The animal is named Nemertes Borlasii, or sometimes Borlasia longissima, in allusion to Dr. Borlase, the historian of Cornwall. It is also occasionally termed the Long-worm, par excellence, a name whose appropriateness will appear from the fact that it sometimes reaches a length of thirty feet, with a breadth of an eighth of an inch.
Mr. Kingsley has drawn the portrait of this ciliated worm; and if he has painted it in somewhat dark colours, and manifested more than a common measure of antipathy to it, we must confess that the physical and moral lineaments of the subject do in some degree justify the description. I will quote his vivid words.
ITS FORM AND HABITS.
“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 chimera dire,’ and yet so wondrously fitted for its work, that we must needs endure for our own instruction to handle and look at it. Its name I know not (though it lurks here under every stone), and should be glad to know. It seems some very ‘low’ Ascarid or Planarian worm. You see it? That black, slimy, 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 strip of dead 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 its 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-rod 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 trout. The victim is tired now; and slowly, yet dexterously, his blind assailent 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 into a pulp long before he has reached the opposite extremity of his cave of doom. Once safe down, the black murderer contracts again into a knotted heap, and lies like a boa with a stag inside him, motionless and blest.”[65]
VI.
JUNE.
We are on the narrow shingle-beach of Maidencombe, or, sometimes, more familiarly, Minnicombe; one of the slight indentations of this line of coast, which, from the mouth of the Exe to Start Point, runs nearly north and south, and so looks right up-channel, and receives the full violence of the keen and blustering east winds.
Away down the gentle slope till we come to the line where the wavelets are kissing the rock, where the next step would put us into King Canute’s circumstances, where the sea is washing to and fro the shaggy weed, and just preventing it from assuming the shrivelled and blackened condition, into which the tufts a little above are fast falling under the baking powers of this June sun; and here, on these very weeds, now submerged, now dry, are crawling some uncouth beings of a dark liver colour or purple-brown hue. The creature passes by the name of Sea-hare;[66] a not inappropriate designation, for I have often seen it in postures when the resemblance to a couching hare was spontaneously suggested. Around Weymouth, where it is common, the fishermen and shore-boys call it the Sea-cow; which is not a bad hit, though not so happy as that of hare. In each case, the feature which strikes the imagination and suggests the comparison with the quadruped, is the pair of tentacles which stand erect, but a little diverging, from the back of the head, and which consist of an expanded lamina infolded at the base, and, as it were, cut off slantingly, so as to look like a hare’s ears. There are, indeed, two pairs of tentacles of similar structure; but the front pair are more commonly stretched forward horizontally, and held near the ground, so as to be much less conspicuous.
