Part 4

No wonder that such a spot as Torquay, with its delicious Italian climate, and endless variety of rich woodland, flowery lawn, fantastic rock-cavern, and broad bright tide-sand, sheltered from every wind of heaven except the soft south-east, 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, well-known 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 sea-floors, where limestones alternate with traps, and traps with slates, while at the valley-mouth 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 deep-sea forms which Messrs. Alder, Goodsir, and Laskey dredge among the lochs of the western Highlands, and the sub-marine mountain glens of the Zetland sea; but it has its own varieties, its own ever-fresh 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 ago.

Follow us, then, reader, in imagination, out of the gay watering-place, with its London shops and London 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 chiaro-oscuro, for any artist; and a mile or so further along a pleasant road, with land-locked 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 ankle-deep 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 ground-swell shifted the sea-bottom, and drove them up hither to perish helpless, but not useless, on the beach.

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 (ore-weed, 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 green-grey scimitars? What are the tapering brown spires? What the tufts of delicate yellow plants like squirrels’ tails, and lobsters’ horns, and tamarisks, and fir-trees, 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 pink-striped pears? What those tiny babies’ heads, covered with grey prickles instead of hair? The great red star-fish, 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 capsicums?—

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 south-western 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 shell-fish 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 double-shelled, mollusca. (Plate II. Fig. 3.)

[Picture: Plate 2: 1. Cardium Rusticum, (tuberculatum). 2. Pagurus Bernhardi, in a Periwinkle Shell]

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 three-quarters of an inch. The semi-pellucid 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 tongue-like; only flattened, not horizontally, like a tongue, but perpendicularly, so as to form, as it was intended, a perfect sand-plough, by which the animal can move at will, either above or below the surface of the sand. {67}

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 Covent-garden 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 here it is all alive!”

“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 close-set 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 sea-beasts 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 wolf-fish (Anarrhichas lupus) or other owner of shell-crushing 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 horns, but with his forehead.

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, Razor-fish (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 razor-fish; at least, for those who so think them; and abound in millions upon all our sandy shores. {70}

Now for the tapering brown spires. They are Turritellæ, 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 tide-rocks 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 sea-worms. 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 wry-neck plasters up a hole in an apple-tree 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 yet ideal feat, of jumping down his own throat. {72}

[Picture: Plate 1: Flustra Lineata etc.]

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 Plumulariæ, always to be distinguished from Sertulariæ by polypes growing on one side of the branch, and not on both. Here is falcata, with its roots twisted round a sea-weed. 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 sea-weed. Here are Flustræ, or sea-mats. This, which smells very like Verbena, is Flustra coriacea (Pl. I. Fig. 2). That scurf on the frond of ore-weed 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 field-glass; for it is truly wonderful. Each polype cell is edged with whip-like spines, and on the back of some of them is—what is it, but a live vulture’s head, snapping and snapping—what for?

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 man living knoweth.

Next, what are the striped pears? They are sea-anemones, and of a species only lately well known, Sagartia viduata, the snake-locked anemone (Pl. V. Fig. 3 {74}). They have been washed off the loose stones to which they usually adhere by the pitiless roll of the ground-swell; 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 mottled brown and grey.

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 leather coat, which she has given, I believe, to no other of his family.

Next, for the babies’ heads, covered with prickles, instead of hair. They are sea-urchins, 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 spring-tide; and ere we go home, we will spend a few minutes at least on the rocks at Livermead, where awaits us a strong-backed quarryman, with a strong-backed crowbar, as is to be hoped (for he snapped one right across there yesterday, falling miserably on his back into a pool thereby), and we will verify Mr. Gosse’s observation, that—

“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 low-water mark, or walk, with an observant downcast eye, along the beach after a gale, without finding some oddly-fashioned, suspicious-looking 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 structure have never yet been suspected.

“‘O sea! old sea! who yet knows half Of thy wonders or thy pride!’”

GOSSE’S _Aquarium_, pp. 226, 227.

These words have more than fulfilled themselves since they were written. Those Deep-Sea 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 sea-bottom “become more and more modified, and fewer and fewer, indicating our approach towards an abyss where life is either extinguished, or exhibits but a few sparks to mark it’s lingering presence.”

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 heavier than molten gold.”

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 low-tide 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 hundred-fathom 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 ocean-floor teeming everywhere with multitudinous life, some of it strangely like, some strangely unlike, the creatures which we see along the shore.

Some strangely like. You may find, for instance, among the sea-weed, here and there, a little black sea-spider, 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 Arctic and Antarctic oceans, nearly two feet across.

[Picture: Nymphon Abyssorum, Norman]