Part 7

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 alway, even to the end of the world.”

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,” {126a} which we picked up just now on Paignton Sands? Or which, again, by its more beautiful little congener, {126b} 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 sea-weed 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. {127} Here the whole animal, with his extraordinary feeding mill, (for neither teeth nor jaws is a fit word for it,) is enclosed within an ever-growing 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 “Sea-Side 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 sea-egg, 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 more.

What is that little brown thing whom you have just taken off the rock to which it adhered so stoutly by his sucking-foot? A limpet? Not at all: he is of quite a different family and structure; but, on the whole, a limpet-like 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. {129} 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.

[Picture: Plate 10: Serpula Contortuplicata etc.]

Look, again, at those sea-slugs. One, some three inches long, of a bright lemon-yellow, clouded with purple; another of a dingy grey; {130a} another exquisite little creature of a pearly French White, {130b} 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 after-part of his back springs a circular Prince-of-Wales’s-feather 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 sea-slug 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 Melibæa those clubs are covered with warts; in Scyllæa, 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 Mollusca.

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 Diatomaceæ and Infusoria, which fill every stagnant pool; which fringe every branch of sea-weed; which form banks hundreds of miles long on the Arctic sea-floor, 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 sea-depths 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 ever-busy rest, hears, as of old, “The Word of the Lord God walking among the trees of the garden in the cool of the day.”

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 the highest ape to the lowest polype.

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 house-spider. 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 chimæra 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; {136} 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 sea-weed, 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 bell-shaped 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 end-foremost 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, motionless and blest. {138}

[Picture: Nemerties Borlasii etc.: Plate 3]

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 {139a} 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 humming-birds, 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 straw-coloured 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 Mangeliæ and Nassæ {139b} 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, {140a} our only European representative of that grand tropical family. Cast one wondering glance, too, at the forest of zoophytes and corals, Lepraliæ and Flustræ, and those quaint blue stars, set in brown jelly, which are no zoophytes, but respectable molluscs, each with his well-formed mouth and intestines, {140b} 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 heroines of Mr. Hawthorne’s “Blithedale Romance.”

Now away, and as a specimen of the fertility of the water-world, look at this rough list of species, {140c} 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 sea-weeds which covers the upper surface, we should probably obtain some twenty minute species more.

A goodly catalogue this, surely, of the inhabitants of three or four large stones; and yet how small a specimen of the multitudinous nations of the sea!

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 Algæ 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 Laminariæ (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, pass 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 analogy 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 Rhodymeniæ. 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 lustrous azure, like that of a tempered sword-blade.”—GOSSE’S _Devonshire Coast_, pp. 187–189.