On me the effects were as follows:—First a slight, and then a severe, tingling on the parts which had been struck. Then sharp, darting pangs. Then a sudden shock as if a bullet had passed through the breast from one side to the other. Consequent collapse, and suspension of the office of both heart and lungs. I once had to walk nearly two miles after being stung by one of these dread animals, and how often I fell before reaching my lodgings I dare not say, but certainly once in every two hundred yards.
Even after partial recovery I should not have known my own face. It was that of an old and wearied man of seventy, grey, wrinkled, and withered; and many months elapsed before I felt myself sure that the weird-like bullet would not drive through my breast, and leave me lying on the ground gasping and speechless.
These dreaded tentacles can sting as fiercely when separated from the animal as when they are conjoined to it, as I can also testify from personal experience.
I have a natural alacrity in damaging myself, and there is scarcely a representative bone in the body that I have not fractured or dislocated, or both. Fortunately the cerebral vertebræ have hitherto escaped. I have broken the right leg, right arm, two ribs, and right collar-bone; dislocated the right ankle, and smashed nearly every bone of the right hand. At present, the damage to the left side is restricted to two ribs; and I hope that the Genius of Ossifraction may now be content with his work.
But I equally seem to have a natural affinity for the tentacles of the Stangers, which deliver their envenomed darts just as fiercely when they are separated from the Medusa as when they are connected with it.
A curious example of this fact befell me in the present year (1875). Seeing that there had been a steady southern gale, which made Lundy Island and Hartland and Baggy Points indiscernible, I dreaded my old foes, and, instead of bathing from the “Pebble Ridge,” took to the great “Nassau” Baths at Westward Ho. I sadly missed the roll of the waves, and the placid rapture of lying with outspread arms as the vast Atlantic billows came rolling in, flinging up the great grey boulders as if they were corks, and letting them roll down the ridge again with a thundering, and yet soothing, sound. Three miles or more inland may the thunder of the Pebble Ridge be heard; and at night, even though a storm be raging, tearing the leaves off the trees in whirling showers, flinging great branches into the air like ostrich plumes, and howling so that one person can hardly hear another speak, the dull, low, continuous thunder of the Pebble Ridge is heard over all. I have often remained awake at Bideford, simply on account of the deep roar of the Pebble Ridge, as the rising tide rolled its vast waves along the coast from Baggy Point, through Westward Ho and Clovelly, to Hartland.
When there is a heavy sea, the “undertow” of these waves is so great that even had no such things as Stangers existed, I should not have ventured upon the Pebble Ridge. One of my friends, a strong swimmer, was nearly drowned off that ridge by the undertow; and not long before I visited Westward Ho a promising young man lost his life within a few yards of that treacherous shore.
Much against my will, I went to the new bath, which is always supplied with a running current of sea-water; and I had hardly swum the length of the bath before I felt the familiar nettle-like sting in my foot. Fortunately it was only caused by a small fragment of a Stanger’s tentacle, which had been severed from the animal and pumped into the bath, and no harm ensued.
USEFUL ARTS.
CHAPTER VI.
SPIRAL AND RINGED TISSUES.—VARIOUS SPRINGS IN NATURE AND ART.
Spiral Tissues, and their Structure and Uses.—The movable Gas-lamp.—Elastic Tubes.—Breathing-tubes of Insects, and their Spiral Wire.—Ringed Tissues and their varied Structure.—Ringed Tissues applied to modern Dress.—Chinese and Japanese Lanterns.—Proboscis of the House-fly.—Trachea of various Animals.—Mutual Tendency of Rings and Spirals towards each other.—Fibres of the Yew-tree.—Diving and Divers.—Principle of the Diving-bell.—How it is supplied with Air.—Structure of the Air-tubes.—Nests of the Water-spider.—Diving by means of Tubes.—Larva of the Drone-fly, and its Mode of breathing.—How to examine them.—Leaping Springs.—The Skip-jack in Nature and Art.—Skip-jack or Click Beetles.—The Spring-tail, Grasshopper, Kangaroo, Gerboa, and other Jumping Creatures.