These timid creatures, when they appeared, were of a prudence carried to its extremest limits. They shut themselves in, shunning even the light of day. To save themselves from the rude contact of sharp and ragged stones, they employed the universal means, a glutinous mucus from which they secreted an enveloping tube, which elongated in proportion to the length of their journey. A poor expedient, that, which kept these miners, the Tarets out of the light and out of the free air, and which compelled an enormous expenditure of their substance. Every step cost them enormously; a creature thus ruining itself that it may live, can only vegetate—poor, and incapable of progress.
The next resource was not much better, temporarily to bury themselves, going below the sands at low water, and rising to the flood-tide; the resource of the Solen. A varying life that, fugitive twice a day, and consequently full of anxiety.
Among very inferior creatures a thing as yet obscure, which was in time to change the world, began to appear. The simple sea stars had in their fine rays a certain support, a sort of jointed carpentry, and on the outside some thorns, suckers, which could be thrust forward or withdrawn at will. An animal very humble, but timid and serious, seems to have profited by this coarse specimen. It said, I imagine, to Nature:
"I am quite without ambition. I do not ask for the brilliant gifts of the molluscs; I covet neither pearl nor mother of pearl, much less the brilliant colors, the gorgeous array which would discover and betray me; least of all do I envy your silly medusæ, with the fatal charm of their waving and fiery hair, which serves only to drown them, or give them a helpless prey to fish below or birds above. Oh, mother Nature, I ask but one thing, to be, to exist, to have life; to be one, self concentrated, and without compromising external appendages; to be strongly and solidly built, self centred, and of rounded figure, as that is the figure that is least easily taken hold of. I have but little desire to travel; sometimes to roll from high to low water will suffice me. Fastened to my rock, I will solve the problem which your future favorite, man, will vainly brood over, the problem of safety; the strict exclusion of enemies, and the free admission of friends, especially water, air, and light. I know that to achieve this, I must work hard and work long. Covered with movable thorns, I shall be avoided, I shall live a strictly retired life; and my name shall be oursin, little Bear, or sea hedge-hog."
How superior is that prudent animal to the Polypes, in their own stone, which they make from their own secretion, without hard labor, indeed, but also without affording them any safety; how superior, even to his superiors themselves, I mean to so many molluscs, who have more various senses, but are destitute of the unity of his vertebral provision, of his persevering labor, and of the skillful tools with which that very labor has provided him.
The great marvel, however, of this poor rolling ball, which we might mistake for a thorny chestnut, is that he is at once one and multiple, fixed and movable, and consists of two thousand four hundred pieces, which separate at his will and pleasure.
Let us see his history of creation.
It was in a narrow creek of the Sea of Brittany, where there was no soft bed of polypes and of Algæ, such as the sea hedge-hogs of the Indian Sea enjoy, in addition to their exemption from labor. Our Breton, on the contrary, was in presence of great peril and difficulty; like Ulysses, in the Odyssey, who, cast ashore, and anon washed seaward again, endeavored to fasten himself to the rock, with his torn and bleeding fingers. Every ebb and flow of the tide was to our little Ulysses, as bad as a mighty tempest; but his iron will and potent desire made him cling so closely and lovingly to the rock, that he became fastened to it as though the air had been expelled from between them by the cupping glass. At the same time his strong thorns scratched and scratched, and endeavored to get a hold, and one of them subdivided and formed a triple and real anchor of safety in aid of the cupping glass, if this latter should fail to act quite perfectly on a by no means smooth surface.
After he had thus doubly secured himself to his rock, he gradually comprehended that he would be a great gainer if he could form a concavity in it, gradually dig himself out a hole, and thus form himself a snug nest, for the day of sickness or of age. For, in fact, one is not always young and strong. And how pleasant it would be, if, some day, the veteran oursin could relax somewhat of the effort necessitated by this constant holding on, this anchorage by day and night.