Yea, beautiful as mermaid’s golden hair,
Upon the waves dispread.”
It is among the rock-tide pools that some of the most prized treasures of the aquarium may be obtained. There are the little shrubberies of pink coralline, Southey’s “arborets of jointed stone”; there are the crimson banana-leaves of the Delesseria, the purple tufts of Polysiphoniæ and Ceramia, the broad emerald green leaves of Ulva, and the wavy, feathery Ptitola and Dasya. Then everywhere is to be found the lovely Chondrus crispus, with its expanding fan-shaped fronds cut into segments, every segment of every frond reflecting a lovely iridescent azure.
DELESSERIA.
ULVA.
Mr. Gosse was reclining one evening on the turf, looking down on a Devonshire cove that formed the extremity of a great cavern. Though it was low tide, the sea did not recede sufficiently to admit of any access to the cove from the shore. Presently he saw a large rat come deliberately foraging down to the water’s edge, peep under every stone, go hither and thither very methodically, pass into the crevices, exploring them in succession. At length he came out of a hole in the rock, with some white object in his mouth as big as a walnut, and ran slowly off with it by a way the observer had not seen him go before, till he could follow him no longer with his eyes because of the projections of the precipice. What could he possibly have found? He evidently knew what he was about. From his retirement into the cavern, when the sea had quite insulated it, the sagacious little animal had doubtless his retreat in its recesses, far up, of course, out of the reach of the sea, where he would be snugly lodged when the waves dashed and broke wildly through the cove, kindling millions of fitful lamps among the clustering polypes below.
The influx of the tide is frequently, as we all know, very rapid on the sands, and cuts off the communication between rocky islets and the shore in rather a treacherous fashion. Mr. Gosse, in giving an account of such influx on a part of the Devonshire coast says:—
“In the evening we strolled down to look at the place, and were beguiled into staying till it was quite late by the interest which attached to the coming-in of the tide. There was a [pg 198]breeze from the southward, which hove the sea against the opposite entrance of the cavern to that on which we were standing; and the funnel-shaped cliffs on that side concentrated the successive waves, which drove through a sort of ‘bore,’ and covered with turbulent water large tracts which but a few moments before were dry. We were pushed from stone to stone, and from spot to spot, like a retreating enemy before a successful army; but we lingered, wishing to see the junction of the waters and the insulation of the rock. It is at this point that the advance is so treacherous. There was an isthmus of some twenty feet wide of dry sand, when my wife, who had seen the process before, said, ‘It will be all over by the time you have counted a hundred.’ Before I had reached fifty it was a wide wash of water.”