OBSERVATIONS AND ADVENTURES IN SUBMARINE DIVING.
[Greek: —liphon eponumon te reuma kai petraerephae autoktit' antra.]
ÆSCHYLUS: Prometheus Bound.
Did you ever pause before a calm, bright little pool in the woods, and look steadily at the picture it presents, without feeling as if you had peeped into another world? Every outline is preserved, every tint is freshened and purified, in the cool, glimmering reflection. There is a grace and a softness in the prismatic lymph that give a new form and color to the common and familiar objects it has printed in its still, pellucid depths. Every little basin of clear water by the roadside is a magic mirror, and transforms all that it encloses. There is a vastness of depth, too, in that concave hemisphere, through which the vision sinks like a falling star, that excites and fills the imagination. What it shows is only a shadow, but all things seen are mere shadows painted on the retina, and you have, at such times, a realistic sense of the beautiful and bold imagery which calls a favorite fountain of the East the Eye of the Desert.
The alluring softness of this mimic world increases to sublimity when, instead of some rocky basin, dripping with mossy emeralds and coral berries, you look upon the deep crystalline sea. Each mates to its kind. This does not gather its imagery from gray, mossy rock or pendent leaf or flower, but draws into its enfolding arms the wide vault of the cerulean sky. The richness of the majestic azure is deepened by that magnificent marriage. The pale blue is darkened to violet. Far through the ever-varying surface of the curious gelatinous liquid breaks the phosphorescence, sprinkled into innumerable lights and cross-lights. As you look upon those endless pastures thought is quickened with the conception of their innumerable phases of vitality. The floating weed, whose meshes measure the spaces of continents and archipelagoes, is everywhere instinct with animal and vegetable life. The builder coral, glimmering in its softer parts with delicate hues and tints, throws up its stony barrier through a thousand miles of length and a third as much in breadth, fringing the continents with bays and sounds and atoll islands like fairy rings of the sea. Animate flowers—sea-nettles, sea anemones, plumularia, campanularia, hydropores, confervae, oscillatoria, bryozoa—people the great waters. Sea-urchins, star-fish, sea-eggs, combative gymnoti, polypes, struggle and thrive with ever-renewing change of color; gelatinous worms that shine like stars cling to every weed; glimmering animalcules, phosphorescent medusae, the very deep itself is vivid with sparkle and corruscation of electric fire. So through every scale, from the zoophyte to the warm-blooded whale, the sea teems with life, out of which fewer links have been dropped than from sub-aërial life. It is a matter for curious speculation that the missing species belong not to the lower subsidiary genera, as in terrene animals, but to the highest types of marine life. In the quarries of Lyme Regis, among the accumulations of a sea of the Liassic period, lay the huge skeleton of the Ichthyosaurus, a warm-blooded marine existence, with huge saucer eyes of singular telescopic power, that gleamed radiant "with the eyelids of the morning," "by whose neesings alight doth shine"—the true leviathan of Job. In the same extinct sea is found the skeleton of the Plesiosaurus, a marine lizard of equal size, and warm-blooded, whose swan-like neck and body graced the serene seas of the pre-adamite world. Another was that of the Pterodactyl, the antique aragon, a winged fish. The task of sustaining these existences was too great for old Ocean, and the monsters dropped from the upper end of the chain into the encrusting mud, the petrified symbols of failure. So one day man may drop into the limbo of vanities, among the abandoned tools in the Creator's workshop.
But, however high or low the degree in the scale, one distinguishing feature marks the vital creation in vegetable or animal—an intelligence capable of adjusting itself to the elements about it, and electing its food. The sunflower, even, does not follow the sun by a mechanical law, but, growing by a fair, bright sheet of water, looks as constantly at that shining surface for the beloved light as ever did the fabled Greek boy at his own image in the fountain. The tendrils of the vine seek and choose their own support, and the thirsty spongioles of the root find the nourishing veins of water. Growth, says a naturalist, is the conscious motion of vegetable life. But this theory of kinship, imperfect in the plant, becomes plain and distinct in the animate creation. However far removed, the wild dolphin at play and the painted bird in the air are cousins of man, with a responsive chord of sympathy connecting them.
It is this feeling that sends an exhilarating thrill through the submarine explorer when a school of porpoises frisk by with undulating grace, the marine type of a group of frolicking children. It is the instinctive perception that it is a pure enjoyment to the fish, the healthy glow and laugh of submarine existence. But for that sense of sympathetic nature the flying-fish, reeling porpoise and dolphin would be no more to him than the skipping shuttle in a weaver's loom, the dull impetus of senseless machinery. Self-generated motion is the outward and visible sign of vitality—its wanton exercise the symbol and expression of enjoyment. The poor philosopher who distinguished humanity as singular in the exhibition of humor had surely never heard a mocking-bird sing, watched a roguish crow or admired a school of fish.
This keen appreciation of a kindred life in the sea has thrown its charm over the poetry and religion of all races. Ocean us leaves the o'erarching floods and rocky grottoes at the call of bound Prometheus; Cyrene, with her nymphs, sits in the cool Peneus, where comes Aristaeus mourning for his stolen bees; the Druid washed his hedge-hyssop in the sacred water, and priestesses lived on coral reefs visited by remote lovers in their sundown seas; Schiller's diver goes into the purpling deep and sees the Sea-Horror reaching out its hundred arms; the beautiful Undine is the vivid poetry of the sea. Every fountain has its guardian saint or nymph, and to this day not only the German peasant and benighted English boor thrill at the sight of some nymph-guarded well, but the New Mexican Indian offers his rude pottery in propitiation of the animate existence, the deity of the purling spring.
"Der Taucher," for all the rhythm and music that clothes his luckless plunge, was but a caitiff knight to some of our submarine adventurers. A diver during the bay-fight in Mobile harbor had reason to apprehend a more desperate encounter. A huge cuttle-fish, the marine monster of Pliny and Victor Hugo, had been seen in the water. His tough, sinuous, spidery arms, five fathoms long, wavered visibly in the blue transparent gulf,