Part 1

# Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore ### By Kingsley, Charles

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Transcribed from the 1890 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

[Picture: Book cover]

[Picture: Plate 1: Actinia Mesembryanthemum]

GLAUCUS OR THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE

* * * * *

BY CHARLES KINGSLEY

* * * * *

_WITH COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS_

* * * * *

London MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1890

_The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved_

* * * * *

RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BUNGAY.

_First Edition_ (Fcap. 8vo), May 1855. _Second Edition_, August 1855. _Third Edition_, 1856. _Fourth Edition_ (with Coloured Illustrations), 1859. _Fifth Edition_ (Crown 8vo), 1873. _Reprinted_ 1878, 1879, 1881, 1884, 1887, 1890.

Dedication.

MY DEAR MISS GRENFELL,

I CANNOT forego the pleasure of dedicating this little book to you; excepting of course the opening exhortation (needless enough in your case) to those who have not yet discovered the value of Natural History. Accept it as a memorial of pleasant hours spent by us already, and as an earnest, I trust, of pleasant hours to be spent hereafter (perhaps, too, beyond this life in the nobler world to come), in examining together the works of our Father in heaven.

Your grateful and faithful brother-in-law,

C. KINGSLEY.

BIDEFORD, _April_ 24, 1855.

* * * * *

_The basis of this little book was an Article which appeared in the_ _North British Review for November_ 1854.

* * * * *

BEYOND the shadow of the ship, I watch’d the water snakes: They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they rear’d, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes.

* * * *

O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gush’d from my heart, And I bless’d them unware.

COLERIDGE’S _Ancient Mariner_.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

WOOD ENGRAVINGS. FIG. PAGE 1. Nymphon Abyssorum, NORMAN 81 2. Caprella spinosissima, NORMAN 83 3. Pentacrinus asteria, LINNÆUS 85 COLOURED PLATES. PLATE 1. 1. FLUSTRA LINEATA; (_a_) enlarged with polypes 73 protruding. 2. FLUSTRA FOLIACEA. 3. VALKERIA CUSCUTA; (_a_) natural size; (_b_) two tentacles; (_c_) tentacles bent inwards; (_d_) enlarged, showing the gradual eversion of the animal. 4. CRISIA DENTICULATA; (_a_) natural size. 5. GEMELLARIA LORIOATA; (_a_) natural size. 6. SERTULARIA ROSEA; (_a_) natural size. 7. CELLULARIA CILIATA; (_a_) natural size; (_b_) one of the bird’s heads; (_c_) cell and bird’s head, much enlarged. 8. CAMPANULARIA SYRINGA; (_a_) natural size. 9. CAMPANULARIA VOLUBILIS, enlarged. 10. SERIALARIA LENDIGERA. 11. NOTAMIA BURSARIA; (_a_) natural size; (_b_) two pairs of polype cells with the tobacco pipe appendages 2. 1. CARDIUM RUSTICUM, (TUBERCULATUM). 2. PAGURUS 65 BERNHARDI, in a Periwinkle Shell 3. 1. NEMERTIES BORLASII. 2. SABELLA? 3. 136 Sand-tube of TEREBELLA CONCHILEGA (_See Plate_ 8) 4. 1. SYNAPTA DIGITATA; (_a_) Ditto separating and 109 throwing out capsuliferous threads. 2. THALASSIMA NEPTUNI 5. 1. BALANOPHYLLEA REGIA, expanded; (_a_) Ditto, 117 contracted; (_b_) Ditto coral; (_c_) Ditto, tentacle enlarged; 2. CARYOPHYLLEA SMITHII

## partly expanded; (_a_) Ditto, section of bony

plates; (_b_) Ditto, tentacle. 3. SAGARTIA ANGUICOMA closed; (_a_) Ditto, basal disc showing radiating septa. 4. SYNAPTA DIGITATA (_See Plate_ 4); (_a_, _b_) Ditto, fingered tentacles enlarged; (_c_) Ditto, Spiculæ; (_d_) Ditto, anchor lying on its transparent anchor-plate. 5. S. VITTATA? perforated anchor-plate; (_a_) Spicula 6. 1. ACTINIA MESEMBRYANTHEMUM, partially expanded; 135 (_a_) Ditto, closed. 2. BUNODES CRASSICORNIS. 3. CARYOPHYLLEA SMITHII _Front_ 7. 1. ECHINUS MILIARIS, creeping over Modiola 168 barbata. 2. Ditto, creeping up the glass. 3. Hiding under stones 8. 1. LITTORINA LITTOREA (_See Plate_ 9); (_a_) 201 operculum; (_b_) pallet; (_c_) part of pallet, magnified. 2. NASSA RETICULATA (_See Plate_ 11); (_a_) egg capsules; (_b_, _c_) fry; (_d_) shell of fry; (_e_) pallet, magnified. 3. PATELLA VULGARIS; (_a_) palate, natural size; (_b_, _c_) Ditto, enlarged. 4. ECHINUS MILIARIS (_See Plate_ 7); (_a_) teeth and digesting mill; (_b_) suckers, enlarged; (_c_) spine and socket; (_d_) shell denuded; (_e_) Pedicellaria. 5. NEMERTES BORLASII (_See Plate_ 3); (_a_) head, enlarged; (_b_) head expanded swallowing a Terebella 9. 1. CUCUMARIA HYNDMANNI. 2. LITTORINA LITTOREA. 114 3. SIPHUNCULUS BERNHARDUS in shell of TURRITELLA, with living BALANI 10. 1. SERPULA CONTORTUPLICATA. 2. HINNITES PUSIO. 129 3. DORIS REPANDA. 4. EOLIS PELLUCIDA. 5. PHOLADIDÆA PAPYRACEA. 6. PHOLAS PARVA. 7. FISSURELLA GRÆCA 11. 1. SYNGNATHUS LUMBRICIFORMIS. 2. SAXICAVA 163 RUGOSA; (_a_) Shell of SAXICAVA RUGOSA. 3. NASSA RETICULATA 12. 1. PEACHIA HASTATA. 2. URASTER RUBENS 92

GLAUCUS; OR, THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

YOU are going down, perhaps, by railway, to pass your usual six weeks at some watering-place along the coast, and as you roll along think more than once, and that not over-cheerfully, of what you shall do when you get there. You are half-tired, half-ashamed, of making one more in the ignoble army of idlers, who saunter about the cliffs, and sands, and quays; to whom every wharf is but a “wharf of Lethe,” by which they rot “dull as the oozy weed.” You foreknow your doom by sad experience. A great deal of dressing, a lounge in the club-room, a stare out of the window with the telescope, an attempt to take a bad sketch, a walk up one parade and down another, interminable reading of the silliest of novels, over which you fall asleep on a bench in the sun, and probably have your umbrella stolen; a purposeless fine-weather sail in a yacht, accompanied by many ineffectual attempts to catch a mackerel, and the consumption of many cigars; while your boys deafen your ears, and endanger your personal safety, by blazing away at innocent gulls and willocks, who go off to die slowly; a sport which you feel to be wanton, and cowardly, and cruel, and yet cannot find in your heart to stop, because “the lads have nothing else to do, and at all events it keeps them out of the billiard-room;” and after all, and worst of all, at night a soulless _réchauffé_ of third-rate London frivolity: this is the life-in-death in which thousands spend the golden weeks of summer, and in which you confess with a sigh that you are going to spend them.

Now I will not be so rude as to apply to you the old hymn-distich about one who

“—finds some mischief still For idle hands to do:”

but does it not seem to you, that there must surely be many a thing worth looking at earnestly, and thinking over earnestly, in a world like this, about the making of the least part whereof God has employed ages and ages, further back than wisdom can guess or imagination picture, and upholds that least part every moment by laws and forces so complex and so wonderful, that science, when it tries to fathom them, can only learn how little it can learn? And does it not seem to you that six weeks’ rest, free from the cares of town business and the whirlwind of town pleasure, could not be better spent than in examining those wonders a little, instead of wandering up and down like the many, still wrapt up each in his little world of vanity and self-interest, unconscious of what and where they really are, as they gaze lazily around at earth and sea and sky, and have

“No speculation in those eyes Which they do glare withal”?

Why not, then, try to discover a few of the Wonders of the Shore? For wonders there are there around you at every step, stranger than ever opium-eater dreamed, and yet to be seen at no greater expense than a very little time and trouble.

Perhaps you smile, in answer, at the notion of becoming a “Naturalist:” and yet you cannot deny that there must be a fascination in the study of Natural History, though what it is is as yet unknown to you. Your daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing “Pteridomania,” and are collecting and buying ferns, with Ward’s cases wherein to keep them (for which you have to pay), and wrangling over unpronounceable names of species (which seem to be different in each new Fern-book that they buy), till the Pteridomania seems to you somewhat of a bore: and yet you cannot deny that they find an enjoyment in it, and are more active, more cheerful, more self-forgetful over it, than they would have been over novels and gossip, crochet and Berlin-wool. At least you will confess that the abomination of “Fancy-work”—that standing cloak for dreamy idleness (not to mention the injury which it does to poor starving needlewomen)—has all but vanished from your drawing-room since the “Lady-ferns” and “Venus’s hair” appeared; and that you could not help yourself looking now and then at the said “Venus’s hair,” and agreeing that Nature’s real beauties were somewhat superior to the ghastly woollen caricatures which they had superseded.

You cannot deny, I say, that there is a fascination in this same Natural History. For do not you, the London merchant, recollect how but last summer your douce and portly head-clerk was seized by two keepers in the act of wandering in Epping Forest at dead of night, with a dark lantern, a jar of strange sweet compound, and innumerable pocketfuls of pill-boxes; and found it very difficult to make either his captors or you believe that he was neither going to burn wheat-ricks, nor poison pheasants, but was simply “sugaring the trees for moths,” as a blameless entomologist? And when, in self-justification, he took you to his house in Islington, and showed you the glazed and corked drawers full of delicate insects, which had evidently cost him in the collecting the spare hours of many busy years, and many a pound, too, out of his small salary, were you not a little puzzled to make out what spell there could be in those “useless” moths, to draw out of his warm bed, twenty miles down the Eastern Counties Railway, and into the damp forest like a deer-stealer, a sober white-headed Tim Linkinwater like him, your very best man of business, given to the reading of Scotch political economy, and gifted with peculiarly clear notions on the currency question?

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

We shall agree at least that the study of Natural History has become now-a-days an honourable one. A Cromarty stonemason was till lately—God rest his noble soul!—the most important man in the City of Edinburgh, by dint of a work on fossil fishes; and the successful investigator of the minutest animals takes place unquestioned among men of genius, and, like the philosopher of old Greece, is considered, by virtue of his science, fit company for dukes and princes. Nay, the study is now more than honourable; it is (what to many readers will be a far higher recommendation) even fashionable. Every well-educated person is eager to know something at least of the wonderful organic forms which surround him in every sunbeam and every pebble; and books of Natural History are finding their way more and more into drawing-rooms and school-rooms, and exciting greater thirst for a knowledge which, even twenty years ago, was considered superfluous for all but the professional student.

What a change from the temper of two generations since, when the naturalist was looked on as a harmless enthusiast, who went “bug-hunting,” simply because he had not spirit to follow a fox! There are those alive who can recollect an amiable man being literally bullied out of the New Forest, because he dared to make a collection (at this moment, we believe, in some unknown abyss of that great Avernus, the British Museum) of fossil shells from those very Hordwell Cliffs, for exploring which there is now established a society of subscribers and correspondents. They can remember, too, when, on the first appearance of Bewick’s “British Birds,” the excellent sportsman who brought it down to the Forest was asked, Why on earth he had bought a book about “cock sparrows”? and had to justify himself again and again, simply by lending the book to his brother sportsmen, to convince them that there were rather more than a dozen sorts of birds (as they then held) indigenous to Hampshire. But the book, perhaps, which turned the tide in favour of Natural History, among the higher classes at least, in the south of England, was White’s “History of Selborne.” A Hampshire gentleman and sportsman, whom everybody knew, had taken the trouble to write a book about the birds and the weeds in his own parish, and the every-day things which went on under his eyes, and everyone else’s. And all gentlemen, from the Weald of Kent to the Vale of Blackmore, shrugged their shoulders mysteriously, and said, “Poor fellow!” till they opened the book itself, and discovered to their surprise that it read like any novel. And then came a burst of confused, but honest admiration; from the young squire’s “Bless me! who would have thought that there were so many wonderful things to be seen in one’s own park!” to the old squire’s more morally valuable “Bless me! why, I have seen that and that a hundred times, and never thought till now how wonderful they were!”

There were great excuses, though, of old, for the contempt in which the naturalist was held; great excuses for the pitying tone of banter with which the Spectator talks of “the ingenious” Don Saltero (as no doubt the Neapolitan gentleman talked of Ferrante Imperato the apothecary, and his museum); great excuses for Voltaire, when he classes the collection of butterflies among the other “bizarreries de l’esprit humain.” For, in the last generation, the needs of the world were different. It had no time for butterflies and fossils. While Buonaparte was hovering on the Boulogne coast, the pursuits and the education which were needed were such as would raise up men to fight him; so the coarse, fierce, hard-handed training of our grandfathers came when it was wanted, and did the work which was required of it, else we had not been here now. Let us be thankful that we have had leisure for science; and show now in war that our science has at least not unmanned us.

Moreover, Natural History, if not fifty years ago, certainly a hundred years ago, was hardly worthy of men of practical common sense. After, indeed, Linné, by his invention of generic and specific names, had made classification possible, and by his own enormous labours had shown how much could be done when once a method was established, the science has grown rapidly enough. But before him little or nothing had been put into form definite enough to allure those who (as the many always will) prefer to profit by others’ discoveries, than to discover for themselves; and Natural History was attractive only to a few earnest seekers, who found too much trouble in disencumbering their own minds of the dreams of bygone generations (whether facts, like cockatrices, basilisks, and krakens, the breeding of bees out of a dead ox, and of geese from barnacles; or theories, like those of elements, the _vis plastrix_ in Nature, animal spirits, and the other musty heirlooms of Aristotleism and Neo-platonism), to try to make a science popular, which as yet was not even a science at all. Honour to them, nevertheless. Honour to Ray and his illustrious contemporaries in Holland and France. Honour to Seba and Aldrovandus; to Pomet, with his “Historie of Drugges;” even to the ingenious Don Saltero, and his tavern-museum in Cheyne Walk. Where all was chaos, every man was useful who could contribute a single spot of organized standing ground in the shape of a fact or a specimen. But it is a question whether Natural History would have ever attained its present honours, had not Geology arisen, to connect every other branch of Natural History with problems as vast and awful as they are captivating to the imagination. Nay, the very opposition with which Geology met was of as great benefit to the sister sciences as to itself. For, when questions belonging to the most sacred hereditary beliefs of Christendom were supposed to be affected by the verification of a fossil shell, or the proving that the Maestricht “homo diluvii testis” was, after all, a monstrous eft, it became necessary to work upon Conchology, Botany, and Comparative Anatomy, with a care and a reverence, a caution and a severe induction, which had been never before applied to them; and thus gradually, in the last half-century, the whole choir of cosmical sciences have acquired a soundness, severity, and fulness, which render them, as mere intellectual exercises, as valuable to a manly mind as Mathematics and Metaphysics.

But how very lately have they attained that firm and honourable standing ground! It is a question whether, even twenty years ago, Geology, as it then stood, was worth troubling one’s head about, so little had been really proved. And heavy and uphill was the work, even within the last fifteen years, of those who stedfastly set themselves to the task of proving and of asserting at all risks, that the Maker of the coal seam and the diluvial cave could not be a “Deus quidam deceptor,” and that the facts which the rock and the silt revealed were sacred, not to be warped or trifled with for the sake of any cowardly and hasty notion that they contradicted His other messages. When a few more years are past, Buckland and Sedgwick, Murchison and Lyell, Delabêche and Phillips, Forbes and Jamieson, and the group of brave men who accompanied and followed them, will be looked back to as moral benefactors of their race; and almost as martyrs, also, when it is remembered how much misunderstanding, obloquy, and plausible folly they had to endure from well-meaning fanatics like Fairholme or Granville Penn, and the respectable mob at their heels who tried (as is the fashion in such cases) to make a hollow compromise between fact and the Bible, by twisting facts just enough to make them fit the fancied meaning of the Bible, and the Bible just enough to make it fit the fancied meaning of the facts. But there were a few who would have no compromise; who laboured on with a noble recklessness, determined to speak the thing which they had seen, and neither more nor less, sure that God could take better care than they of His own everlasting truth. And now they have conquered: the facts which were twenty years ago denounced as contrary to Revelation, are at last accepted not merely as consonant with, but as corroborative thereof; and sound practical geologists—like Hugh Miller, in his “Footprints of the Creator,” and Professor Sedgwick, in the invaluable notes to his “Discourse on the Studies of Cambridge”—have wielded in defence of Christianity the very science which was faithlessly and cowardly expected to subvert it.

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

Happy, truly, is the naturalist. He has no time for melancholy dreams. The earth becomes to him transparent; everywhere he sees significancies, harmonies, laws, chains of cause and effect endlessly interlinked, which draw him out of the narrow sphere of self-interest and self-pleasing, into a pure and wholesome region of solemn joy and wonder. He goes up some Snowdon valley; to him it is a solemn spot (though unnoticed by his companions), where the stag’s-horn clubmoss ceases to straggle across the turf, and the tufted alpine clubmoss takes its place: for he is now in a new world; a region whose climate is eternally influenced by some fresh law (after which he vainly guesses with a sigh at his own ignorance), which renders life impossible to one species, possible to another. And it is a still more solemn thought to him, that it was not always so; that æons and ages back, that rock which he passed a thousand feet below was fringed, not as now with fern and blue bugle, and white bramble-flowers, but perhaps with the alp-rose and the “gemsen-kraut” of Mont Blanc, at least with Alpine Saxifrages which have now retreated a thousand feet up the mountain side, and with the blue Snow-Gentian, and the Canadian Sedum, which have all but vanished out of the British Isles. And what is it which tells him that strange story? Yon smooth and rounded surface of rock, polished, remark, across the strata and against the grain; and furrowed here and there, as if by iron talons, with long parallel scratches. It was the crawling of a glacier which polished that rock-face; the stones fallen from Snowdon peak into the half-liquid lake of ice above, which ploughed those furrows. Æons and æons ago, before the time when Adam first

“Embraced his Eve in happy hour, And every bird in Eden burst In carol, every bud in flower,”

those marks were there; the records of the “Age of ice;” slight, truly; to be effaced by the next farmer who needs to build a wall; but unmistakeable, boundless in significance, like Crusoe’s one savage footprint on the sea-shore; and the naturalist acknowledges the finger-mark of God, and wonders, and worships.

Happy, especially, is the sportsman who is also a naturalist: for as he roves in pursuit of his game, over hills or up the beds of streams where no one but a sportsman ever thinks of going, he will be certain to see things noteworthy, which the mere naturalist would never find, simply because he could never guess that they were there to be found. I do not speak merely of the rare birds which may be shot, the curious facts as to the habits of fish which may be observed, great as these pleasures are. I speak of the scenery, the weather, the geological formation of the country, its vegetation, and the living habits of its denizens. A sportsman, out in all weathers, and often dependent for success on his knowledge of “what the sky is going to do,” has opportunities for becoming a meteorologist which no one beside but a sailor possesses; and one has often longed for a scientific gamekeeper or huntsman, who, by discovering a law for the mysterious and seemingly capricious phenomena of “scent,” might perhaps throw light on a hundred dark passages of hygrometry. The fisherman, too,—what an inexhaustible treasury of wonder lies at his feet, in the subaqueous world of the commonest mountain burn! All the laws which mould a world are there busy, if he but knew it, fattening his trout for him, and making them rise to the fly, by strange electric influences, at one hour rather than at another. Many a good geognostic lesson, too, both as to the nature of a country’s rocks, and as to the laws by which strata are deposited, may an observing man learn as he wades up the bed of a trout-stream; not to mention the strange forms and habits of the tribes of water-insects. Moreover, no good fisherman but knows, to his sorrow, that there are plenty of minutes, ay, hours, in each day’s fishing in which he would be right glad of any employment better than trying to

“Call spirits from the vasty deep,”

who will not

“Come when you do call for them.”

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

“Keine luft an keine seite, Todes-stille fürchterlich;”

as Göthe has it—

“Und der schiffer sieht bekümmert Glatte fläche rings umher.”