Very lovely and interesting indeed was the collection that soon grew up in his cabinet, under his magic spell. What could be in that tangled mass of mud and weed and sand, one would have asked, that was hauled on board, the sea-water dripping and trickling out of the bag?
To Dr Barrett—and to the savants at home—treasures more valuable than gold itself.
And after he had secured a haul, washed them, put them up, perhaps on cards of jet to show their beauties off, the clever surgeon would have handed you his great glass and bade you look. It was like gazing at creatures from fairyland. All shapes and colours, but all so minute that they could not well be seen with the naked eye. Here is a little fairy fish—no bigger is it than this letter ‘f.’ Take that glass, please. Now look. No wonder an expression of amazement steals over your face! It is a perfect fish, yet, strange to say, transparent and colourless—that is, there is no fixed colour any more than there is in the Arctic aurora, but greens dance and crimsons flit and play around it; and, stranger still, with a stronger glass, you can see its internal anatomy, see its heart beat and its pulses move! Could anything be more wonderful? And here are shells that, lying on this morsel of black cardboard, are no bigger than the letters “a,” or “e,” or “c.” Look at these. No wonder you smile with delight; they, too, are faultless in shape and curious in form; they, too, are transparent as glass; they, too, display all the colours of the finest pearl.
Put this one—it is no bigger than a comma to the naked eye—under the microscope in a drop of water. Lo! that drop of water is to it a small ocean, and round and round it crawls, legs all out and its shell high up on its shoulders, and of a bright translucent blue. I could sit here all the livelong night and write, sheet of foolscap after sheet of foolscap should flutter from my desk and fall upon the floor, and yet when the grey dawn of morning crept in through the casement of this red parlour, I should not have told you of one-half the mysterious and beautiful beings that this man of science dredged up from the dark depths of that mysterious sea.
I pause here and listen. There was not a sound in the house when I penned the last sentence, only a mouse nibbling the crumbs that I placed for it in the corner, but now there comes from an adjoining room the voice of some one singing. It is only poor old Janet. She does so every night before retiring; and, old though she be, I know she is very happy—happy with a happiness that can never be taken from her. But to-night the words she sings are so en rapport with my own spirit while writing, that I cannot but give a line or two—
“God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps on the sea,
And rides upon the storm.”
As much as it was practicable to do so, the Icebear hugged the western shores of Greenland, but here the ice was heaviest. As the summer advanced, however, the land became bare of snow; it was then that delightful excursions were made inland, up through the long, deep fiords that everywhere indent this coast. I do not like the word “indent,” though I use it; for an indentation means fork-like incision, widest at the mouth—a bay, for example,—but these Arctic fiords are, many of them, narrow at the inlet, then spread out as they go inland.
There are thousands and thousands of them yet unexplored, and which never will be explored as long as the world lasts.
Not altogether for the sake of pleasure were these excursions made, but for the purpose of scientific discovery.