spite of all their warnings, by the carelessness, and laziness, and greed of sinful man. And as I thought over the whole hapless question of sanitary reform, proved long since a moral duty to G.o.d 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 un.o.btrusive perfection with which she has been taught to antic.i.p.ate, since the foundation of the world, some of the loftiest discoveries of modern science, of which we are too apt to boast as if we had created the method by discovering its possibility. Created it? Alas for the pride of human genius, and the autotheism which would make man the measure of all things, and the centre of the universe! All the invaluable laws and methods of sanitary reform at best are but clumsy imitations of the unseen wonders which every animalcule and leaf have been working since the world"s foundation; with this slight difference between them and us, that they fulfil their appointed task, and we do not.
The sickly geranium which spreads its blanched leaves against the cellar panes, and peers up, as if imploringly, to the narrow slip of sunlight at the top of the narrow alley, had it a voice, could tell more truly than ever a doctor in the town, why little Bessy sickened of the scarlatina, and little Johnny of the hooping-cough, till the toddling wee things who used to pet and water it were carried off each and all of them one by one to the churchyard sleep, while the father and mother sat at home, trying to supply by gin that very vital energy which fresh air and pure water, and the balmy breath of woods and heaths, were made by G.o.d to give; and how the little geranium did its best, like a heaven-sent angel, to right the wrong which man"s ignorance had begotten, and drank in, day by day, the poisoned atmosphere, and formed it into fair green leaves, and breathed into the children"s faces from every pore, whenever they bent over it, the life-giving oxygen for which their dulled blood and festered lungs were craving in vain; fulfilling G.o.d"s will itself, though man would not, too careless or too covetous to see, after thousands of years of boasted progress, why G.o.d had covered the earth with gra.s.s, herb, and tree, a living and life-giving garment of perpetual health and youth.
It is too sad to think long about, lest we become very Herac.l.i.tuses. Let us take the other side of the matter with Democritus, try to laugh man out of a little of his boastful ignorance and self-satisfied clumsiness, and tell him, that if the House of Commons would but summon one of the little Paramecia from any Thames" sewer-mouth, to give his evidence before their next Cholera Committee, sanitary blue-books, invaluable as they are, would be superseded for ever and a day; and sanitary reformers would no longer have to confess, that they know of no means of stopping the smells which in past hot summers drove the members out of the House, and the judges out of Westminster Hall.