DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Science from an Easy Chair
Science from an Easy Chair. Second Series
From an Easy Chair
Extinct Animals
The Kingdom of Man

A CORNER IN A MARINE AQUARIUM, PAINTED BY PHILIP HENRY
GOSSE, F.R.S.

The scene shews the great white Sea Anemone of Weymouth. In front are two richly coloured sea-worms (Serpula) issuing from their calcareous tubes, attached to a dead scallop's shell. The green sea-grass (Zostera) and a translucent pink sea-weed, left and right, complete the picture

DIVERSIONS OF A
NATURALIST

BY

Sir RAY LANKESTER

K.C.B., F.R.S.

WITH A FRONTISPIECE IN COLOUR AND FORTY-THREE
OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1915

PREFACE

AT this time of stress and anxiety we all, however steadfast in giving our service to the great task in which our country is engaged, must, from time to time, seek intervals of release from the torrent of thoughts which is set going by the tremendous fact that we are fighting for our existence. To very many relief comes in splendid self-sacrificing action, in the joyful exercise of youthful strength and vigour for a noble cause. But even these, as well as those who are less fortunate, need intervals of diversion—brief change of thought and mental occupation—after which they may return to their great duties rested and refreshed.

I know that there are many who find a never-failing source of happiness in acquaintance with things belonging to that vast area of Nature which is beyond and apart from human misery, an area unseen and unsuspected by most of us and yet teeming with things of exquisite beauty; an area capable of yielding to man knowledge of inestimable value. Many are apt to think that the value of "Science" is to be measured mainly, if not exclusively, by the actual power which it has conferred on man—mechanical and electrical devices, explosives, life-saving control over disease. They would say of Science, as the ignoble proverb tells us of Honesty, that it is "the best policy." But Honesty is far more than that, and so is Science. Science has revealed to man his own origin and history, and his place in this world of un-ending marvels and beauty. It has given him a new and unassailable outlook on all things both great and small. Science commends itself to us as does Honesty and as does great Art and all fine thought and deed—not as a policy yielding material profits, but because it satisfies man's soul.

I offer these chapters to the reader as possibly affording to him, as their revision has to me, a welcome escape, when health demands it, from the immense and inexorable obsession of warfare. The several chapters have been selected from articles entitled "Science from an Easy Chair" written in recent years by me for the "Daily Telegraph." Under that title I have already published two volumes of similar selections. I have chosen a new title, "Diversions of a Naturalist," for this third volume in order to avoid confusion with the earlier ones. Illustrative drawings have been introduced into several of the articles and a few alterations made in the text. But they remain essentially what their origin implies—namely, detached essays addressed to a wide public.

I wish to thank my friend Dr. Smith Woodward of the Natural History Museum for the figures 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, and 30, illustrating Chapter X, and also to thank Messrs. Veitch for the use of figures 33, 34, 35, 40, and 42. I have copied figures 4 to 8, 11, 19, and 20 from the drawings made by Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S., and published by him in that wonderful little book "Marine Zoology," now long out of print. I have also borrowed my frontispiece from the book on "The Aquarium" by that great naturalist and lover of the seashore. Many beautiful coloured plates of marine animals executed by his skilful hand are to be found in that and other works published by him.

E. R. L.

16 June 1915

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Oh! how light and lovely the air is upon the earth! How beautiful thou art, my earth, my golden, my emerald, my sapphire earth! Who, born to thy heritage would choose to die, would wish to close his eyes upon thy serene beauties and upon thy magnificent spaces?—Feodor Sologub.

DIVERSIONS OF A
NATURALIST

CHAPTER I
ON A NORWEGIAN FIORD

THE splendour of our Sussex Weald, with its shady forests and lovely gardens, around which rise the majestic Downs sweeping in long graceful curves marked by the history of our race, has charmed me during these sunny days of June. The orchids, the water-lilies, the engaging and quaintly named "petty whin," and the pink rattle are joined with the tall foxgloves and elder-blossoms in my memory. And for some reason—perhaps it is the heat—I am set thinking of very different scenes—the great, cool fiords of Norway, with their rocky islets and huge, bare mountain-tops, where many years ago I had the "time of my life" in exploring with the naturalist's dredge the coral-grown sea-bottom 1000 and even 2000 feet in a straight line below the little boat in which I and my companion and three Norwegian boatmen floated on the dark purple waves.

To let a dredge—an oblong iron frame some three feet long, to the edges of which a bag of strong netting is laced, whilst the frame is hung to a rope by a mystical triangle—sink from the side of a boat and scrape the surface of the ocean-floor far below for some ten or twenty minutes, and then to haul it up again and see what living wonders the unseen world has sent you, is, in my opinion, the most exciting and delightful sport in which a naturalist can indulge. There are difficulties and drawbacks connected with it. You cannot, in a small boat and without expenditure of large sums on a steam yacht and crew, reach from our coast—with rare exceptions in the north-west—with a fair prospect of returning in safety, those waters which are 100 fathoms deep. And it is precisely in such depths that the most interesting "hauls" are to be expected. I had had in former days to be content with 10 fathoms in the North Sea and 30 to 40 off the Channel Islands.

Then there is the question of sea-sickness. Nothing is so favourable to that diversion as slowly towing a dredge. I used to take the chance of being ill, and often suffered that for which no other joy than the hauling in of a rich dredgeful of rare sea creatures could possibly compensate, or induce me to take the risk (as I did again and again). I remember lying very ill on the deck of a slowly lurching "lugger" in a heaving sea off Guernsey, when the dredge came up, and as its contents were turned out near me, a semi-transparent, oblong, flattened thing like a small paper-knife began to hop about on the boards. It was the first specimen I ever saw alive of the "lancelet" (Amphioxus), that strange, fish-like little creature, the lowest of vertebrates. I recognized him and immediately felt restored to well-being, seized the young stranger, and placed him in a special glass jar of clear sea-water. A few years later the fishermen at Naples would bring me, without any trouble to myself, twenty or more any day of the week ("cimbarella" they called them), and I not only have helped to make out the cimbarella's anatomy, but also to discover the history of the extraordinary changes it undergoes as it grows from the egg. I sent my pupil Dr. Willey, now professor in Montreal, one summer to a nearly closed sea-lake, the "pantano" of Faro, near Messina, where the lancelet breeds. He brought home hundreds of minute young in various stages, and again later made a second visit to that remote sea-lake in order to complete our knowledge of their growth and structure by observation on the spot.

The advantage of the Norwegian fiords for a naturalist who loves to "dredge" is that at many parts of the coast you can sail into water of 200 fathoms depth and more, within three minutes from the rocky shore; and, secondly, that the great passage between the islands and the mainland is, to a very large extent, protected from those movements of the surface which cause such torture to many innocent people who venture on the sea in boats! Accordingly, in 1882, when I heard from the greatest naturalist-dredger of his day—the Rev. Canon Norman, of Durham—that he knew a farmhouse at Lervik, on the island of Stordö, near the mouth of the Hardanger Fiord, between Bergen and Stavanger—where one could stay, and where a boat could be hired for a couple of months—I determined to go there. I was confirmed in my purpose by the fact that Canon Norman had obtained in his dredge, at a spot near Lervik, which he marked for me on the large-scale official map of the region, a very curious little polyp-like animal, attached to and branching on the stems of the white coral which one dredges there at the depth of 150 fathoms. The little animal in quest of which I went, though other wonderful things were to be expected also, had been dredged originally by Dr. Norman off the Shetland Islands, and described by Professor Allman, of Edinburgh. But they had not examined it in the living state with the microscope, and though they showed that it was quite unlike other polyps, yet there was obvious need for further examination of it. I hoped to obtain its eggs and to watch its early growth. The name given to it by Allman was "Rhabdopleura," meaning "rod-walled," alluding to a rod-like cord which runs along the inside of the delicate branching tube (only the one-twentieth of an inch wide), which the little animal constructs and inhabits.

I sent a chest containing glass jars, microscopes, books, chemicals, etc., and my dredge, as well as a large windlass, on which was coiled 600 fathoms of rope, by sea to Lervik, and started in early July, with my assistant, Dr. Bourne (afterwards Director of Education in the Madras Presidency), overland, via Copenhagen, for Christiania. Thence we drove in "carioles" across Norway to Laerdalsören, on the west coast, making acquaintance with the magnificent waters—rivers, lakes, and cascades—of that pine-grown land. After visiting the Naerodal and the glaciers which descend from the mountains into the sea on the Fjaerlands Fiord, we took steamer to Lervik, and were welcomed at our farmhouse by its owner, the sister of the member of Parliament for the surrounding region (about four times the area of Yorkshire), whose son secured for me a fair-sized sailing boat, and with two other men of Lervik engaged as my crew for six weeks.

Fig. 1.—A portion of the branching tubular growth formed by Rhabdopleura Normani, fixed to and spreading over the smooth surface of an Ascidian, dredged at Lervik and drawn of three times the natural dimensions. The colourless tubes (b) stand up freely from the surface to which the rest of the growth is adherent, and from each of them issues in life (as seen at bb) a polyp such as that shown in Fig. 2. Each polyp is continuous with the dark internal cord (or rod) which is seen traversing the whole of the tubular system. a, points to the main and oldest portion of the branching stem; c, points to a "leading" shoot which is still adherent and will give rise to young buds right and left which will form upright tubes like b. The inset d represents a piece of the tube magnified so as to show the rings by which it is built up.

After a day or two we had everything in order, and at seven o'clock one morning sailed out of the harbour to make our first cast of the dredge. The mouth of the harbour of Lervik is 40 fathoms deep, and the great north-bound steamers enter it and come alongside the rocks on which the village stands. Outside the harbour the depth increases precipitously to 200 fathoms. We sailed about 10 miles along the fiord, and determined precisely the spot indicated by Dr. Norman on the map, and here we lowered our dredge. We had fixed around the mouth of the dredge long tassels of hemp fibre, since on rocky ground, such as we were now dredging, one cannot expect much to be "scooped up" by the slowly travelling dredge as it passes over the bottom, whilst the threads of the hemp, on the contrary, entangle and hold all sorts of objects with which they come into contact. We were 1000 feet from the bottom, and our dredge took a good five minutes to sink as we paid out the rope from the winch in the stern of our boat. When it reached the bottom we let out another 2000 feet of rope, and then very slowly towed the dredge for about a quarter of an hour. Then the laborious task commenced of winding it up again, two men turning the handles of the winch for a quarter of an hour. At last the dredge could be seen through the clear water, and soon was at the surface and lifted into the boat. The hempen tangles were crowded with masses of living and dead white coral ([Fig. 3]), star-fishes, worms, and bits of stone covered with brilliant-coloured sponges, Terebratulæ (a deep-water, peculiar shellfish, the lamp-shell), and other animals. There were only a few fragments of coral in the bag of the dredge.

Fig. 2.—One of the polyps of Rhabdopleura which is attached by its soft contractile stalk (c) to the dark internal cord seen in Fig. 1. A similar polyp issues during life from the open end of each of the upright tubes seen in Fig. 1, and is, when disturbed, pulled back into the tube by the contraction of the cord c. a, mouth; b, vent; c, contractile stalk; d, head-shield or disk; e, the left gill-plane; f, the body-mass enclosing the intestine, etc. (From a drawing made by the author in Lervik, Stordö, in 1882.) For a full account of Rhabdopleura, see the "Quart. Journal of Microscopical Science," vol. xxiv., 1884.

We filled glass jars with sea water and placed the bits of coral in them, and I eagerly examined them for the creeper-like "Rhabdopleura." There, sure enough, it was on several of the dead stems of coral, and we sailed back to Lervik with our booty in order to examine it at leisure with the microscope whilst still fresh and living. In our temporary laboratory at the farmhouse the little polyp which it had been my chief object to study, issued slowly from its delicate tubes when placed in a shallow trough of sea-water beneath the microscope. I was able on that day, and many others subsequently—with renewed supplies from the depths of the fiord—to make coloured drawings of it, and to find out a great deal of interest to zoologists about its structure. The minute thing ([Fig. 2]) was spotted with orange and black like a leopard, and had a plume of tentacles on each side of its mouth, which was overhung by a mobile disk—the organ by means of which it creeps slowly out of its tube, and also by which the transparent rings which form the tube are secreted and added one by one to the tube's mouth, so as to increase its length. The creature within the tree-like branching system of tubes ([Fig. 1]) is also tree-like and branching, fifty or more polyp-like individuals terminating its branches and issuing each from one of the upstanding terminal branches of the tube system. I was able to determine the "law" of its budding and branching, and I also found the testis full of spermatozoa in several of the polyps, but I failed to find eggs. I believe that we were too late in the season for them; and they are still unknown.

One of the most interesting deep-sea creatures discovered by the "Challenger" proved to be closely allied to our little Rhabdopleura, and received the name "Cephalodiscus." Several species of this second kind have been discovered in the last twenty years in the deep sea, and the largest and most remarkable in some respects was one which "jumped to my eyes" among the booty of marine dredgings sent home from the Antarctic expedition of the "Discovery" by Captain Scott, when I unpacked the cases containing these marine treasures, in the basement of the Natural History Museum. I published a photograph of it in the "Proceedings of the Royal Society," and named it "Cephalodiscus nigrescens." But nothing more of importance has, as yet, been brought to light as to "Rhabdopleura."

Fig. 3.—A piece of the white branching coral (Lophohelia prolifera) dredged in great quantity by the author off Lervik in 1882. Drawn of the natural size.

Our rule at Lervik was to go out dredging from seven to twelve, and work at the material with microscope and pencil for some three or four hours after lunch. Of all the many beautiful things we dredged, the most striking were the various kinds of corals, the large, glass-like shrimps, the strange apple-green worm Hamingia (actually known previously by two specimens only), and the large, disc-like and branched, sand-covered or sausage-like Protozoa (from a shelly bottom of 200 fathoms depth). My friend Dr. Norman joined me at Lervik after I had been there for a month, and showed his extraordinary skill in choosing the most favourable spots for sinking the dredge and in pouncing on interesting specimens as we sorted the contents of the dredge (when we had been on a soft bottom) by passing them through the sieves, specially provided for naturalists' use, as we gently rocked on the dark surface of the clear, deep water, many miles from our island. The colours and light of that region are wonderful—the mountains of a yellow tint, far paler than the purple sea, whilst the rocky islands are fringed with seaweed of rich orange-brown colour, and clothed with grass and innumerable flowers.

The white coral of two kinds (Lophohelia and Amphihelia) is accompanied by beautiful purple and salmon-coloured softer kinds of coral (Alcyonarians), known as Primnoa, and by the gigantic Paragorgia. On one occasion our dredge became fast. For long nothing would move it, and we feared we should have to cut it and lose some 300 fathoms of rope. At last the efforts of four men at the oars set it free, and we wound it in. As the dredge came up we found entangled in the rope an enormous tree-like growth, as thick as a man's arm, seven feet long, and spreading out into branches, the whole of a pale vermilion colour (like pink lacquer)—a magnificent sight! It was a branch of the great tree-coral of these waters—the Paragorgia—and we preserved many pieces of it in alcohol and dried the rest. But the gorgeous colour could not be retained.

One day the green worm, Hamingia (named after a Norwegian hero—Haming) was dredged by us at the mouth of Lervik Harbour, in 40 fathoms. A somewhat similar worm lives in holes in the limestone rocks of the Mediterranean, and is named Bonellia (after the Italian naturalist, Bonelli). All the specimens of this Mediterranean worm, which is as large as a big walnut, and has a trunk, or proboscis, a foot long, were found to be females. The male was unknown until my friend the late Alexander Kowalewsky, the most remarkable of Russian zoologists, discovered that it is a tiny threadlike green creature, no bigger than the letter "i" on this page. Three or four are found crawling about on the body of the large female. I found the same diminutive kind of male crawling on my Norwegian Hamingia, at Lervik, and published a drawing and description of him. I was also able to show that, unlike Bonellia, the Norwegian worm has red blood-corpuscles, like those of a frog, and impregnated with hæmoglobin, the same oxygen-carrying substance which colours our own blood-corpuscles. The identity of the worm's hæmoglobin with that in our own blood was proved by its causing two dark bands of absorption in the solar spectrum when light was passed through it and then through the spectroscope—dark bands exactly the same in position and intensity as those caused by the red substance of my own blood and changing into one single band intermediate in position between the two—when deprived by an appropriate chemical of the oxygen loosely combined with it.

On the Fiord near Lervik.

Of many other things we caught and many other delights of that long-past summer on the Norwegian fiords, of the great waterfalls, the vast forests, the delightful swimming in the sea, the trout-fishing, and the very trying food approved and provided for us by the natives, I must not now tell. My hope is that I may have enabled my readers to understand some of the enjoyment open to the marine zoologist, even when he dispenses with the aid of a big steamship, and modestly pursues his quarry in a sportsmanlike spirit.

CHAPTER II
NATURE-RESERVES

ONE of the new features of modern life—the result of the enormous development of the newspaper press and the vast increase in numbers of those who read and think in common—is the development of a sensitive "self-consciousness" of the community, a more or less successful effort to know its own history, to value the records of the past, and to question its own hitherto unconscious, unreflecting attitude in mechanically and as it were blindly destroying everything which gets in the way of that industrial and commercial activity which is regarded, erroneously, as identical with "progress." Beautiful old houses and strange buildings—priceless records of the ways and thought of our early ancestors—-which at one time were either guarded by superstitious reverence or let alone because there was room for them and for everything else in the spacious countryside—-have been thoughtlessly pulled down as population and grasping enterprise increased. The really graceful old houses of London and other towns, lovingly produced by former men who were true artists, have been broken up and their panelling and chimney-pieces sold to foreigners in order to make way for more commodious buildings, hideous in their ignorant decoration, or brutally "run up," gaunt, bare, and mis-shapen. The stones of Avebury, of Stonehenge, and of many another temple have been knocked to pieces by emancipated country-folk—no longer restrained either by superstition or by reverence—to mend roads and to make enclosures.

Happily the new self-consciousness is taking note of these things. That strange lumbering body which we call "the mother of parliaments" has dimly reflected the better thought of the community, and given a feeble sort of protection to ancient monuments. The newspapers have lately managed to excite some public interest in a fine old house in Dean Street, Soho, and to arouse a feeling of shame that the richest city in the richest Empire of the world should allow the few remnants of beautiful things of the past still existing in its midst to be destroyed by the uncontrolled operation of mercenary "progress." I have, in common with many others, visited this doomed mansion. It is a charming old place, of no great size or importance, and, with its well-proportioned panelled rooms and fine staircase, was destined to be a private residence. It is not large enough to be a museum, but its rooms might serve for the show place of a first-rate maker or vender of things of fine workmanship. There ought to be some public authority—municipal or departmental—with power to acquire such interesting houses as this, not necessarily to convert them into permanent public shows, but to keep them in repair, and to let them on lease, at a reasonable rent, to tenants, subject to the condition of their being open on certain days in the year to artists and others provided with orders of admission by the authority. In other countries such arrangements are made; with us they are not made simply because we have not assigned to any authority the duty of acting in this way for the public benefit. Our public authorities have little or no public spirit, and resemble private committees, councils, and individuals in evading and refusing even the smallest increase of responsibility and activity beyond that which they are compelled by law to discharge. Unless they are legally compelled to interfere, all records of art and nature may perish before they will incur the inconvenience of moving a finger! Consequently the only thing to be done is to assign such duties by law to an existing authority, or to one created for such purposes.

The same tale of destruction and irreparable damage has to be told of our dealings with the beauty of once unsullied moorland, meadow, marsh, forest, river-bank, and seashore. But the destruction has here been more gradual, less obvious on account of remoteness, and more subtle in its creeping, insinuating method, like that of a slowly-spreading infective disease. The word "country" has to a very large extent ceased to signify to us "outlying nature beyond the man-made town," occupied only in little tracts here and there by the immemorial tillers of the soil. The splendid and age-long industry of our field-workers has made much of our land a garden. Now they themselves are disappearing or changed beyond recognition, losing their traditional arts and crafts, their distinctive and venerable dialects, and their individuality. The land is enclosed, drained, manured; food plants produced by the agriculturist replace the native plants; forests are cut down and converted into parks and pheasant-runs; foreign trees are substituted for those native to the soil. Commons, heaths, and wild moorlands have been enclosed by eager land-grabbers, the streams are polluted by mining or chemical works, or if kept clean are artificially overstocked with hand-fed trout; whilst the open roads reek of tar and petroleum. The "wilderness" is fast disappearing, and it is by this name that we must distinguish from the mere "country," as much besmirched and devastated by man as are the sites of his towns and cities, the regions where untouched nature still survives and is free from the depredations of humanity. Many beautiful and rare plants which once inhabited our countryside have perished; many larger animals (such as wolf, beaver, red-deer, marten-cats, and wild-cats) have disappeared, as well as many insects, great and small, such as the swallow-tailed butterfly and the larger copper butterfly, and many splendid birds.

Here and there in these islands are to be found bits of "wilderness" where some of the ancient life—now so rapidly being destroyed—still flourishes. There are some coast-side marshes, there are East Anglian fens, some open heath-land, and some bits of forest which are yet unspoilt, unravaged by blighting, reckless humanity. It is a distressing fact that some of the recent official attempts to preserve open forest land and commons for the public enjoyment have been accompanied by a mistaken attempt to drain them, and lay them out with gravel walks, to the complete destruction of their natural beauty and interest. The bog above the Leg of Mutton Pond, on Hampstead Heath, where I used to visit, years ago, the bog-bean and the sun-dew, and many a moss-grown pool swarming with rare animalcules, has been drained by an over-zealous board of guardians, animated by a suburban enthusiasm for turf and gravel paths. The same spirit, hostile to nature and eager to reduce the wilderness to vulgar conventionality, has tamed the finer parts of Wimbledon Common, and is busy laying down gravel paths in Epping Forest. In the New Forest the clamour of the neighbouring residents for "sport" has led to the framing of regulations by the officials of the Crown (it is a "Royal" forest), which are resulting in the destruction and disappearance of rare birds which formerly nested there. Many a distant common threatened by the builder has been preserved as an open space by golfers. Such preservation is like that of the boards of conservators, useless from the point of view of the nature-lover. The health-seeking crowd spreads devastation around it. The rare sand-loving plants of the dunes, and the "bog-bean," the "sun-dew," and other refugees from human persecution on our once unfrequented heath-lands, are remorselessly trodden down or hacked up by the golfer. Other destroyers of nature's rarer products are those who greedily search for them and carry them off, root and branch, to the last specimen, in order to sell them. These dealers are "collectors," indeed, but must not be confused with the genuine "naturalist," who may allow himself, with due modesty, to secure a limited sample of treasures from nature's open hand.

Under these circumstances a society has been founded for the formation of "nature-reserves" in the British Islands. Its object is to secure, by purchase or gift, tracts of as yet unsullied wilderness—of which some are still, though rarely, to be found—where beast and bird, insect and plant are still living as of old—untouched, unmolested, undisturbed by intrusive, murderous man. The society's object is to enter into relations with those who may know of such tracts, and to arrange for their transference—if of sufficient interest—to the National Trust. The expense of proper guardianship and the admission to the reserve of duly authorized persons would be the business of the society. Its office is at the Natural History Museum in Cromwell Road, and Mr. Ogilvie Grant, the naturalist in charge of the ornithological collections, is one of the secretaries. Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Lewis Harcourt and several of our most distinguished botanists and zoologists are members of the council. All who sympathize with the objects of the society should write to the secretary for further information.

Already two tracts of land were secured as nature-reserves before the society came into existence. One of these is Wickham Fen, not far from Cambridge, renowned for its remarkable plants and insects. It was purchased and placed in the hands of the National Trust by a public-spirited entomologist. Another reserve, which has been secured, is far away on the links or dunes of the north coast of Norfolk, and is of especial interest to botanists. No one—either golfer or bungalow-builder—can now interfere there and destroy the interwoven flora and fauna, the members of which balance and protect, encourage and check one another, as is Nature's method. The interaction of the various species of wild plants in this undisturbed spot is made the subject of continual and careful study by the botanists who are permitted to frequent it. More such "reserves" and of different characters are desirable. Should we, of the present day, succeed in securing some great marsh-land, one or more rocky headlands or islands, and a good sweep of Scotch moor and mountain, and in raising money to provide guardians for these acquisitions, we shall not only enjoy them ourselves but be blessed by future generations of men for having saved something of Britain's ancient nature, when all else, which is not city, will have become manure, shooting greens, and pleasure gardens.

In Germany and in Switzerland a good deal has been done in this way. Owing to the existence of "forestry" and a State Forest Department in Germany—which has no representative in this country—there is machinery for selecting and guarding such "reserves." A large sum is assigned annually by the Government to this purpose. Last year an international congress, attended by delegates from the English society, as well as by representatives of many other States, was held, and much useful discussion as to methods and results took place.

The notion of creating a nature-reserve on a small scale seems to have originated with Charles Waterton, the traveller and naturalist, who in the middle of last century converted the estate surrounding his residence near Pontefract in Yorkshire into a sort of sanctuary, where he made it a strict rule that no wild thing should be molested. For some years now the attempt to create "nature-reserves," on a far larger scale than those of which I have been writing, has been made where civilization is planting its first settlements in primeval forest and prairie. The United States Government, impressed with the rapid destruction and disappearance both of forests and of native animals which have accompanied the opening up by road and rail of vast territories in the West, created in 1872 the national "reserve," called the Yellowstone Park, which is some 3300 square miles in area. We are assured that here under proper guardianship the larger native animals are increasing in number; whilst the great coniferous trees, which were in danger of extermination by the white man, are safe. Similar reserves have been proclaimed in parts of Africa under British control, but though that known as Mount Elgon—an ancient volcanic cup, clad with forest, and ten miles in diameter—seems to have been effective, and to have furnished in Sir Harry Johnston's time, ten years ago, a refuge for the giraffe, it is scarcely possible, at present, to provide an efficient police force to protect areas of something like 1000 square miles against the depredations of native and commercial "hunters" provided with modern rifles.

In May, 1900, I was, with the late Sir Clement Hill, appointed "plenipotentiary" by her Majesty Queen Victoria to meet representatives of Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Congo States in a conference, presided over by the late Marquis of Linlithgow, at the Foreign Office. The conference was arranged by the great African powers in order to consider and report on the means to be taken to preserve the big game animals of Africa from extinction. We spent an extremely interesting fortnight, and finally agreed upon a report, the upshot of which was that whilst certain animals, such as the giraffe, some zebras and antelopes, the gorilla, and such useful birds as the vultures, secretary bird, owls, and the cow-pickers (Buphagus), should be absolutely protected, others should be only protected at certain seasons, or in youth, or in limited numbers, and others again should be killed without licence or restraint at any time, such being the lion, the leopard, the hunting-dog, destructive baboons, most birds of prey, crocodiles, pythons, and poisonous snakes. The question of large "nature-reserves" was discussed. It was agreed that such reserves should be maintained for the breeding-places and rearing of the young of desirable animals, and that the destruction of predatory animals or an excess of other forms should be permitted to the administrators of such reserves. Thus it is clear that no absolute "nature-reserves" were considered possible.

In fact this is the case whether the reserve be large or small. Once man is present in the neighbourhood, even at a long distance, he upsets the "balance of Nature." The naturalist's small "nature-reserve" may be ravaged by predatory animals driven from the outlying region occupied by man, or again, the absence from the "reserve" of predatory animals which act as natural checks on the increase of other animals, may lead to excessive and unhealthy multiplication of the latter. Man must "weed" and artificially manage his "reserve" after all! Man brings also into the neighbourhood of reserves, great and small, disease germs in his domesticated animals, which are carried by insects into the cherished "reserve," and there cause destruction. Conversely, the animals maintained in a reserve carry in their blood microscopic parasites to the poisons of which they have become immune by natural selection in the course of ages. They act as "reservoirs" of such microscopic germs. These germs carried by flies or other insects to the carefully reared cattle imported by civilized man from other regions of the world into the neighbourhood of such "reserves," cause deadly disease (such as the tsetse-fly diseases or trypanosome diseases) to those imported cattle, as also to man himself. Whilst, then, we may do something to retain small tracts of our own country in the modified state which it attained after the earlier inhabitants had destroyed lion, bear, wolf, and other noxious animals, as well as great herbivora, such as giant deer, red deer, aurochs (or great bull), and bison—yet in reality a true "Nature-reserve" is not compatible with the occupation of the land, within some hundreds of miles of it, by civilized, or even semi-civilized, man.

Nothing but the isolation given by a wide sea or high mountain ranges will preserve a primeval fauna and flora—the indigenous man-free living denizens of the isolated region—from destruction by the necessary unpremeditated disturbance of Nature's balance by man once he has passed from the lowest stage of savagery. At present we are faced by this difficulty in Africa. Not only the white settlers have large herds of cattle, but before their arrival the native races had imported Indian cattle. These cattle are destroyed by "fly disease," the germs (trypanosomes) being carried by the tsetse-fly to the domesticated cattle from wild buffalo which swarm with the germs but are uninjured by them. Consequently, if the rich pasture lands of Africa—at present unutilized—are to be occupied by herdsmen, the wild game, buffalo and antelopes, must be destroyed. In many regions they have been destroyed. Is this destruction to be continued? If Africa is to be the seat of a modern human population and supply food to other parts of the world, the whole "balance of Nature" there must be upset and the big wild animals destroyed. There is no alternative. The practical question is, "How far is it possible to mitigate this process?" Can a great African "reserve" of 100,000 square miles be established in a position so isolated that it shall not be a source of disease and danger to the herdsmen and agriculturists of adjacent territory?

CHAPTER III
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

SOME men of unbalanced minds have lately proposed deliberately and completely to obliterate all the artistic work of past generations of man in order, as they openly profess, that they themselves and their own productions may obtain consideration. Even were they able to make such a clearance, it may be doubted whether the consideration given to their own performances would be favourable. These obscure individuals have immodestly dubbed themselves "futurists," and the name has been at once adopted as a mystification and advertisement by a variety of art-posers—probably unknown to the originators of the word—who have ventured into one or other of the fields of art without even the smallest gift, either of conception or of expression, or even of imitation. They receive undeserved attention from a section of the public ready to dabble in every newly-made puddle. I am led to refer to them because the abolition of the supremely beautiful things slowly evolved by Nature in the long course of ages, and the substitution for them of man's fancy breeds and races and garden paths, is not merely a parallel piece of folly, but is due to a mental defect identical with that of the genuine "futurist," namely, an intellectual incapacity which renders its victim insensible to the charm of historical and evolutional complexity.

The modern man who nourishes a real love for undistorted nature—that is to say, who is a true "naturalist"—has one or two resources even in these British Islands. There are ways of access to Nature unadorned by man which are open even to the town-dweller. The chief of these is the seashore. Even from London, in the course of a few hours, one may be transported to territory where there are no traces of man's operations. The region of rock and pool, sand-flat, and shell-bank, exposed by the sea as it retreats, is a real "nature-reserve"—effectually so is that deepest area only exposed at spring-tides. The locality chosen by the naturalist must be at a distance from any great harbour or estuary polluted by the cities seated on its banks, and should also be out of the way of the modern steam-driven fish trawlers, which have caused havoc in some sweet bays of our southern coast by pouring out tons of dead, unsaleable fish. The rejected offal has become the gathering-ground of carnivorous marine creatures, and the balance of Nature has been upset by the nourishment thus thoughtlessly thrown by man into new relations.

Some favoured spot on the south or west coast may be known to our city-dwelling nature-lover, and thither he will hasten to spend week-ends, and, when he can, longer spells in the supreme delight of undisturbed communion with the things of Nature, apart from human "enterprise." In some cottage near the sea marsh, where an unpolluted stream joins the salt water, he has his accustomed lodging; his host, a cheery long-shore fisherman and handy boatman. Close by is the rising headland and rocky cliff facing the sea. The shore is strewn with rocks, and as the tide goes down long "reefs" are exposed, clothed with brown and green seaweeds. Here no man has intruded! When the water recedes still farther, pools and miniature caverns appear, edged with delicate feathery red-coloured seaweeds. Many small fishes, shrimps of various kinds, sometimes pale rainbow-tinted "squids" (one of the more delicate cuttle-fishes), are seen darting about the pools, changing their colour with lightning rapidity. The overhanging sides of the rock-pools give protection to gorgeously-coloured "sea-anemones" adhering to them. Here, also, are those exquisite ascidians—ill-described by the rough name "sea-squirt"—hanging from the rocks like drops of purest crystal in their transparency—for which naturalists use the prettier title "Clavellina." The nature-lover now turns one of the large flat slabs of rock lying in such a pool—well knowing what loveliness its under-side will reveal to his eyes. That under-side is studded with a dozen or two of the most exquisite gems of green and peach colour, ruby and yellow (Corynactis by name!), which, if the slab of stone is left beneath the water, expand and display each its circlet of brilliant little tentacles. They are sea-anemones no bigger than the precious stone in a signet-ring. Among them a bright salmon-coloured worm hastens with serpentine movement and the rippling strokes of a hundred feathery feet to escape from the unaccustomed light. A deep blood-red coloured prawn (Alpheus) darts from concealment and hastily buries itself in the sandy bottom of the pool, snapping its pincerlike claw with a sharp cracking sound. A couple of bivalved shells (Lima hians) which were concealed beneath the slab swim lazily round the pool by opening and closing their delicate white "valves"—an unusual kind of activity in such mussels, oysters, and clams—whilst a fringe of long orange-red tentacles trails in the water from each of them. The lifting of another rock may dislodge an "octopus"—or a huge brilliantly-coloured star-fish—or one of the rarer kinds of crab eager to avoid the observation of the octopus, of which it is the regular food. A spade pushed into the neighbouring sandbanks reveals heart-urchins, gorgeous sea-worms, and burrowing shell-fish and perhaps sand-eels. The human visitor—bending over these scenes of wonderment and perhaps venturing to transfer one or two only of the less familiar animals to a glass jar filled with sea-water so that he may see them more clearly—at last stands up and straightens his back, gazing over the sun-bathed scene from the tumbled weed-grown rocks, encrusted with crowds of purple-blue mussels, to the patches of golden sand, clear pools, and the blue sea beyond. Then he may note (as I have) a curious rhythmical sound if he is among rocks covered with seaweeds—a quiet but incessant "hiss-hiss," which is heard above the deeper-toned lapping of the little waves among the big stones. This is the sound made by the rasp-like tongues of the periwinkles feeding on the abundant weed, over which they crawl, leaving the water and "browsing" on the surface exposed to the air by the fall of the tide. The browsing sound of these little snails is to the seashore what the humming of bees is to inland meadows.

Day after day and at various seasons of the year the nature-lover will visit this sanctuary, and, whilst contemplating the lovely forms, colour, and movement of its denizens, will learn the secrets of their life, of their comings and goings, and the mysteries of their reproduction, their birth, and their childhood. Each day he finds something unknown to his brother naturalists. He will examine it with his lens, paint it in all its beauty, and tell of it in due course in printed page and coloured portraiture; but he is no mere seeker for novelty, nor is the credit of discovery the motive of his devotion. Beyond and greater than any such gains are the incomparable delight, the never-failing happiness which personal intimacy with the secret things of natural beauty bring to him.

He has yet another chance of such enjoyment, if he be a microscopist, and familiar with the inhabitants of fresh-water ponds. A pond is, in many cases, an oasis in the waste of civilization, a miniature nature-reserve, rarely, if ever, affected by human proceedings until haply it is abolished altogether. A fairly deep, stagnant pond under trees in some secluded park is one of the most favourable kind, but all sorts deserve inquiry (even the rain pools on the roofs of old houses in Paris have rewarded the faithful seeker), and may prove, for a time at least, havens of refuge for a wonderful assemblage of animalcules and minute microscopic plants, which for the most part perish as did the bison of the American plains by the mere disturbance caused by the propinquity of civilized man. I knew such a pond—it is now built over—near Hampstead. As one lay on the bank and peered into the depths of the pond the transparent, glass-like larvæ of the "plume fly" (Corethra) could be seen swimming in the clear water, driving before it troops of minute pink-coloured water-fleas (Daphnia) and other crustaceans.

In other parts the water was made bluish-green by crowds of the little floating spherical animalcules called "Volvox globator." The mud contained many curious worms allied to the earth-worm, whilst coiled round fallen twigs were the small snake-like worms known as "Nais serpentina." Desmids, Diatoms, and animalcules of endless variety abounded. A muslin net set on a ring on the end of a stick enabled one to procure samples of the floating life of the water and also to skim the surface of the mud, and these spoils were brought home in bottles and searched for hours drop by drop with the microscope. The world of active, graceful, bustling life thus revealed as one gazes for hours through the magic tube of the microscope, is as remote from human civilization as that uncovered at low tide on the seashore. Many a worried City man, amongst them a great political writer on the staff of a London daily, now passed from among us, has found in this microscopic world—so readily accessible even at his own study table—a release from care, a refreshing contact with unadulterated natural things of life and beauty. My friend, Iwan Müller, the writer referred to, was as discriminating a judge of the shapes of wheel-animalcules as he was of the faces of the politicians of Europe and South Africa!

There is another and much more difficult escape from the grip and taint of civilization, which is that effected by the explorer who penetrates into sparsely inhabited wilds such as those of the Australian continent. Man is there, but in such small number (one to every 450 square miles!), and in so primitive and childlike a state, that he is not a disturbing element, but simply one of the "fauna"—one of the curious animals living there under the domination of Nature—not yet "Nature's rebel," but submissive, unconscious, and a more fascinating study for us than any other of her products. He shows us what manner of men were our own remote ancestors. The hunters who have left their flint implements in the earlier river gravels of Western Europe were such men as these Australian natives now are. Naked, using only sticks and chipped stones as implements and weapons, destitute of crops or herds or habitations, wandering from place to place in keen search of food—small animals, birds, lizards, and grubs—these Australians have none of the arts of the most primitive among other races, excepting that they can make fire and construct a canoe of the bark of trees. They have not even the bow and arrow, but make use of spears and the wonderful "boomerang" in hunting and fighting. They daub themselves with a sort of white paint, and decorate their bodies with great scars made by cutting gashes in the flesh with sharp stones, and they dress their heads and faces and ceremonial wands with wool and feathers, which they fix by the aid of an adhesive fluid always ready to hand—namely, their own blood. I recently was present at a lecture given to the Anthropological Institute in London by Professor Baldwin Spencer, of Melbourne, with whom I was closely associated when he was a student at Oxford thirty years ago. He has devoted many years to the study of the Australian natives, and ten years ago published a most valuable work describing his experiences amongst them, to which he has recently added a further volume. He has lived with them in friendship and intimacy in the remote wilderness of the Australian bush, and has been admitted as a member of one of their mysterious clans, of which the "totem," or supposed spirit-ancestor, is "the witchety grub"—a kind of caterpillar. He has been freely admitted to their secret ceremonies as well as to their more public "corroborees" or dances, and has been able (as no one else has been), without annoyance or offence to them, to take a great number of cinema-films of them in their various dances or when cooking in camp or paddling and upsetting their canoes, and climbing back again from the river. Many of these he exhibited to us, and we found ourselves among moving crowds of these slim-legged, beautifully-shaped wild men. The film presented some of their strange elaborate dances, which soon will be danced no more. These wild men die out when civilized man comes near them. It appears that they really spend most of their time in dancing when not looking for food or chipping stone implements, and that their dances are essentially plays (like those of little children in Europe), the acting of traditional stories relating the history of their venerated animal "totem," which often last for three weeks at a time! Whilst dancing and gesticulating they are chanting and singing without cessation, often repeating the same words over and over again. Here, indeed, we have the primitive human art, the emotional expression from which, in more advanced races, music, drama, dancing, and decorative handicraft have developed as separate "arts."

The most remarkable and impressive result was obtained when Professor Baldwin Spencer turned on his phonograph records whilst the wild men danced in the film picture. Then we heard the actual voices of these survivors of prehistoric days—shouting at us in weird cadences, imitating the cry of birds, and accompanied by the booming of the bull-roarer (a piece of wood attached to a string, and swung rapidly round by the performer). A defect, and at the same time a special merit, of the cinema show of the present day is the deadly silence of both the performers and the spectators. Screams and oaths are delivered in silence; pistols are fired without a sound. One can concentrate one's observation on the facial expression and movements of the actors with undivided attention and with no fear of startling detonations. And very bad they almost invariably are, except in films made by the great French producers. On the other hand, I was astonished at the intensity of the impression produced by hearing the actual voices of those Australian wild men as they danced in rhythm with their songs. To hear is a greater means of revelation than to see. One feels even closer to those Australian natives as their strange words and songs issue from imprisonment in the phonograph, than when one sees them in the film pictures actually beating time with feet and hands and imitating the movements of animals. To receive, as one sits in a London lecture-room, the veritable appeal of these remote and inaccessible things to both the eye and the ear simultaneously, is indeed the most thrilling experience I can remember. With a feeling of awe, almost of terror, we recognize as we gaze at and listen to the records brought home by Professor Baldwin Spencer that we are intruding into a vast and primitive Nature-reserve where even humanity itself is still in the state of childhood—submissive to the great mother, without the desire to destroy her control or the power to substitute man's handiwork for hers.

CHAPTER IV
THE GREAT GREY SEAL

IT is always pleasing to find that intelligent care can be brought to bear on the preservation of the rare and interesting animals which still inhabit parts of these British Islands, though it is not often that such care is actually exercised. Mr. Lyell (a nephew of the great geologist Sir Charles Lyell) in April 1914 introduced a Bill into the House of Commons which is called the Grey Seals (Protection) Bill. It came on for consideration before the Standing Committee, was ordered to be reported to the House without amendment, and has now passed into law.

The Great Grey Seal is a much bigger animal than the Common Seal, the two species being the only seals which can be properly called "British" at the present day, though occasionally the Harp Seal, or Greenland Seal, and the Bladder-nosed Seal are seen in British waters, and may emerge from those waters on to rocky shores or lonely sandbanks. The Great Grey Seal is called "Halichœrus grypus" by zoologists, whilst the Common Seal is known as "Phoca vitulina." The male of the former species grows to be as much as 10 feet in length, whilst that of the Common Seal rarely attains 5 feet. Both these seals breed on the British coast. The Common Seal frequents the north circumpolar region, being found on the northern coasts on both sides of the Atlantic, and also on both sides of the Pacific, and even makes its way down the coasts of France and Spain into the Mediterranean, where it is rare. A few years ago one appeared on the beach at Brighton! It may often be seen on the west coast of Scotland, of Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall, where it breeds in caves. Its hairy coat is silky, and has a yellowish-grey tint spotted with black and dark grey, most abundantly on the back.

The Great Grey Seal does not occur in the Pacific, but is limited to the northern shores on both sides of the Atlantic. Its coat is of a more uniform greyish-brown colour than that of the Common Seal, and when dried by exposure to the sun has a silvery-grey sheen. The Great Grey Seal is a good deal rarer on our coasts than is the Common Seal. It is now limited to the south, west, and north coasts of Ireland, to the great islands on the West of Scotland, the Orkneys, the Shetlands, and some spots on the east coast of Scotland. It is heard of as a rare visitor to the Lincolnshire "Wash," the coasts of Norfolk, Cornwall, and Wales. Some years ago (in 1883) I found a newly-born Grey Seal on the shore of Pentargon Cove, near Boscastle, North Cornwall. It appears that whilst (contrary to the statements of some writers) the Common Seal produces its young most usually in caves or rock-shelters, the Great Grey Seal chooses a remote sand island or deserted piece of open shore for its nursery. The Common Seal gives birth to its young—a single one or a pair—in June; the Great Grey Seal about the 1st of September. While the young in both species is clothed when born in a coat of long yellowish-white hair, this coat is shed in the case of the Common Seal within twenty-four hours of birth, exposing the short hair, forming a smooth, silky coat, as in the adult, and the young at once takes to the water and swims. On the other hand, the long yellowish-white coat of hair persists in the young of the Great Grey Seal for six or seven weeks, during which time it remains on shore, and refuses to enter the water. It is visited at sundown by the mother for the purpose of suckling it. According to Mr. Lyell, this renders the young of the Great Grey Seal peculiarly liable to attack by reckless destructive humanity, and he accordingly proposes legislation to render it a penal offence to destroy the young seals or the mothers during the nursing season. It is estimated that the total number of Great Grey Seals in Scottish waters has been reduced to less than 500, and that in English and Irish waters the total is even less.

It has often been desired by naturalists that a check should be put by the Legislature upon the wanton destruction of the common seal, as well as of the grey seal. It is certainly a regrettable result of the increased visitation of our remote rocky shores by holiday-makers, so-called "sportsmen" and thoughtless ruffians of all kinds, that the large, and perfectly harmless, grey seal is likely to be exterminated. In former times in these islands, as to-day in more northern regions, there was a regular "seal fishery," and vast numbers of seals were annually slaughtered for the sake of their skins and fat. The fur of both our native species, though differing vastly from the soft under-fur of the fur-seals, or Otariæ, of the North Pacific—which belong to a different section of the seal group, having small external "ears," and hind feet which can be moved forward and used in walking—is yet largely used for making gloves and thick overcoats. To-day the number of British seals killed and brought to market is so small that no local fishery interests would suffer were all protected by the law during the spring and summer, when breeding and the rearing of the young is in progress. There is even less reason for objecting to the protection of the larger and rarer "Great Grey Seal," which, unless it had been placed under the shelter of an Act of Parliament, would in five or six years have ceased to be a denizen of the British Islands.

Owing to my having accidentally made the acquaintance of a young grey seal, as mentioned above, in North Cornwall, I feel a special interest in the legislative protection of this kind. I was at Boscastle at the end of August, and was delighted to see there on the morning after my arrival three or four of the common seal swimming in the little rock-bound harbour. I was told by native authorities that there was a cave in the rocks at the side of Pentargon Cove, a couple of miles distant (formerly inaccessible from the cliffs), where these seals breed, and that it had been the custom of some of the young men of the district to go round there in a boat when wind and tide served in the early spring and "raid" the cave. They could get in at low tide, and, armed with heavy cudgels, they would attack the seals which were congregated in the cavern to the number of thirty or forty. A single well-delivered blow on the nose was sufficient, I was assured, to kill a full-grown seal, and if fortunate the raiders might secure ten or a dozen seals, which were then sold for their skins and oil to Bristol dealers. The enterprise was dangerous on account of the rising tide and the struggles of the seals and their assailants among the slippery rocks and deep pools in the darkness of the cave. Cruel and savage as the adventure was, it yet had its justification on a commercial basis—similar to that claimed for other "fisheries" of the great beasts of the sea hunted by man for their oil and skins. The seals of this cave were undoubtedly the small common seal—the Phoca vitulina—and I gathered that little had been heard of late years of successful expeditions to these rocks. I was, however, told that a path had been cut and ropes fastened to iron stanchions in the face of the rocky cliffs of Pentargon Cove just before my visit to Boscastle, which rendered it now comparatively easy to descend the 150 feet of rock from the hill overlooking it and reach the shore of the curiously isolated and enclosed cove.

So, with two companions—my sisters—I set off the next morning for Pentargon Cove. We climbed down the face of the cliff by the aid of the much-needed ropes and found ourselves on the shore, the tide being low. We hoped that we should be able to get a view of the "seal-cave" and some of its inhabitants swimming in its neighbourhood. We were disappointed in this, and my companions hastened down to the water's edge, in order to get as near as possible to the rocky sides of the cove. I was about to follow them when I saw, lying in the open, on the pebbles above high-tide mark, what I took at first for a white fur cloak left there by some previous visitor. I walked up to it, when, to my extreme astonishment, it turned round and displayed to my incredulous gaze a pair of very large black eyes and a threatening array of teeth, from which a defiant hiss was aimed at me. It was a baby seal, covered all over with a splendid growth of white fur, three inches deep. He was twice as big as the fur-covered young of the common seal—more than two feet long—his black eyes were as big as pennies, and he was lying there on the upper beach, far from the water, in the full blaze of the sun, as dry and as "fluffy" as a well-dressed robe of Polar bear's skin. We were indeed well rewarded for our excursion in search of the seal's cave of Pentargon Cove! For this was a new-born pup of the Great Grey Seal, entirely unconnected with the inferior population of the inaccessible cave, laid here in the open by his mother at birth (as is the habit of her species), little suspecting that the long-secluded shore of Pentargon Cove had that year been rendered accessible to marauding land-beasts for the first time. Not knowing the peculiarities of the grey seal and the refusal of its young to enter the water until six weeks after birth, when it sheds its coat of long white hair, we cautiously rolled the little seal on to my outspread coat and carried him to the water's edge. After the hissing with which he had greeted my first approach he was not unfriendly or alarmed, and for my part I must say that I have never yet stumbled upon any free gift of Nature which excited my admiration and regard in an equal degree. His eyes were beautiful beyond compare. We placed him close to the water and expected him to wriggle into it and swim off, but, on the contrary, he wriggled in the opposite direction, and slowly made his way, by successive heaves, up the beach. He was not more than a day or two old, as was shown by the unshrunken condition of the umbilical cord. We did not like to leave him exposed to the attacks of vagrant boys, who might climb down into the cove, so we carried him on my coat to the shelter of some large rocks, a hundred yards along the shore. There, with much regret, we left him.

But on the following evening, as we sat down to dinner, I heard from some other visitors at the Wellington Inn, to whom, under pledge of secrecy, I had confided our discovery, that they had been to Pentargon Cove to visit our young friend, and found that he had been removed (probably by his mother) back to the exact spot where we had found him. They also stated that his presence there had become known in the village, and that the conviction had been expressed that "the boys" would certainly go and stone him to death! I had already reproached myself for going elsewhere that day instead of to Pentargon Cove to look after my young seal, and now I hastily left my dinner, procured in the village two men and a potato sack, and hurried to Pentargon Cove. As we approached the edge of the cliff the sun was setting, and the cove was very still and suffused with a red glow. Then a weird sound rent the air, like that made by one in the agonies of sea-sickness. It was the little seal calling for his mother! It is the habit of the females of this species to leave the shore during the day when they go in search of the fish on which they feed, and to return to their young in the evening, in order to suckle them. I could see, from above, my baby friend—a little white figure all alone in the deepening gloom of the great cliffs—raising his head and, by his cries, helplessly inviting his enemies to come and destroy him. In a few minutes we were down by his side, had placed him in the potato sack, and brought him to the upper air. On the way to the inn I purchased a large-sized baby's bottle with a fine indiarubber teat. We placed the little seal on straw in a large open packing-case in the stables, whilst the kitchen-maid warmed some milk and filled the feeding-bottle. Then I brought it to him, looking down on his broad, white-furred head, with its wonderful eyes, set so as to throw their appealing gaze upwards. I touched his nose with the milky indiarubber teat. With unerring precision his lips closed on it, his nostrils opened and shut in quick succession, and he had emptied the bottle. I gave him a quart of milk before leaving him and getting my own belated meal. He slept comfortably, but at four in the morning his cries rent the air, and threatened to wake every one in the hotel. I had to get up, descend to the kitchen, warm some more milk for him, and satisfy his hunger. He became fond of the bottle, and also of the friend who held it for him. I arranged to take him to the Zoological Gardens when, after three days, I left Boscastle. He travelled to London in the guard's van in a specially constructed cage, and was as beautiful and happy as ever when I handed him over to the superintendent at Regent's Park.

In those days (as it happened) there was little understanding or care at "the Gardens" as to the feeding of an exceptional young animal like my little seal. It is possible to treat cow's milk so as to render it suitable to a young carnivore, much as it is "humanized" for the feeding of human babies, and I was willing to pay for a canine foster-mother were such procurable. I had then to leave London in order to preside over one of the sections of the British Association's meeting at Southport, and intended to take complete charge of my baby seal upon my return. But in less than a week the neglectful guardians at Regent's Park had killed him with stale cow's milk. I believe such a foundling would have a better chance there to-day, but the rearing of young mammals away from their mother is, of course, a difficult and uncertain job.

I do not regret having taken the baby seal from Pentargon Cove, for I undoubtedly saved him from a violent death, whilst his mother would soon recover from the loss due to my action—a loss to which she and her fellow "grey seal-mothers" must be not unfrequently exposed from other causes. I do regret, however, that it did not occur to me until too late that it would have been a wonderful experience to lie quietly on the shore some few yards from the baby seal, as the sun set, and then to see and hear the great seal-mother—7 or 8 feet long—swim into the cove, raise her gigantic bulk on the shore, and heave herself across the pebbles to her eager child. To witness the embraces, caresses, and endearments of the great mysterious beast would have been a revelation such as a naturalist values beyond measure. And so I hope, with all my heart, that Mr. Lyell will succeed in his good work of protecting the Great Grey Seal.

CHAPTER V
THE GROUSE AND OTHER BIRDS

IN August when so many people are either shooting or eating that delectable bird—the grouse—a few words about him and his kind will be seasonable. "Grouse" is an English word (said to have meant in its original form "speckled"), and by "the" grouse we mean the British red grouse, which, though closely related to the willow grouse, called "rype" (pronounced "reepa") in Norway—a name applied also to the ptarmigan—is one of the very few species of birds peculiar to the British Islands. The willow-grouse turns white in winter, and is often called the ptarmigan, which it is not, though closely related to it. The willow-grouse inhabits a sub-arctic zone, which extends from Norway across the whole continent of Europe and Asia, and through North America, from the Aleutian Islands to Newfoundland. The red grouse does not naturally occur beyond the limits of the British Islands. It does not turn white in winter, and the back of the cock bird is darker in colour, as is also the whole plumage of the hen bird, than in the willow-grouse. The red grouse lives on heather-grown moors; the willow-grouse prefers the shrubby growths of berry-bearing plants interspersed with willows, whence its name. No distinction can be discovered in the voice, eggs, build, and anatomical details of the two species. The red grouse and the willow-grouse were, at no very distant prehistoric period, one species, but the race which has become isolated in these islands has just the small number of marked differences which I have mentioned, and it breeds true, and therefore we call it a distinct "species." In Scotland, the red grouse is called "muir-fowl," and a century ago was almost invariably spoken of in England as moor-fowl, or moor-game. It is found on moors from Monmouthshire northward to the Orkneys, and inhabits similar situations in Wales and Ireland.

The red grouse and the willow-grouse belong to a section or "order" of birds which are classified together because they all have many points in common with "the common fowl" or jungle-cock and the pheasants. That order or pedigree-branch was named by Huxley Alectoromorphæ, or cock-like birds, perhaps more simply termed Galliformes, Gallus being the Latin name for "chanticleer." When there is a question of the groups recognized in the classification of animals, it is well to bear in mind, once for all, that the biggest branches of the animal pedigree are called "phyla" (or sub-kingdoms); that these have branches or sub-divisions which are called "classes" (birds are a class of the phylum Vertebrata). Classes divide into "orders"; these often are subdivided into "sub-orders." Orders comprise each several smaller branches called "families," families branch into "genera," and each "genus" contains a number of "species" which have diverged from a common ancestral form, and become more or less stable and unchanging (but not unchangeable) at the present day. The individuals of a species are distinguishable by certain marks, shape, and colour from the individuals of other species of the genus. They breed true to those points when in natural conditions, and show some differences of habit, locality, and constitution which emphasize their distinction as a separate "species."

The order Galliformes of the class Aves or birds is one of some eighteen similar orders of birds. It contains several families, namely, the grouse-birds, the partridges, the francolins (formerly introduced into Italy from Cyprus), the quails, the pheasants, including the common fowl or Gallus, the peacocks, the turkeys, and, lastly, the guinea-fowls. The mound-builders and the South American curassows (very handsome birds to be seen at the Zoological Gardens) are families which have to be separated from the rest as a distinct sub-order. Fifty years ago the pigeons were placed in one order with the galliform birds, which was termed "Rasores," or scratching birds; but they are now separated under the name Columbiformes.

All the galliform birds are specially agreeable to man as food, and the domesticated race of the jungle-fowl—for which we have no proper English name, except that of "the" fowl[1]—is second only to the dog in its close association with man. It seems to have been domesticated first in Burma, and was introduced into China about 1000 B.C., and through Greece into Europe about 600 B.C. It is not mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures, nor by Homer, nor figured on ancient Egyptian monuments. It was called "the Persian bird" by the Greeks, indicating that it came to them from the Far East through Persia. The common or barn-door fowl is assigned to the genus Gallus, of which there are four wild species. It is very closely related to the pheasants (genus Phasianus, with several "local" species); indeed, so closely that, when pheasants and "fowls" are kept together in confinement they will sometimes interbreed and produce vigorous hybrids. The peacocks are Indian, and with them is associated the Malay Argus-pheasant. They share with the turkeys, which are North American in origin, the habit of "display" by the male birds when "courting"—a habit which we see in a less marked form in the strutting, wing-scraping, and cries of the pheasants, chanticleers, and grouse-birds. The various species of partridges are confined to the temperate regions of the Old World, but the word is wrongly applied in America and Australia to other kinds of birds. The guinea-fowls are African, and so are the francolins and quails, the latter migrating to the South of Europe. It is an interesting fact that, when the turkey was first brought from America, about 1550, a confusion grew up in Europe between it and the guinea-fowl. The turkey was given a genus (Meleagris) to itself by Linnæus, who called it "M. gallopavo," whilst the guinea-fowl was called "Numida meleagris." We know, at present, other "species" of Meleagris besides M. gallopavo, and other species of Numida.

[1] "Chanticleer" is the name given to the cock-bird of this species in the very ancient story of "Renard the Fox."

Now we revert to the grouse-birds, a family for which the zoologist's name is Tetraonidæ. They all have the beautiful crimson arch of bare knobby skin above each eye which gives its chief beauty to our grouse. The family contains several genera and included species. The largest species is the capercailzie (a Gaelic word), or cock of the wood, called by the French "coque du bois," by the Germans "auerhahn" (auerhuhn for the hen bird), and by the Norwegians "tiur." It is placed in the genus Tetrao (which gives its name to the "family"), and receives the specific name "urogallus." This fine bird was formerly native in England, as well as in Scotland and Ireland, and is found in the pine forests of Europe from Spain to Lapland and Greece. It has been re-established in Scotland since 1838. An allied species is found in Siberia. The black grouse (often called black cock and grey hen) is a second species of the genus Tetrao, namely, T. tectrix. It is often called "Lyrurus tetrix." The French name for it is "coq de bruyère"; the German is "birkhahn." It is a smaller bird than the capercailzie, but frequently produces hybrids with that species. The beautifully curled tail-feathers are favourite adornments for the hat of mountaineers and hunters in the Tyrol and Switzerland.

Though the word "grouse" may have been first applied (as some think) to the black cock, it is now the proper appellation of the red grouse. This bird is placed by zoologists in the genus Lagopus—the members of which are easily distinguishable from other Tetraonidæ by the fact that their feet and toes are well covered with feathers. "L. scoticus" is the scientific name of the red grouse. Being a purely British bird, it has no foreign designations. "L. saliceti" is the name of the allied willow-grouse, which has an endless variety of names, owing to its great range of distribution. The willow-grouse is often called ptarmigan, and is sold as such to the number of thousands by poulterers in our markets, but it is not the true ptarmigan. Owing to the fact that its plumage is quite white in winter, there is much excuse for the confusion. The name "ptarmigan" is the Gaelic word "tarmachan," and no one has explained how the initial "p" came to be added to it. The bird called in Scotland tarmachan or ptarmigan is a third species of Lagopus. It is much rarer in Scotland than the red grouse, and lives in high, bare ground. It is numerous at an elevation far above the growth of trees in Norway, and occurs also in the Pyrenees and the Alps. It turns white in winter (as do all the species of Lagopus except the red grouse), and differs in many features of structure from the red grouse and the willow-grouse. It is called "L. mutus." A fourth species of Lagopus is L. rupestris, of North America, Greenland, Iceland, and Siberia. Spitzbergen has a fifth species, L. hemileucurus, a large form. The sixth and smallest species of Lagopus is the L. leucurus of the Rocky Mountains. There are yet further some excellent grouse-like birds, which are separated to form other genera distinct from Lagopus. Though they do not inhabit the British Islands, some of them are brought occasionally to the London market. The hazel-hen of continental Europe is one of these, and is considered to be the most delicate game-bird that comes to table. It is placed in the genus Bonasa, and receives the specific name "sylvestris." The French call it "gelinotte" (under which name various kinds of cold-storage grouse are often served in London clubs and restaurants), the Germans "hasel-huhn," and the Scandinavians "hjerpe." It is a purely forest bird. It is represented in North America by four other species, of which the best known is Bonasa umbellus, called by the Americans the ruffed grouse or birch-partridge.

Another genus of Tetraonidæ, or grouse-birds, is called "Canachites," and contains the species known as the Canadian spruce-partridge, Franklin's spruce-partridge, and the Siberian spruce-partridge. Nearly allied to these is a genus Dendragapus, with three North American species. Then we have the sage-cock of the plains of California (Centrocerus urophasianus), three species of sharp-tailed grouse (genus Pediocætes), and "the prairie hen," of which three species are placed in the genus Tympanuchus. The United States have, undoubtedly, a great variety of grouse-like birds. Nevertheless, a year ago I met in Paris an American from the neighbourhood of Boston who told me that he should have to desert his native land and come to live in Europe, because he could not obtain a regular supply of game-birds for his table in the eastern States. He was eating a Scotch grouse at the time with evident satisfaction.

The supply of grouse in this country has been threatened by disease caused by the attempt to make the moors carry more birds than they would do under natural conditions. The number annually shot on British moors is enormous. Predaceous animals have been destroyed in order to increase the number of birds, but this proceeding has resulted in allowing the weakly to survive. The undisturbed stretches of moorland have also of late years been greatly broken into both by roads and building, and by the too abundant visitation of strangers of all kinds. Only a few years ago one moor-owner was able to boast that he had on several occasions killed over 500 head of grouse in a single day on his moor, and that in one season he and his guests had killed 18,231 head of grouse on that same moor! Personally I rejoice when grouse are abundant, but it seems to me possible that the moor above mentioned had been made to carry, so to speak, too heavy a crop. However, there is reason to hope that the balance of Nature is restored after a few years of disease, which kills off the too-abundant bird population.

CHAPTER VI
THE SAND AND PEBBLES OF THE SEASHORE

THE "beach" on our English coast is an accumulation of pebbles or of sand, or of both, often accompanied by dead shells and other fragments thrown up by the sea. Very generally it slopes rapidly from above high-water mark to about half-tide limit, and then merges into a more horizontal expanse of fine, compact sand. This last is not "a beach" thrown up by waves, but a sediment or deposit. It forms a flat, often ripple-marked plain (much has been written as to how those ripple-marks are produced), which is exposed at low water, the sea retreating for a quarter or even half a mile or more over it, on some level shores. Sometimes, though rarely, the sea rises and falls against a hard, rocky cliff without forming any beach or exposing any "shore" even at low tide. This occurs on parts of the Cornish coast, where the Atlantic beats against adamantine cliffs, which even at low tide rise sheer from the water. Again, it sometimes happens that the shore is simply formed of a terrace of sloping hard rock, without any "beach." But on the coast of England generally there is a good beach of sand or pebbles, or both, overlying the native rock or clay, and sometimes it is growing every year, so as to extend the land surface seawards and add new acres to the possessions of the landlord.

On other parts of the coast the beach "travels," being driven along the underlying solid shore by the prevailing direction of the tidal currents and by the waves. The sea-waves break close to the soft cliffs of clay, sand, and sandstone. These are continually crumbling away owing to the action of land water, which soaks from the surface down to the layers of clay and forms subterranean springs and streams. They undermine the face of the cliff and cause the upper parts to topple. When there is a big, broad, growing beach in front of such a cliff, the breaking down or "toppling" of its face only leads to the formation of a slope (at the "angle of rest"), and things remain but little changed for ages. But if the beach is not being piled up and added to and growing out seawards year by year, and is, on the contrary, a travelling beach, then the sea comes close up to the cliff, and when masses of it topple on to the beach the sea washes them away, and no "slope of repose" is formed. The cliff keeps on toppling as it is undermined by springs of land water. Its natural buttress against further breakage—namely, its own fallen material—instead of resting against it as a great sloping, protective bank, is washed away by the sea as fast as it falls, and is carried down the coast by the tidal currents. This is the story of "coast erosion" about which there has recently been a Government inquiry. Where the combined action of prevailing winds and sea currents is throwing up and adding to the beach there is no coast erosion. The causes of the sea currents on our coasts are not easy to determine, as they are connected with the general contour of the land and the currents in large tracts of sea, such as the Channel and the North Sea. Coast erosion is a serious thing. Large parts of the coast of Suffolk and Norfolk are being thus washed away. It can be prevented by "holding" the beach with piles and boarding, but this costs too much to make it worth doing unless the land so preserved has a special value for the erection of houses.

At Felixstowe, where I am writing, the sea has swept away most of the flat—the "dunes," or "deans"—covered with grass, which it had itself built up by a contrary accumulating action before the time of the Romans. On this flat the ancient Roman town was built. Why the sea has reversed its action is very difficult to say. But within my knowledge of this place high-water mark has advanced as much as 300 yards nearer than it was to the old roadway and to old houses. The great town of Dunwich, which in the Middle Ages had eleven churches, strong fortifications, and a flourishing trade, stood on the flat grass-land in front of the cliff on the Suffolk coast. Its site is now under the sea, not far from here. The breaking away of the cliff (on to which part of the town extended) is still going on there. A few years ago I saw a great bricked well lying like a fallen chimney on the shore. It had been exposed by the crumbling of the cliff, and at last fell out of it. Once that well supplied fresh water to the monastery, part of the walls of which are still standing, and were formerly three-quarters of a mile distant from the seashore. The prehistoric cliffs to which the sea came before it formed the flats or links which it is now again eating away, are often traceable a mile or two inland. On the other hand, on parts of the Lincolnshire coast the sea has piled up sand and shingle and added valuable land to the extent of hundreds of acres to the property of those whose estates were bounded by the shore line, and is still doing so. Perhaps the action of the north wind in blowing back and piling up sand out of the reach of the tide is influential in producing this increase of shore-lands, which face northwards. Blown sand forms hills 30 feet and more in height on such flat lands as those of the Sandwich and Deal "links," which have been thrown up by the sea since St. Augustine landed at Richborough, then a seaport, now a couple of miles from the sea. On the French coast near Boulogne the sand has been blown inland so as to form stratified deposits on the low hill country as far as 3 or 4 miles from the sea, and the neighbouring port of Ambleteuse, which five hundred years ago had the chief trade with England—is now nothing but a vast stratified "dune" of blown sand. The great Napoleon made some attempt to reopen the harbour, but gave it up as a bad job; the blowing of sand inwards from the enormous tract of flat, sandy shore was too much for his engineers.

The "erosion" and the contrary process of the "extension" of the coast by the action of the waves and currents of the sea must be kept apart and distinguished from a process leading to similar but not identical results, namely, the actual "crumpling" or "buckling" of the earth's crust, leading to the rising of the land surface in some parts of the globe relatively to the sea-level, and on the other hand to the sinking of the land beneath the sea in other regions. This change of the actual level of the land has continually gone on in the past, and is continually going on to-day. What are called "raised beaches" are seen on many parts of the coast. These are lines of ancient beach, consisting of sea-worn pebbles, fragments of shell, etc., forming terraces along the face of the rocks which rise from the present seashore—terraces which are now 15, 30, or more feet above the sea-level, although they must at no very distant period have been at the level of the sea. The land has risen and carried them up out of reach of the waves. Such a raised beach is seen along the rocks bordering Plymouth Sound, at a height of some 15 feet (so far as I can, at this moment, remember) above high-water mark. Owing to the fact that the rock is limestone, and is dissolved and redeposited by rain water, as a rock of sugar might be, the pebbles and shells of the old beach are all stuck together or "petrified" by redeposited limestone (carbonate of lime). Lumps of it can be carried away as specimens.

Geological deposits of much older date than these comparatively recent raised beaches tell us of the rising of great masses of land. Thus, for instance, marine shells in a deposit not quite so old as our chalk cliffs and downs, are present at a height of 10,000 feet, forming part of the Alps. At one time that very spot was the bottom of the ocean, whilst other tracts of the earth's surface, now sunk hundreds of fathoms below the sea-level, stood out as continents, with hills and valleys well raised above the waters. Direct evidence of the recent sinking of the coast as distinct from its erosion is not familiar to us in England. The evidence of it is naturally obliterated, as the sinking goes on, whereas on a rising coast the evidence is as naturally preserved. But on the shores of the Mediterranean near Naples the evidence of sinking is well preserved, and has been carefully studied and recorded. The ancient Roman road is still sunk beneath the water, though the celebrated temple of Puteoli, which was formerly submerged by the sinking of the land, has reappeared by a subsequent elevation of the same area. This has not brought the site to so high a level as it had when the temple was built, as appears from the fact that the Roman paved roadway close by is still some 15 feet below the surface of the sea.

A beach is built up of water-worn pebbles, consisting usually of bits of the rock of the immediate vicinity, which have become rounded and shaped by continually rolling and knocking against one another as the waves of the sea throw them up or drag them down the sloping heap of like pebbles which is accumulated near high-water line. At Dover and such places, under chalk cliffs, the beach consists of chalk pebbles oval in shape, often of 8 or 9 inches in length, with a large number of well-rounded flint pebbles as big as your fist interspersed, or outnumbering the chalk pebbles. At Tenby, in South Wales, the beach consists of assorted sizes of limestone pebbles, well-worn bits of the limestone cliffs of the neighbourhood. Large numbers of them are literally "worm-eaten," being bored into, hard and dense as they are, by a little marine worm (known as Polydora), which may be sometimes found alive and at work in these limestone pebbles lying between tide limits, or more easily at other places in similarly placed chalk blocks or pebbles. On a coast bounded by granite cliffs you get a beach of granite pebbles; where there are cliffs of slate or of sandstone, pebbles of slate or of sandstone.

But there are some beaches which, as remarked above, are continually travelling along the coast. That on the English shores of the North Sea, for instance, is always moving southwards, except where it is held by piles and breakwaters, locally called "shies." Moreover, the land of the East Coast, especially the Suffolk and Norfolk coast, in the course of its erosion, has given back to the sea old deposits of the glacial and post-glacial period, consisting of gravels and "drift," made up of flint pebbles and fragments of rocks from the more northern regions over which the great European ice-cap of the glacial epoch extended, and from which it ground and tore the surface rock and carried large and small masses—boulders and incredible millions of tons of broken up fragments—and spread them over East Anglia (where they form the so-called "glacial drift"), and over regions still submerged in the North Sea. Consequently the beach on the Suffolk seashore has a specially variegated assortment of pebbles from all sorts of more northerly situated rocks—though small flint pebbles, derived directly from glacial drift and by the drift from the chalk land-surface (the chalk itself not now reaching the shore-line of East Anglia), are greatly predominant. It is in the chalk that flint takes its origin, being found there as large irregular nodules and sheets.

CHAPTER VII
THE CONSTITUENTS OF A SEABEACH

I ONCE went down to Aldeburgh, on the Suffolk coast, with a party of friends, which included an American writer, himself as delightful and charming as his stories. Why should I not give his name? It was Cable, the author of "Old Creole Days." We walked through the little town to the sea-front, and came upon the immense beach spreading out for miles towards Orford Ness. "Well, I never!" said he to me; "I suppose the hotel people have put those stones there to make a promenade for the visitors. It's a big thing." It took me some time to persuade him that they were brought there by the sea and spread out by it alone. It was his first visit to Europe, but he had seen the seashore on the other side, and there was nothing like this over there, he declared. A similar readiness to ascribe Nature's handiwork to the enterprise of hotel-keepers led a visitor to the Bel Alp, in the Rhone Valley, when he looked down from that high-placed hostelry on to the great Aletsch glacier, with its central "moraine" of huge rock masses and debris, to exclaim, "I see the proprietor has spread a cinder-path along the glacier to prevent us from slipping. It's a convenience, no doubt, but gives a nasty dirty look to the snow." Mr. Cable, when he once realized that the great Aldeburgh beach was a natural production, did what a true poet and naturalist must do—he fell in love with it, and spent hours in filling his pockets with strange-looking pebbles of all kinds until he was brought into the house to dinner by main force, when he spread his collection on the table, and demanded an explanation of "what, whence, and why" in regard to each pebble. Our companions—a great lawyer, a military hero, a politician, and two "learned men"—regarded him as eccentric, not to say childish. But I entirely sympathized with him, and when next day we sailed down to Orford and stood in front of the old Norman fortress, he further established himself in my regard by deeply sighing and exclaiming, "So that is a real English castle!" whilst several large tears quietly streamed down his undisturbed countenance.

To give an idea of what various rocks from far-distant localities may be brought together on an East Coast beach, take that of Felixstowe as an example. What is true of the East Coast is to some extent also true of the South Coast, and, indeed, wherever the sea makes the pebbles of a modern beach from the materials furnished by the breaking up of old deposits, which were in their day brought by ice-flows or torrential currents from remote regions. The most abundant kind of pebbles on the Felixstowe beach are small, rounded, somewhat flat pieces of flint, derived not directly from the chalk which is the "stratum" or "bed" in which flint is originally formed, but from the Red Crag capping the clay cliffs (London clay or early Eocene), and also from surface washings and "gravels" (of later age than the crag) farther north, whence they have travelled southward with many other constituents of the beach. All these flints are stained ruddy brown or yellow by iron—a process they underwent when lying in the gravels or in the crag in which they were deposited as pebbles, broken, washed, and rolled ages ago from the chalk. The iron is in a high state of oxidation, and stains not only flint pebbles but the sands of the Red Crag and later gravels a bright orange-red, or sometimes a less ruddy yellow. The iron comes originally from very ancient igneous rocks in which it is black and usually combined with silica. The chalk flints are always, owing, it seems, to minute quantities of carbon, quite black in the mass, but thin, translucent splinters have a yellowish-brown tint. The flints are free from iron stain when taken direct from the chalk. The commonest pebble next to flint is milky quartz, or opaque white quartz. This is derived from some far northern source, where there are igneous rocks traversed by veins of this substance (perhaps Norway). Quartz, like flint, is pure silica, the oxide of the element silicon. It appears in another form as rock-crystal, and also as chalcedony and agate. Opal also is pure silica, but differs from quartz and its varieties in being non-crystalline or amorphous, and in being less hard and of less specific gravity than quartz. Opal is soluble in alkaline water containing free carbonic acid, such as are many natural waters and the sea! But quartz is not so. The siliceous "spicules" and skeletons of many microscopic animals and plants are "opal." The gem known as "opal" is a variety owing its beauty to minute fissures in its substance which break up light into the prismatic colours.

A great deal rarer than the milky quartz, but well known on the East Coast on account of their beauty, and often sought for to be cut and polished, are the small rolled bits or pebbles of chalcedony or agate, which have been bedded before their appearance on the beach in some of the pre-glacial or post-glacial gravels, together with the flints, and in consequence are often stained of a fine red. Such clear red-stained chalcedony is called "carnelian"; if the banded agate structure shows, it is called agate rather than carnelian. It is wonderful how many beautiful pieces of both carnelian and agate are picked up on the Felixstowe beach, rarely, however, bigger than a hazel nut. The original source of these carnelians and agates is the East of Scotland. At Montrose you may see the igneous rock containing pale, lavender-coloured agate nodules as big as a potato, the breaking and rolling of which by the sea into small bits has furnished our Suffolk carnelians. Quartzite—more or less translucent, sandy-looking pebbles, colourless or yellow: jasper, black or green with red veining: a fine wine-red or purple stone often veined with quartz—are all more or less common, and come from northern igneous rocks—possibly some from Scandinavia and some from the breaking up of an ancient "breccia" of the Triassic age, which still exists northwards of East Anglia.

Other pebbles very common on this shore are those formed in a curious way by the sea-water from the clay cliffs and sea bottom which are here present, and are of that special geologic age and character known as the London clay. The sea at this moment is continually converting the clay of our Suffolk shore into "cement-stone" by a definite chemical process. The clay and many other things submerged in the sea, as Shakespeare knew, "undergo a sea-change." The cement-stone used to be dredged up from the sea bottom and ground to make cement at Harwich. Great rock-like slabs of it pave the shore at low water, and pebbles of it are abundant. The curious thing is that ages ago—geological ages, I mean—when the sea was throwing up here the old shell-banks and sand-banks known nowadays as "the Red and Coralline Crags," the London clay cliffs and clay sea bottom were in existence just as they are now. But in that period there existed here enormous quantities of bones of whales of kinds now extinct, which had lived a little earlier in the sea of this area, and were deposited in vast quantity as a sort of first layer of beach or shallow water sea-drift. Bones consist largely of phosphate of lime, and are used as manure. In that old crag sea the phosphate of lime was dissolved from the deposit of bones, and as we find occurring in the case of other clays and other bones elsewhere—was chemically taken up by the clay—the same kind of clay which to-day is being converted into "cement-stone." It was thus, at that remote period, converted into "clay phosphorite," owing to the presence of the immense deposit of whales' bones, and it has been known for sixty years as Suffolk "coprolite," owing to a mistaken notion that it was the petrified dung of extinct animals. It has been dug up by the ton from below the crag all over this part of Suffolk, where it forms, together with bones, teeth, flints, and box-stones, a bed of small nodules, a foot or so thick separating the London clay from the shelly "crag." This bed is called the Suffolk bone-bed or nodule-bed. The phosphorite, or "coprolite," occurs in the form of bits of clay, hardened by phosphate of lime, and of the colour of chocolate, and hundreds of tons of it have been used by manufacturers of the manure known as "superphosphate." Henslow, of Cambridge, Darwin's friend and teacher, was the first to point out its value. Bits of it, as well as box-stones, and fragments of bone, teeth of whales, of sharks, of mastodon, rhinoceros, tapir, and other extinct animals—all fallen from the bone-bed in the cliff—are found mixed with the pebbles of the Suffolk beach by those who lie on that beach in the sunshine, and, for want of something better to do, turn over handful after handful of its varied material. And, besides all the stones I have already mentioned, they find amber, washed here by some mysterious currents from the Baltic, wonderful fossil shells out of the crag, the cameo shell, and the great volute,—shells which are as friable as the best pastry when dug out of the Red Crag, but here on the shore become hardened by definite chemical action of the sea-water, so as to be as firm as steel. Here, too, the "chiffonier" of the seashore finds recent shells, recent bones (slowly dissolving and wearing away), well-rounded bits of glass, jet drifted down from Whitby, Roman coins, bits of Samian ware (!), mediaeval keys, bits of coal, burnt flints (from steamers' furnaces), and box-stones.

A very important and interesting thing about "beaches" is the way in which the pebbles of which they consist are assorted in sizes. Suppose that one prepares a trough some two or three yards long and twelve inches deep, and lets it fill with water from a constantly running tap, tilting it slightly so that the water will overflow and run away at the end farthest from the tap. Then if one drops into the trough near the tap handful after handful of coarse sand and small stones of varied sizes, they will be carried along by the stream, and the more rapid and voluminous the stream the farther they will be carried. But they will eventually sink to the bottom of the trough, the bigger pieces first, then the medium-sized, then the small, and the smaller in order, as the current carries them along, so that one gets a separation and sorting of the solid particles according to size, a very fine sediment being deposited last of all at the far end of the trough. The waves of the sea are continually stirring up and assorting the constituents of the beach in this way. Usually the largest pebbles are thrown up farthest by the advancing waves, and dropped soonest by the backward suck of the retreating water, so that one generally finds a predominance of big pebbles at the top of the beach. But on the flat shore of firm ripple-marked sand lying lower down than the sloping "beach" and only exposed at quite "low tide," one often finds very big pebbles of eight or nine pounds weight scattered here and there and little rubbed or rounded. They have gradually moved down the sloping beach and are too heavy to be thrown back again by the waves of the shallow sea which flows over the flat shores characteristic of much of our south-eastern and southern coast. On some parts of the coast huge banks, consisting exclusively of enormous pebbles as big as a quartern loaf, are piled up by the waves, forming a great ridge often miles in length, as at the celebrated Chesil pebble bank near Weymouth, and at Westward Ho! in North Devon. The presence of these specially large pebbles is due to the special character of the rocks which are broken up by the sea to form them, and to the specially powerful wave-compelling winds and tidal currents at the parts of the coast where they are produced.

One generally finds a selected accumulation of moderate-sized pebbles lower down the beach as the tide recedes, and then still lower down patches of sand alternating with patches or tracts of quite small pebbles not much bigger than a dried pea. They are always assorted in sizes, but the extent of each tract of a given size of pebble varies greatly on different beaches along the coast, and even from day to day on the same shore. The greater or less violence of the waves, and of the currents caused by wind and tide, is the cause of this variation and local difference. The pebbles of the "beach" are, of course, always being worn away, rounded and rubbed down by their daily movement upon one another, caused by the waves as the tide mounts and again descends over the shore. Even the biggest stones, excepting those which lie in deeper water beyond the beach, are eventually rubbed down, and become quite small; but a point is reached when, the weight of the pebbles being very small, they have but little effect in rubbing down each other, and consequently where the pebbles consist of very hard material—like flints—the smallest ones are not so much rounded, but are angular and irregular in shape.

Whilst a perfect gradation in size can be found from the largest flint pebbles some 6 inches or 7 inches long to the smallest, usually not bigger than a split pea (though sometimes a patch of even smaller constituents may be found), there is a real break or gap between "pebbles" and "sand." I am referring now to what is commonly known as "sand" on the southern part of the East Coast, much of the South Coast, and the shores of Holland, Belgium, and France. There are "sands" of softer material (limestone and coral sand), but the sands in question are almost entirely siliceous, made up of tiny fragments of flint, of quartz, agate, and hard, igneous rock. They are often called "sharp" sand. The particles forming this sand are sorted out by the action of moving water, and form large tracts between tide-marks looking like brown sugar, for which baby visitors have been known to mistake them, and accordingly to swallow small handfuls. The strong wind from the sea blows the sand thus exposed, as it dries, inland out of reach of the tide, to form sand-dunes, and it is also deposited, together with still finer particles (those called "mud"), on the shallower parts of the sea bottom. The curious thing about the particles of "sharp" sand is that they are angular, and for the most part without rounded edges. If you examine them under a microscope you will see that they do not look like pebbles—in fact, they are not pebbles, for they are so small and have so little weight, or, rather, mass, that they do not rub each other to any effect when moved about in water. They look like, and, in fact, are, for the most part broken bits of silica, unworn and sharp-edged splinters and chips, glass-like in their transparency and most of them colourless, a few only iron-stained and yellow. Amongst these are a few rounded, almost spherical pieces, which are no doubt of the nature of minute water-worn pebbles. Although these few minute pebbles exist among the sharp, chiplike particles of "sand," it is clear that we must broadly distinguish "pebbles" of all sizes down to the smallest—from the much smaller "sand particles." There is no intermediate quality of material between "sand" and the finest "shingle."

CHAPTER VIII
QUICKSANDS AND FIRE-STONES

THERE are curious facts about sand which can be studied on the seashore. There are the "quicksands," mixtures of sand and water, which sometimes engulf pedestrians and horsemen at low tide, not only at the Mont St. Michel, on the Normandy coast, but at many spots on the English, Welsh, and Scotch coasts. Small and harmless quicksands are often formed where the sand is not firmly "bedded" by the receding sea, and the sea-water does not drain off, but forms a sort of sand-bog. Then one may also study the polishing and eroding effect of dry blown sand, which gives a "sand-glaze" to flints, and in "sand-deserts" often wears away great rocks. The natural polishing of flints and other hard bodies by fine sand carried over them for months and years in succession by a stream of water, is also a matter of great interest, about which archæologists want further information.

A very interesting fact about the ordinary sand of the seashore is that two pints of dry sand and half a pint of water when mixed do not make two pints and a half, but less than that quantity. If you fill a child's pail with dry sand from above the tide-mark, and then pour on to it some water, the mass of sand actually shrinks. The reason is that when the sand is dry there is air between its particles, but when the sand-particles are wetted they adhere closely to each other; the air is driven out, and the water does not exactly take an equivalent space, but occupies less room than the air did, owing to the close clinging together of the wet particles. If you add a little water to some dry sand under the microscope, you will see the sand-particles move and cling closely to one another. "Capillary attraction"—the ascent of liquid in very fine tubes or spaces—is a result of the same sort of adhesive action. If you walk on the firm, damp sand exposed at low tide on many parts of the seashore when it is just free from water on the surface, you will see that when you put your foot down the sand becomes suddenly pale for some seven inches or so all round your foot. The reason is that the water has left the pale-looking sand (dry sand looks paler than wet sand), and has gone into the sand under your foot, which is being squeezed by your weight. The water passing into that squeezed sand enables its particles to sit tighter or closer together, and so to yield to the pressure caused by your weight. You actually squeeze water "into" the sand, instead of squeezing water "out" of it, as is usually the case when you squeeze part of a wet substance—say a cloth or a sponge. When you lift your foot up, you find that your footmark is covered with water—the water you had drawn to that particular spot by squeezing it. It separates as soon as the pressure is removed.

Quartz and quartzite pebbles occur on the South as well as the East Coast. They are sometimes called "fire-stones," because they can be made to produce flashes of flame. If you take a couple of these pebbles, each about as big as the bowl of a dessert-spoon (a couple of flint pebbles will serve, but not so well), and holding one in each hand in a dark room, or at night, scrape one with the other very firmly, you will produce a flash of light of an orange or reddish colour. And at the same time you will notice a very peculiar smell, rather agreeable than otherwise, like that of burning vegetable matter. It would seem that the rubbing together of the stones produces a fine powder of some of the siliceous substance of the stone and at the same time a very high temperature, which sets the powder aflame. I had the idea at one time, based on the curious smell given out by the flashing pebbles, that perhaps it was a thin coating of vegetable or other organic matter derived from the sea-water which burns when the stones are thus rubbed together; but I found on chemically cleaning my pebbles, first with strong acid and then with alkali, that the flame and the smell were produced just as well by these chemically clean stones as by those taken from the beach. The flame produced by the rubbing of the two stones seemed then to be like the sparks obtained by strike-a-lights of flint and steel, or the prehistoric flint and pyrites. Now, however, a new fact demands consideration. The supposition that the powdered silica formed, when one rubs the two pebbles together, is actually "burnt," that is to say, combined with the oxygen of the air by the great heat of the friction, is rendered unlikely by the fact that if you perform the rubbing operation in a basin of water with the stones submerged, the flash is produced as easily as in the air. My attention was drawn to this fact by a letter from the well-known naturalist the Rev. Reginald Gatty. I at once tried the experiment and found the fact to be as my correspondent stated. Not only so, but the smell was produced as well as the flash.

With the desire to get further light on the subject, I consulted the great experimental physicist, my friend Sir James Dewar, in his laboratory at the Royal Institution. He told me that the late Professor Tyndal used to exhibit the production of flame by the friction of two pieces of quartz in his lectures on heat, but made use of a very large and rough crystal of quartz (rock-crystal) and rubbed its rough surface with another large crystal. Tyndal's note on the subject in his lecture programme was as follows (Juvenile Lectures on Heat, 1877-78): "When very hard substances are rubbed together light is produced as well as heat." Sir James Dewar kindly showed me the crystals used by Tyndal, the larger was 16 inches long and 4 or 5 inches broad. We repeated the experiment in the darkened lecture room, and obtained splendid flashes. The same smell is produced when rock-crystal is used as when flint or quartz pebbles are rubbed together. All three are the same chemical body, namely, silica (oxide of silicon). We also found that when the crystals were bathed with water or (this is a new fact) with absolute alcohol, the same flashing was produced by the friction of one against the other.

Later, with the kind assistance of Mr. Herbert Smith, of the mineral department of the Natural History Museum, I examined, with a spectroscope, the flash given by two quartzite pebbles when rubbed together. No distinctive lines or bands were seen; only a "continuous" spectrum, showing that the temperature produced was not high enough to volatilize the silicon. I also examined some pebbles of another very hard substance—nearly as hard as silica (rock-crystal, quartz, and flint). This was what is called "corundum," the massive form of "emery powder" (oxide of aluminium). By grinding two of these corundum pebbles with very great pressure one against the other (using much greater pressure than is needful in the case of quartz), I obtained flashes of light. It was not known previously that any pebbles except those of silica would give flashes of light when rubbed together. A smell resembling that given out by rubbed quartz, but fainter, was observed.

Those are the facts—new to me and to many others—about this curious subject. The flashing under water is a very remarkable thing. I cannot say that I am yet satisfied as to the nature of the flash. A simple explanation of the result obtained, when two dry pebbles are rubbed together in the air, is that crushed particles of the quartz or of the corundum are heated by the heavy friction to the glowing point. But this does not accord with the fact that submergence in a liquid does not interfere with the flashing. The rise of temperature would certainly be checked by the liquid. And the curious smell produced is in no way explained.

The breaking of crystals is in many instances known to produce a flash of light. Thus a lump of loaf sugar broken in the dark gives a faint flash of blue light, as anyone can see for himself immediately on reading this. White arsenic crystals also, when broken by shaking the liquid in which they have formed, give out flashes of light. Some rare specimens of diamond, when rubbed in the dark with a chamois leather, glow brightly. The well-known mineral called Derbyshire spar, "Blue John," or fluoride of calcium, when heated to a point much below that of a red-hot iron, "crackles" and glows briefly with a greenish light. The crystals of phosphate of lime, called apatite, and a number of other crystals have this property. But there is no record of any peculiar smell accompanying the flashes of light. It is still a matter open to investigation as to whether the flashing of pieces of quartz and rock-crystal when rubbed together with heavy pressure is of the nature of the flashing of the heated crystals of other minerals, or whether there is any chemical action set up by the friction—an action which is certainly suggested by the very peculiar smell produced. Since the flashing can be produced under water and other liquids, it should be easy to obtain some evidence as to the chemical nature of the flame—whether acid or alkaline, whether capable of acting on this or that reagent dissolved in the water, and whether setting free any gas of one kind or another.

Any one of my readers who chooses can produce the wonderful orange-coloured flame by rubbing two quartz or flint pebbles together in the dark, and can have the further gratification of producing with the utmost ease the mysterious and weird phenomenon of a flame under water, and may, perhaps, by further experiment, explain satisfactorily this unsolved marvel which has haunted some of us since childhood.

CHAPTER IX
AMBER

AMBER is not unfrequently picked up among the pebbles of the East Coast. I once picked up a piece on the beach at Felixstowe as big as a turkey's egg, thinking it was an ordinary flint-pebble and intending to throw it into the sea, when my attention was arrested by its extraordinary lightness, and I found that I had got hold of an unusually large lump of amber. There is a locality where amber occurs in considerable quantity. It is a long way off—namely, the promontory called Samland near Königsberg on the Prussian shore of the Baltic. There it occurs with fossil wood and leaves in strata of early Tertiary age, deposited a little later than our "London clay." It used to be merely picked up on the shore there until recent times, when "mining" for it was started. From this region (the Baltic coast of Prussia) amber was carried by the earliest traders in prehistoric times to various parts of Europe. Their journeyings can be traced by the discovery of amber beads in connexion with interments and dwelling-places along what are called "amber routes" radiating from the amber coast of Prussia. To reach the East Coast of England the bits of amber would have to be carried by submarine currents. Amber travels faster and farther than ordinary stones, on account of its lightness. What has been held to be amber is found, also embedded in ancient Tertiary strata, in small quantity in France, in Sicily, in Burma, and in green sand (below the chalk) in the United States. The Sicilian amber (called "Simetite") was not known to the ancients: it is remarkable for being "fluorescent," as is also some recently discovered in Southern Mexico. But it is possible that chemically these substances are not quite the same as true amber. Amber is a fossil resin or gum, similar to that exuded by many living trees, such as gum-copal. It has been used as an ornament from prehistoric times onwards, and was greatly valued by the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and by our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, not only for decorative purposes, but as a "charm," it being supposed to possess certain magical properties.

Amber (it is generally believed) comes slowly drifting along the sea bottom to the Suffolk shore from the Baltic. Lumps as big as one's fist are sometimes picked up here. The largest pieces on record found on the Baltic shore, or dug out of the mines there, are from 12 to 18 lb. in weight, and valued at £1000. A party sent by the Emperor Nero brought back 13,000 lb. of amber from the Baltic shores to Rome. The bottom currents of seas and oceans, such as those which possibly bring amber to our shores, are strangely disposed. The Seigneur of Sark some fifty years ago was shipwrecked in his yacht near the island of Guernsey; he lost, among other things, a well-fastened, strongly-made chest, containing silver plate. It was found a year later in deep water off the coast of Norway and restored to him! In the really deep sea, over 1000 fathoms down, there are well-marked broad currents which may be described as rivers of very cold water (only four degrees or so above freezing-point). They flow along the deep sea bottom and are sharply marked off from the warmer waters above and to the side. Their inhabitants are different from those of the warmer water. They are due to the melting of the polar ice, the cold water so formed sinking at once owing to its greater density below the warmer water of the surface currents. These deep currents originate in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions, and the determination of their force and direction, as well as of those of other ocean currents, both deep and superficial, such as the warm "Gulf Stream," which starts from the Gulf of Mexico, and the great equatorial currents, is a matter of constant study and observation, in which surveying ships and skilled observers have been employed.

Amber has not only been valued for its beauty of colour—yellow, flame-colour, and even deep red and sometimes blue—for its transparency, its lightness, and the ease with which it can be carved, but also on account of certain magical properties attributed to it. Pliny, the great Roman naturalist of the first century A.D., states that a necklace of amber beads protects the wearer against secret poisoning, sorcery, and the evil eye. It is first mentioned by Homer, and beads of it were worn by prehistoric man. Six hundred years B.C., a Greek observer (Thales) relates that amber when rubbed has the power of attracting light bodies. That observation is the starting-point of our knowledge of electricity, a name derived from the Greek word for amber, "electron." In Latin, amber is called "succinum." By heating in oil or a sand-bath, amber can be melted, and the softened pieces squeezed together to form larger masses. It can also be artificially stained, and cloudy specimens are rendered transparent by heating in an oil-bath.

Amber is the resinous exudation of trees like the "Copal gum" of East Africa and the "Kauri resin" or "Dammar" of New Zealand. Both of these products are very much like amber in appearance, and can be readily mistaken for it. The trees which produced the amber of the Baltic were conifers or pine trees, and flourished in early Tertiary times (many millions of years ago). Their leaves, as well as insects of many kinds, which have been studied and named by entomologists, are found preserved in it. There is a very fine collection of these insects in the Natural History Museum in London. It is probable that more than one kind of tree produced the amber-gum, and that its long "fossilization" has resulted in some changes in its density and its chemical composition. The East African copal is formed by a tree which belongs to the same family as our beans, peas, and laburnum. It is obtained when freshly exuded, but the best kind is dug by the negroes out of the ground, where copal trees formerly grew and have left their remains, so that copal, like amber, is to a large extent fossilized. The same is true of the New Zealand dammar or kauri gum, which is the product of a conifer called "Agathis australis," and is very hard and amber-like in appearance. Chemically amber, copal, and dammar are similar to one another but not identical. Amber, like the other two, has been used for making "varnish," and the early Flemish painters in oils, as well as the makers of Cremona violins, made use of amber varnish.

A medicament called "eau de luce" was formerly used, made by dissolving one of the products of the dry distillation of amber (called "oil of amber") in alcohol. Now, however, amber is used only for two purposes—besides decoration—namely, for the mouthpieces of pipes and cigar tubes and for burning (for amber, like other resins, burns with a black smoke and agreeable odour) as a kind of incense (especially at the tomb of Mahomet at Mecca). These uses are chiefly Oriental, and most European amber now goes to the East. In China they use a fine sort of amber, obtained from the north of Burma. The use of amber as a mouthpiece is connected with its supposed virtues in protecting the mouth against poison and infection. It is softer than the teeth, and therefore pleasant to grip with their aid; but as a cigar or cigarette tube it is disadvantageous, as it does not absorb the oil which is formed by the cooling of the tobacco smoke passing along it, but allows it to condense as an offensive juice.

Forty years ago an old lady used to sit in the doorway of her timber-built cottage in the village of Trimley (where there are the churches of two parishes in one churchyard), smoking a short clay pipe and carving bits of amber found on the Suffolk beach into the shape of hearts, crosses, and beads. She would carve and polish the amber you had found yourself whilst you joined her in a friendly pipe. You were sure in those days of the genuine character of the amber, jet, and agate sold as "found on the beach." Nowadays these things, as well as polished agates and "pebbles from the beach," are, I am sorry to say, manufactured in Germany, and sent to many British seaside resorts, like the false coral and celluloid tortoise-shell which, side by side with the genuine articles, are offered by picturesque Levantines to the visitors at hotels on the Riviera, and even in Naples itself. Nevertheless, genuine and really fine specimens of amber picked up on the beach and polished so as to show to full advantage their beautiful colour and "clouding" can still be purchased in the jeweller's shop at Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast near the great pebble beach of Orfordness.

There are difficulties about using the word "amber" with scientific precision. The fossil resins which pass under this name in commerce, and are obtained in various localities, including the Prussian mines on the Baltic, are undoubtedly the product of several different kinds of trees, and, from the strictly scientific chemical point of view, they are mixtures in varying proportions of different chemical substances. The merchant is content with a certain hardness (which he tests with a penknife), transparency, and colour, and also attaches great importance to the test of burning a few fragments in a spoon, when, if the material is to pass as "amber," it should give an agreeable perfume. Scientifically speaking, "amber" differs from other "resins," including copal, in having a higher melting point, greater hardness, slighter solubility in alcohol and in ether, and in containing "succinic acid" as an important constituent, which the other resins, even those most like it, do not. True amber thus defined is called "succinite," but several other resins accompany it even as found in its classical locality—the Baltic shore of Prussia—and, owing to their viscid condition before fossilization, may have become mixed with it. One of these is called "gedanite," and is used for ornamental purposes. It is more brittle than amber, and contains no succinic acid. It is usually clear and transparent, and of a pale wine-yellow colour.

It is not possible to be certain about the exact nature of what appears to be a "piece of amber" thrown up on the seashore, without chemical examination. A year or two ago a friend brought to me a dark brownish-yellow-coloured piece of what looked like amber, which (so my friend stated) had been picked up on the shore at Aldeburgh. It was as big as three fingers of one's hand, very transparent and fibrous-looking, owing to the presence of fine bubbles in its substance arranged in lines. I found an exactly similar piece from the same locality in the collection of the Natural History Museum. It was labelled "copal," and, I suppose, had been chemically ascertained to be that resin and not "amber," or, to use the correct name, "succinite." How either of these pieces got into the North Sea it is difficult to say. Though the "copal" of commerce is obtained from the West Coast of Africa, it may occur (though I have not heard that it does) associated with true amber in Prussia. A fossilized resin very similar to copal is found in the London clay at Highgate and elsewhere near London, and is called "copalite." It is possible, though not probable, that the bits of amber found on our East Coast beaches are derived from Tertiary beds, now broken up and submerged in the North Sea, and do not travel to us all the way from the Baltic.

CHAPTER X
SEA-WORMS AND SEA-ANEMONES

LET us now leave the beach-pebbles and go down on to the rocks at low tide in order to see some of the living curiosities of the seashore. There are some seaside resorts where, when the tide goes down, nothing is exposed but a vast acreage of smooth sand, and here the naturalist must content himself with such spoils as may be procured by the aid of a shrimping-net and a spade. Wading in the shallow water and using his net, he will catch, not only the true "brown shrimp," but other shrimp-like creatures, known as "crustacea"—a group which includes also the lobsters, hermit-crabs, true crabs, and sand-hoppers, as well as an immense variety of almost microscopic water-fleas.

He will also probably catch some of the stiff, queer little "pipe-fish," which are closely related to the little creatures known as "sea-horses." Pipe-fish are very sluggish in movement, almost immobile, whilst the "sea-horse" or hippocampus—only to be taken by the dredge amongst corallines in deep water on rocky bottoms (as, for instance, in the Channel Islands)—goes so far as to curl his tail, like a South American monkey, round a stem of weed and sit thus upright amidst the vegetation. Even when disturbed he merely swims very slowly and with much dignity in the same upright position, gently propelled by the undulating vibratory movement of his small dorsal fin. The male in both pipe-fish and sea-horses is provided with a sac-like structure on the ventral surface in which he carries the eggs laid by the female until they are hatched.

Fig. 4.—British Marine Worms or Chætopods.

a, Arenicola piscatorum. Lug-worm largely used for bait by sea-fishermen. It burrows in sea-sand and clay as the earth-worm does in soil. Half the natural size, linear.

b, Nephthys margaritacea, actively swimming. It also burrows in the sea-sand. Natural size.

c, Eunice sanguinea, a very handsome marine worm (often used for bait) which lives in clefts in the submarine rocks and also swims actively. The numerous filaments on the sides of the ringed body are the gills of a rich blood-colour. The figure is one-third of the natural size, linear.

The shrimper will probably catch also some very young fish fry—including young flat-fish about 2 inches long. If he explores the exposed surface of sand near the low-tide limit, he will find a variety of indications of burrowing animals hidden beneath. Little coiled masses like the "castings" of earth-worms are very abundant in places, and are produced by the fisherman's sand-worm, or "lug-worm" ([Fig. 4, a]). A vigorous digging to the depth of a foot or two will reveal the worm itself, which is worth bringing home in a jar of sea-water in order to see the beautiful tufts of branched gills on the sides of the body, which expand and contract with the flow of bright red blood showing through their delicate walls. Other sand-worms, from 2 to 6 inches long, will at the same time be turned up,—worms which have some hundred or more pairs of vibrating legs, or paddles, arranged down the sides of the body, and swim with a most graceful, serpentine curving of the mobile body ([Fig. 4, b]). These sea-worms are but little known to most people, although they are amongst the most beautifully coloured and graceful of marine animals. Hundreds of different kinds have been distinguished and described and pictured in their natural colours. Each leg is provided with a bundle of bristles of remarkable shapes, resembling, when seen under a microscope, the serrated spears of South Sea Islanders and mediaeval warriors. These worms usually have (like the common earth-worm) red blood and delicate networks of blood-vessels and gills ([Fig. 4, c]), whilst the head is often provided with eyes and feelers. They possess a brain and a nerve-cord like our spinal cord, and from the mouth many of them can suddenly protrude an unexpected muscular proboscis armed with sharp, horny jaws, the bite of which is not to be despised. These "bristle-worms," or "chætopods," as they are termed by zoologists, are well worth bringing home and observing in a shallow basin holding some clean sea-water.

At many spots on our coast (e.g. Sandown, in the Isle of Wight, and the Channel Islands) rapid digging in the sand at the lowest tides will result in the capture of sand-eels, a bigger and a smaller kind, from 1 foot to 6 inches in length. These are eel-shaped, silvery fish, which swim near the shore, but burrow into the soft sand as the tide recedes. They are excellent eating. We used at Sandown to make up a party of young people to dig the smaller "sand-eels," or "sand-launce." The agility and rapid disappearance of the burrowing fish into the sand when one thought one had safely dug them out, rendered the pursuit difficult and exciting. Then a wood fire on the beach, a frying-pan, fat, flour, and salt were brought into operation, and the sand-eels were cooked to perfection and eaten.

Fig. 5.—The shell of the
Heart-urchin (Spatangus
purpureus) with its
spines rubbed off.
One-fourth the actual
diameter.

Some of the marks or small heaps of sand on the flats exposed at low tide are characteristic of certain shell-fish. The "razor-fish" [(Fig. 19, b)]—a very much elongated clam, or mussel, with astonishing powers of rapid burrowing—leaves a hole on the surface like a keyhole, about an inch long. It can be dug up by an energetic spadesman, but a spoonful of common salt poured over the opening of its burrow will cause it to suddenly shoot out on to the surface, when it may be picked up, and the hunter spared any violent exertion. The curious heart-urchin ([Fig. 5]), as fragile as an egg-shell, and covered with long, closely-set spines like a brush, is often to be found burrowing in the sand, as well as the transparent, pink-coloured worm known as Synapta, in the skin of which are set thousands of minute calcareous anchors hinged to little sculptured plates. These burrowers swallow the sand and extract nutriment from stray organic particles mixed in it.

The mere sand-flat of the low tide is not a bad hunting ground; but the rock pools, often exposed when the tide is out, and the fissures in the rocks and the under surfaces of slabs of rock revealed by turning them over—are the greatest sources of varied delight to the sea-shore naturalist. It is well to take a man with you on to these rocks to carry your collecting bottles and cans, and to turn over for you the larger slabs of loose stone, weighing as much as a couple of hundredweight. The most striking and beautiful objects in these rock pools are the sea-anemones ([Fig. 6] and [Frontispiece]). They present themselves as disk-like flowers from 1 to 5 inches in diameter, with narrow-pointed petals of every variety of colour, set in a circle around a coloured centre. The petals are really hollow tentacles distended with sea-water, and when anything falls on to them or touches them they contract and draw together towards the centre. The centre has a transverse opening in it which is the mouth, and leads into a large, soft-walled stomach, separated by its own wall from a second spacious cavity lying between that wall and the body wall, and sending a prolongation into each tentacle. The stomach opens freely at its deep end into this second "surrounding" chamber, which is divided by radiating cross walls into smaller partitions, one corresponding to each tentacle. The nourishing results of digestion, and not the food itself, pass from the stomach into the subdivided or "septate" second chamber. There is thus only one cavity in the animal, separable into a central and a surrounding portion.

In this respect—in having only one body cavity—sea-anemones and the coral-polyps and the jelly-fishes and the tiny freshwater polyp or hydra, and the marine compound branching polyps like it—agree with one another and differ from the vast majority of animals, such as worms, sea-urchins, star-fishes, whelks, mussels, crustaceans, insects, spiders and vertebrates (which last include fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals). These all have a second chamber, or body cavity, quite shut off from the digestive cavity and from the direct access of water and food particles. This second distinct chamber is filled with an animal fluid, the lymph, and is called the "Cœlom" (a Greek word meaning a cavity). These higher animals, which possess a cœlom as well as a gut, or digestive cavity, are called "Cœlomata," or "Cœlomocœla," in consequence; whilst the sea-anemones, polyps, and jelly-fish form a lower grade of animals devoid of cœlom, but having the one cavity, or gut, continued into all parts of the body. Hence they are called "Cœlentera," or "Enterocœla," words which mean that the cavity of their bodies (Greek cœl) is made by an extension of the gut, or digestive cavity (Greek enteron). The higher grade of animals—the Cœlomocœla—very usually have a vascular system, or blood-vessels and blood, as well as a cœlom and lymph, and quite independent of it; also some kind of kidneys, or renal excretory tubes. Neither of these are possessed by the sea-anemones and their allies—the Enterocœla—but they have, like higher animals, a nervous system and also large ovaries and spermaries on the walls of their single body cavity, which produce their reproductive germs. These pass to the exterior, usually through the mouth, but sometimes by rupture of the body wall.

All "one-cavity" animals, the Enterocœla or Cœlentera, produce peculiar coiled-up threads in their skin in great quantity—many thousands—often upon special warts or knobs. These coiled-up threads lie each in a microscopic sac; they are very delicate and minute and carry a virulent poison, so that they are "stinging" threads. Excitement of the animal, or mere contact, causes the microscopic sac to burst, and the thread to be violently ejected. The sea-anemones, jelly-fish, and polyps feed on fresh living animals, small fish, shrimps, etc., and catch their prey by the use of these poisonous threads. Some jelly-fish have them big enough to act upon the human skin, and bathers are often badly stung by them. The commonest jelly-fish do not sting, but where they occur a few of the stinging sort are likely to occur also. Even some sea-anemones can sting one's hand with these stinging threads. One sea-anemone (known as "Cerianthus"), occasionally taken in British waters, makes for itself a leathery tube by the felting of its stinging threads, and lines its long burrow in the sand below tidal exposure in this way.

The sea-anemones are very hardy, and they are wonderfully varied and abundant on our coasts. Some sixty years ago a great naturalist, who loved the seashore and its rock-pools enthusiastically, Mr. Philip Henry Gosse, father of Mr. Edmund Gosse, the distinguished man of letters, described our British sea-anemones, and gave beautiful coloured pictures of them. One of these I have taken for the frontispiece of this volume, and some of the outline figures of marine animals in these chapters are borrowed from a marvelously complete and valuable little book by him—now long out of print—entitled "Marine Zoology." His books—of high scientific value—and his example, made sea-anemones "fashionable." London ladies kept marine aquariums in their drawing-rooms stocked with these beautiful flowers of the sea. They were exhibited in quantity at the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park, and it is by no means a creditable thing to our London zoologists that neither these nor other marine creatures are now to be seen there. At a later date public marine aquaria were started with success in many seaside towns,—Brighton, Scarborough, Southport, etc.—and a very fine one was organized in Westminster and another at the Crystal Palace. It is an interesting and important fact, bearing on the psychology of the British people, that most of these charming exhibitions of strange and beautiful creatures from the depths of the sea were very soon neglected and mismanaged by their proprietors; the tanks were emptied or filled with river water, and the halls in which they were placed were re-arranged for the exhibitions of athletes, acrobats, comic singers, and pretty dancers. These exhibitions are often full of human interest and beauty—but I regret the complete disappearance of the fishes and strange submarine animals. I have some hope that before long we may, at any rate in the gardens in the Regent's Park, see really fine marine and fresh-water aquaria established, more beautiful and varied in their contents than those of earlier days.

Fig. 6.—British Sea-Anemones.

a, Sagartia bellis, the daisy anemone, viewed from above when fully expanded.

b, Bunodes crassicornis, half expanded; side view.

c, Anthea cereus. The tentacles are pale apple-green in colour, tipped with mauve, and cannot be completely retracted.

d, Actinia mesembryanthemum. The disk of tentacles is completely retracted. This is the commonest sea-anemone on our South Coast, and is usually maroon colour, but often is spotted like a strawberry.

There are four kinds of sea-anemones which are abundant on our coast. They adhere by a disk-like base to the rocks and large stones, and have the power of swelling themselves out with sea-water (as have many soft-bodied creatures of this kind), with all their tentacles expanded. They have, in that condition, the shape of small "Martello" towers, with their adhesive disk below and the mouth-bearing platform above, fringed by tapering fingers; and they can, on the other hand, shrink to a fifth part of their expanded volume, drawing in and concealing their tentacles, which are in some kinds perforated at the tip. One common on the rocks at Shanklin and other parts of our South Coast, but not on the East Coast, has very abundant, long, pale green tentacles, which are tipped with a brilliant peach colour, and it is peculiar in not being able to retract or conceal this beautiful crown of snake-like locks, reminding one of the Gorgon Medusa. It is known as Anthea cereus ([Fig. 6, c]). Many of them are known by the name "Actinia," and the commonest of all ([Fig. 6, d)] is called "Actinia mesembryanthemum," because of its resemblance to a fleshy-leaved flower of that name which grows on garden rockeries—sometimes called the "ice-plant." This one is of a deep maroon colour, rarely more than an inch and a half across the disk. The adhesive disk is often edged with bright blue, and small spherical tentacles, of a bright blue colour, are set at intervals outside the fringe of longer red ones. This anemone lives wonderfully well in a small glass basin or in an aquarium holding a gallon of sea-water, which is kept duly aerated by squirting it daily. One lived in Edinburgh for more than fifty years, in the possession first of Sir John Dalyell, and then of Mr. Peach. She was known as "Granny," and produced many hundreds of young in the course of years. This species is viviparous, the young issuing from the parent's mouth as tiny fully-formed sea-anemones, which immediately fix themselves by their disks to the glass wall of their habitation. Anemones kept thus in small aquaria have to be carefully fed; bits of the sea mussel (of course, uncooked) are the best food for them. This and many other kinds are not absolutely stationary, but can very slowly crawl by means of muscular movements of the adhesive disk. There are kinds of sea-anemones known which spend their lives floating in the ocean; they are thin and flat. Others adhere to the shells of hermit crabs and even to the big claws of some crabs, and profit by the "crumbs" of food let fall by the nippers of their host. A very handsome and large sea-anemone is common on the East Coast, and is known as "crassicornis" (its generic name is Bunodes). When distended it measures as much as 4 inches across ([Fig. 6, b]). I have one at this moment before me, expanded in a bowl of sea-water. The tentacles are pale green or grey, banded with deep red, and the body is blotched with irregular patches of red, green, and orange. It attaches fine pebbles and bits of shell to the surface of the body.

CHAPTER XI
CORAL-MAKERS AND JELLY-FISH

A VERY beautiful kind of sea-anemone (common at Felixstowe) is the Daisy or Sagartia troglodytes, ([Fig. 6, a]), which has a very long body attached to a rock or stone far below the sandy floor of the pool, on the level of which it expands its thin, long, ray-like tentacles, coloured dark brown and white, and sometimes orange-yellow. As soon as you touch it it disappears into the sand, and is very difficult to dig out. The most beautifully coloured of all sea-anemones are the little Corynactids (half an inch across), which you may find dotted about like jewels, each composed of emerald, ruby, topaz, and creamy pink and lilac, on the under surface of slabs of rock at very low tide in the Channel Islands. One of the most puzzling facts in natural history is that these lovely little things live in the dark. No eye, even of fish or crab, has ever seen what you see when you turn over that stone. It is a simple demonstration of the truth of the poet Gray's statement, that many a gem of purest ray serene is concealed in the dark, unfathomed depths of ocean! A splendid anemone is the Weymouth Dianthus (see the [frontispiece] of this volume), so named because it is dredged up in Weymouth Bay. It is often six inches long, and has its very numerous, small tentacles arranged in lobes, or tufts, around the mouth. It is either of a uniform bright salmon-yellow colour or pure white. When kept in an aquarium it fixes itself by its disk on the glass wall, and often, as it slowly moves, allows pieces of the disk to become torn off and remain sticking to the glass. These detached pieces develop tentacles and a mouth, and grow to be small and ultimately full-sized Weymouth anemones.

If the disk were spread out and gave rise to little anemones without tearing—so that they remained in continuity with the parent—we should get a composite or compound animal, made up of many anemones, all connected at the base. This actually happens in a whole group of polyps resembling the sea-anemones. They grow into "stocks," "tree-like" or "encrusting" masses, consisting of hundreds and even thousands of individuals, each with its mouth and tentacles, but with their inner cavities and bases united. These are the "coral polyps," or "coral-insects" of old writers, of so many varied kinds. One further feature of great importance in a "coral" is the production of a hard deposit of calcite, or limestone, which is thrown down by the surface of the adhesive disk, and is also formed in deep, radiating "pockets," pushed in to the soft animal from the disk. The hard deposit of calcite is continuous throughout the "stock," or "tree," and when the soft sea-anemone-like animals die, the hard, white matter is left, and is called "coral." Very commonly this white coral shows star-like cups on its surface, which correspond to the lower ends or disks of the soft sea-anemone-like creatures which deposited the hard coral. In a less common group (represented commonly on our coast by the so-called "Dead men's fingers" found growing on the overhanging edges of low-tide rocks) the hard coral material does not form cups for the minute sea-anemones which secrete it, but takes the form of a supporting central or axial rod (sea-pens), or branched tree (sea-bushes), upon which the fleshy mass of polyps are tightly set. This is the case with the precious red and pink coral of the Mediterranean (which is now being "undersold" actually in the Mediterranean markets by a similar red coral from Japan, usually offered as the genuine article, which it is not!).

On the British coast you do not, as a rule, find coral-forming polyps. A small kind, consisting of two or three yellow and orange-red anemone-polyps united and producing a small group of hard calcite cups (Caryophyllia and Balanophyllia) is not uncommon at Plymouth at a few fathoms depth. But you have to go to the Norwegian fiords or else far out to sea where you have 300 fathoms of sea-water in order to get really luxuriant white corals—the beautiful Lophohelia ([Fig. 3, p. 9]), which I used to dredge in the Nord Fiord near Stavanger, as branching, shrub-like masses of a foot cube in area, each white marble cup standing out from the stem, an inch long and two-thirds of an inch across, and the stems giving support to a whole host of clinging growths (among them Rhabdopleura!) and sheltering wonderful deep-water worms and starfish.

But these, beautiful as they are, are nothing, so far as mass and dominating vigour of growth are concerned, in comparison with the reef-building corals of the warm seas of the tropics. There these lime-secreting conglomerated sea-anemones separate annually hundreds of tons of solid calcite per square mile of sea bottom from the sea-water, and build up reefs, islands, and huge cliffs of coral rock. They get the calcite—as do calcareous seaweeds and shell-making clams, oysters, whelks, and microscopic chalk-makers—from the sea—the water of the sea which always has it ready in solution for their use. And the sea gets it from the rivers and streams which wear away and dissolve the old limestone deposits now raised into mountain chains, as well as by itself dissolving again in due course what living creatures have so carefully separated from it. Sea water or fresh water with a little carbonic acid gas dissolved in it dissolves limestone and chalk—it becomes what we call "hard." Neutralize the dissolved carbonic acid (as is done in the well-known Clark's process for softening water), and down falls the dissolved calcite as a fine white sediment. These alternating processes of solution and "precipitation" are always going on in the waters of the earth and sea.

The name "jelly-fish" has reference to the colourless, transparent, soft, and jelly-like substance of the bodies of the animals to which it is applied. There are a number of marine animals, besides the common jelly-fish, belonging to different classes, which are glass-like in transparency and colourless—so as to be nearly or quite invisible in clear water, and some, too, occur in fresh waters (larvæ of gnats, notably of the plume-horned gnat Corethra). The transparency of these animals serves them in two different ways—some are enabled by it to escape from predatory enemies; others, on the contrary, are enabled to approach their own prey without being observed. The latter was obviously the case with the little fresh-water jelly-fish which appeared in great abundance some years ago in the lily tank in Regent's Park. The water was full of small water-fleas (minute crustacea), and the little jelly-fish, if removed from the tank and placed in a tall glass jar filled with the tank water, spent its whole time in swimming upwards to the surface by the alternate contraction and expansion of its disk-like body, and then dropping gently through the full length of the jar to the bottom, when it would again mount. On the downward journey—owing to its transparency—it would encounter unsuspecting, jerkily-moving water-fleas, unwarned by any shadow cast by the impending glass-like monster of half an inch in breadth slowly approaching from above; and as soon as they touched it they were paralysed (by microscopic poison-threads like those of the sea-anemones), and were grasped and swallowed by the mobile transparent proboscis (like that of an elephant, though certainly smaller, and having the mouth opening at its end, instead of a nostril), which hangs from the centre of the disk-like jelly-fish.[2]

[2] See "Science from an Easy Chair" (First Series, 1910), p. 60, for a further account and figure of the freshwater jelly-fish.

There are some glass-like transparent creatures, including some small fishes, which live at 500 fathoms depth and a good deal deeper on the sea bottom. We know that the sun's light does not penetrate below 200 fathoms, so that one is led to ask—What is the good of being transparent if you live at the bottom of the sea, at a greater depth than this? There is also a very beautiful prawn, which I dredged in Norway in 200 fathoms, which looks like a solid piece of clearest, colourless glass. And then there are some very beautiful little stalked creatures (called Clavellina), fixed to the under-side of rocks in the tidal zone, which are absolutely like drops of solid glass an inch long. One cannot easily imagine how colourless transparency can be of "life-saving value" to these varied inhabitants of the dark places of the sea bottom—any more than we can assign any life-saving value to the brilliant, gem-like colouring of some of the sea-anemones which live in the dark on the under-surface of rocks.

The most probable view of the matter is that neither the colourless transparency of the one set nor the brilliant colouring of the other has any value; it just happens to be so, and is not harmful. So, for instance, some crystals are colourless, some blue or green or yellow or red, without any advantage to them! On the other hand, we know that a large number of the animals which live in the dark unfathomed depths themselves produce light, that is to say, are phosphorescent, and it seems probable that at great depths, though there is no sunlight, the sea bottom is illuminated—we can only vaguely guess to what degree—by the strange living lanterns—fish, crustaceans, worms, and even microscopic creatures—which move about in quest of their food, carrying their own searchlight with them. Another suggestion is that the eyes of these inhabitants of the dark may be more sensitive than our own, and even be affected by rays invisible to us. This, however, is not probable, since whilst there are among them some with enormous eyes, we find that at the greatest depths (2 to 4 miles) even the fishes have no eyes at all, and at a depth of a mile there are many shrimp-like creatures in which the eyes have been completely transformed into peculiar "feelers," or otherwise aborted. So that we cannot suppose there is a possibility of developing the eye of the dwellers in deep-sea darkness to a degree of sensitiveness greatly beyond that of terrestrial animals. A limit of obscurity is reached at which it is of no use having an eye at all, and eyes cease to have life-saving value, and accordingly are not maintained by natural selection.

The transparency and colourlessness of marine animals which float near the surface is, on the other hand, obviously useful, and to this group our jelly-fishes belong. Not only do they escape observation by their transparency and general absence of colour, but some actually have a blue transparent colouring which blends with the blue colour of the sea. Such are the gas-holding, bladder-like sac as large as your fist called the "Portuguese man-of-war," and the little sailing Velella, both of which float, and even protrude above the surface, so as to catch the wind. Others are only semi-transparent, and others are marked with strong red, brown, or yellow streaks. Many of the smallest kinds of jelly-fish have eyes which are bright red in colour.

Fig. 7.—A common British
Jelly-fish.

Aurelia aurita, usually as
large as a breakfast-plate
and often larger.

The animals to which the name "jelly-fishes" is now more or less strictly applied are (as that fine zoologist Aristotle knew) in their structure closely similar to the sea-anemones, but even simpler. They are called the Medusæ by naturalists. Their disk-like bodies are largely formed by a jelly-like material, on the surface of which are stretched delicate transparent skin, nerves, and delicate muscles, whilst in the middle of the disk, on the surface which faces downwards as the creature floats, is the mouth, leading into a relatively small pouched cavity excavated in the jelly, from which a delicate system of canals is given off, and radiates in the jelly of the disk. There is, as in the sea-anemones, only one continuous cavity. The edge of the disk is beset with fine, sensitive tentacles, sometimes many feet in length, and the lips of the mouth are often drawn out into a sort of depending trunk, or into four large tapering lobes or lips of jelly, which, with the longer tentacles, are used for seizing prey. The commonest jelly-fish on our coast—so common as to be "the" jelly-fish par excellence—is often to be seen left on the sands by the receding tide or slowly swimming in quiet, clear water at the mouth of a river in enormous numbers. It is known as "Aurelia" ([Fig. 7]). It is as big as a cheese-plate, and the four pouches connected with the stomach are coloured pink or purple, and appear in the middle of the circular plate of jelly, like a small Maltese cross. The reproductive particles (germ-cells and sperm-cells) are produced in that coloured region, and escape by the mouth. There is a fringe of fine, very short tentacles round the edge of the disk, and they, as well as the great lobes of the mouth, are provided with innumerable coiled-up stinging hairs or "thread-cells," similar to those of the sea-anemones, which led Aristotle to call both groups "sea-nettles." Eight stalked eyes are set at equal intervals around the disk.

Usually accompanying the floating crowd of the common and abundant Aurelia are a few specimens of a very unpleasant kind of Medusa of a turbid appearance, often called "slime balls" by fishermen, from six inches to a foot in diameter. It is known to naturalists by the name "Cyanæa capillata." The tentacles on the edge of the disk of this kind of jelly-fish are very long and elastic, stretching to several feet, even yards, in length, and are provided with very powerful stinging hairs. The tentacles not infrequently become coiled around the body of a bather; the stinging hairs are shot out of the little sacs in which they are rolled up, and the result may be very painful to the person stung in this way and even dangerous. There are two other common large jelly-fish on the English coast, one called "Chrysaora" (Fig. 8), with a wheel-like pattern of brown pigment on the disk, and the other with the mouth lobes very large and bound together like a column.

Fig. 8.—A common British
Jelly-fish.

Chrysaora hysoscella, usually twice
as big as the figure.

The common Aurelia is remarkable for the fact that the young which hatch from its eggs attach themselves to stones and rocks on the sea bottom, and grow into little white tube-like polyps, about half an inch long, quite unlike their parent, with a crown of small tentacles surrounding the mouth, whilst they are fixed by the opposite end of the body. Then a very curious thing happens. The little polyp becomes nipped at intervals across its length, so that it looks like a pile of saucers—a dozen or more. And then the top saucer swims away as a minute jelly-fish, the next follows, and so on, so that, in the course of an hour or two, the whole pile separates into a number of freely swimming young, each of which gradually grows into a full-sized Aurelia. I have only once had the chance of witnessing this beautiful sight, and that was many years ago in a tank at the Zoological Gardens (they have no such tanks now), where the polyp-like young (called "Hydra tuba") spontaneously put in an appearance, and proceeded to break up into piles of little disks, which separated and swam off as one watched them. The French poet, Catulle Mendés, imagined a world where the flowers flew about freely and the butterflies were fixed to stalks. His fancy is to some degree realized by the swimming away of the young jelly-fish from their stalks. There are a host of very minute jelly-fish, measuring when full grown only half an inch or less in diameter. They originate as buds from small branching polyps, one kind of which is common on oyster-shells, and is called "the herring-bone coralline." The dried skins of these coralline polyps (which are horny) are often to be picked up with masses of seaweed on the seashore after a storm. The little jelly-fish are the ripe individuals of the polyps, and produce eggs and sperm which grow to be polyp-trees. These, again, after growing and branching as polyps, give rise to little jelly-fish here and there on the tree, which in most kinds (though not in all) break off and swim away freely.

CHAPTER XII
SHRIMPS, CRABS, AND BARNACLES

WE have no word in English to indicate the varied crab-and-shrimp-like creatures of salt and fresh waters in the same way as "insect" designates the six-legged, usually winged, terrestrial creatures of many kinds—beetles, bees, bugs, two-winged flies, dragonflies, day-flies, and butterflies. They are all "insects." Naturalists call the aquatic shrimp-and-crab creatures "crustaceans." Perhaps "crab" might be used in a large sense to include them all, together with the true crabs, as the Germans use their word, "krebs." The shore-crab is the most familiar of all crustaceans, in the living, moving condition. Boiled lobsters, prawns, and shrimps are more generally familiar members of the class, but the "undressed" living crab is better known to every one who has been on the seashore than the live lobster, prawn, and shrimp. Londoners have been heard to express interest in the curious blue variety of lobster caught on the coast, not being aware that the hot bath which he takes before he, too, is "dressed," causes his blue armour to change its colour to a brilliant scarlet. Occasionally a regular ordinary lobster is caught in which this change has occurred during life in the sea—and there are some enormous deep-sea prawns of a pound in weight which when living have a splendid crimson colour. A large series of "crustaceans," carefully prepared so as to show their natural colours in life, is exhibited in the Natural History Museum in Cromwell Road.

A curious kind of prawn (by name Althea rubra), of fair size, is found under "the low-tide rocks" in the Channel Islands, which not only is of a deep crimson colour, but snaps his fingers at you—or rather one of his fingers—or claws—when you try to catch him, making a loud crack audible at ten yards distance. The common big prawn, if you see him in a large vessel of sea-water with the light shining through him, appears very brilliantly marked with coloured bands and spots—reddish-brown, blue, and yellow—which are displayed on a transparent, almost colourless surface. Of course, boiling turns him pale red. A common smaller species of prawn when boiled is often sold as "pink shrimps," and lately a deep-sea prawn—a third species—has come from the Norwegian coast into the London market. There are many kinds which are not abundant enough to become "marketable." Prawns are at once distinguished from the true "brown shrimp" by having the front end of the body drawn out into a sharp-toothed spine, which is absent in the shrimp. Besides the prawns (Palæmon and Pandalus), the shrimp (Crangon), and the common lobster (Homarus), you may see in the London fish shops the large spiny lobster (Palinurus) called "langouste" by the French, and apparently preferred by them as a table delicacy to the common lobster, although it has no claws. It used to be called "craw-fish" or "sea craw-fish" in London; why, I am unable to say. The name was certainly bad, as it leads to confusion with the cray-fish, the fresh-water lobster of British and all European rivers (there are many other kinds of fresh-water lobsters in other parts of the world, as well as fresh-water prawns and crabs), whose English name is a curious corruption of the French one, "écrevisse" (cray-vees, cray-fish). Another lobster of our markets is the little one known as the "Dublin prawn," which is common enough on the Scotch and Norwegian coasts, as well as that of Ireland. Naturalists distinguish it as Nephrops Norvegicus. The great edible crab completes the list of British marketable crustaceans, but in Paris I have eaten, as well as at Barcelona, a very large Mediterranean prawn, three times as big as our biggest Isle of Wight prawns, but by no means so good. It is called "Barcelona prawn" and "Langostino" ("Penæus" by naturalists). In Madrid I have seen in the fish shops and eaten yet another crustacean—a very curious one—namely, a long-stalked rock-barnacle of the kind known to naturalists as Pollicipes.

That the barnacles—ship's barnacles ([Fig. 10]) and with them the little sea-acorns ([Fig. 11]), those terribly hard and sharp little white "pimples" which cover the rocks nearly everywhere just below high-tide mark, and have so cruelly lacerated the hands and shins of all of us who swim and have had to return to a rocky shore in a lively sea—should be included with crabs, lobsters, and shrimps as "crustaceans" must appear astonishing to every one who hears it for the first time. The extraordinarily ignorant, yet in their own estimation learned, fishermen of the Scottish coast will tell you with solemn assurance that the ubiquitous encrusting sea-acorns are the young of the limpet, whilst the creature living inside the shell of the long-stalked ship's barnacles has for ages been discoursed of by the learned as one of the marvels of the sea—nothing more or less than a young bird—the young, in fact, of a goose—the barnacle goose which, since it was thus proved to be a fish in origin, was allowed to be eaten by good Catholics on fast days! Two hundred years or more ago this story was discredited by serious naturalists, but the barnacles and sea-acorns were thought (even by the great Cuvier) to be of the nature of oysters, mussels, and clams (Molluscs), because of their possessing white hard shells in the form of "valves" and plates, which can open and shut like those of mussels. Their true history and nature were shown about eighty years ago by a great discoverer of new things concerning marine creatures, Dr. Vaughan Thompson, who was Army Medical Inspector at Cork, and studied these and other animals found in the waters of Queenstown Harbour.

The crab class, or Crustacea, have, like the insects, centipedes, spiders, and scorpions, a body built up of successive rings or segments. The earth-worms (as every one knows) and marine bristle-bearing worms also show this feature in the simplest and most obvious way. The vertebrates, with their series of vertebræ or backbone-pieces and the body muscles attached ring-wise to them, show the same condition. The marine worms have a soft skin and a pair of soft paddle-like legs upon each ring of the body, often to the number of a hundred such pairs. But the crab class and the classes called insects, centipedes, arachnids, and millipedes are remarkable for the hard, firm skin, or "cuticle," which is formed on the surface of their bodies and of their legs, which, as in the marine worms, are present—a pair to each body-ring or segment—often along the whole length of the body as in centipedes. This hard cuticle is impregnated with lime in the bigger members of the crab class, such as the lobster. It is not equally thick and hard all over the surface of the lobster, but is separated by narrow bands of thin, soft cuticle into a number of harder pieces, thus rendered capable of being bent or "flexed" on one another. Thus the body is jointed into a series of rings, and the legs are also divided each into several joints (as many as seven), which gives them flexibility and so usefulness of various kinds. The various joints are "worked" by powerful muscles, which are fixed internally to the cuticle and pass from one hard ring or segment, whether of body or of leg, to a neighbouring ring.

Every one knows the structure of a lobster's tail and of its legs, which can be readily examined in illustration of my statement, and the same structure can be seen in the leg of a beetle or a fly. Naturalists term all this series of creatures with hard-jointed cuticle, to which the muscles are attached, including the crab class, the insects, centipedes, spiders, and scorpions, "jointed-leg owners," or Arthropods. It is easy to appreciate this characteristic difference which separates the Arthropods from other animals. The sea-worms differ from them, in that they have soft cuticle, but stiffen and render their paddle-like legs firm by squeezing the liquid of the body into them in the same sort of way as the sea-anemones distend their tentacles with liquid, though in that case the liquid is sea-water taken in by the mouth. The Molluscs also distend their muscular lobe, or "foot" as it is called, by pressing the blood from the rest of the body into it, and so making it swell and become stiff, so that the muscles can work it; when not distended in that way it is flaccid. The Vertebrates (bony animals) and the star-fishes have again another and peculiar mechanism. Their muscles are attached to hard internal pieces, sometimes cartilaginous but often calcareous or bony, which are spoken of as "the internal skeleton." There are thus three distinct kinds of mechanism in animals for giving the necessary resisting surfaces, hinged or jointed to one another, and made to "play" one on the other by the alternate contraction and relaxation of the muscles attached to them.

The Arthropods differ among themselves in the number of body-rings, the enlargement or dwindling of certain rings, and the fusion of a larger or smaller number of the rings to form a composite head, or a jointless mid-body or hind-body. The successive legs are primarily and essentially like to one another, and each body-ring, with its pair of legs, is but a repetition of its fellows. At the same time, in the different classes included as "Arthropoda" a good deal of difference has been attained in the structure of the legs, and they have in each class a different form and character in successive regions of the body, distinctive of the class, and are sometimes, but not always, absent from many of the hinder rings. All these Arthropods agree in having a leg on each side immediately behind the mouth—belonging to a body-ring, which is fused with others to form the head—very specially shortened, of great strength and firmness, and shaped so as to be pulled by a powerful muscle attached to it, against its fellow of the opposite side, which is similarly pulled. These two stumpy legs form thus a powerful pair of nippers called "the mandibles." They are jaws, although they were in the ancestors of the Arthropods merely legs. These jaw-legs, or leg-jaws, are characteristic of all the crab class, as well as of the other Arthropods, but no bristle-worm or other animal has them. The jaws of marine worms are of a totally different nature. So are the jaws of snails, whelks, and cuttle-fish. Many of the crab class have not one only, but several, pairs of legs following the mouth converted into jaws. Thus, if you examine a big shore-crab, or, better, an edible crab, and a lobster, and a large prawn, you will find that they all have five pairs of legs converted into short foliaceous jaws (hence called "foot-jaws"), and overlying the first very strong pair, or mandibles.

Following these "foot-jaws" you find in a crab or a lobster the great nipping claws and the four large walking legs—the same in proportion and shape in crab, lobster, and prawn, much bigger than the foot-jaws. But the curious thing is that if you set them out and carefully compare them (for they are not simple jointed limbs, but each has two or even three diverging stems carried on a basal joint), you will find a strange and fascinating "likeness in unlikeness," or an agreement of the parts of which they are built, and yet a difference between all of them.

The rings of the body to which the jaw-legs and legs are attached are fused into one unjointed piece. The spine in front of the mouth and the support of the eyes and the feelers or "antennæ" are fused with that piece. It forms on the back a great shield—often called "the head"—which overhangs and is bent down over the sides of this region, so as to protect the gills, which you can see by cutting away the overhanging flap.

Following on the jaw-legs or foot-jaws and walking-legs, in the three crustaceans we are looking at, comes the jointed tail or hind-body, consisting of seven pieces. The first five rings of the tail have small Y-shaped legs, a pair to each ring. They are called "swimmerets," whilst the sixth has legs of the same shape, but very large and flat. In the middle between these large flat legs is the last ring, which has no legs, but is perforated by the opening of the intestine. You will see if you compare the crab and the lobster (or the prawn, which is very much like the lobster), that the crab has the so-called head (really head and mid-body combined) drawn out from side to side, so as to make it much wider than it is long. And, moreover, the jointed tail or hind-body seems at first sight to be absent in the crab. But if you turn the crab (a dead one) on his back, you will find that he has a complete tail, on the whole like that of the lobster, but pointed and bent forwards, and closely packed under the fused head and mid-body in a groove, from which you can raise it and turn it back.

Fig. 9.—The larval or young form of Crustacea known as "the Nauplius." This is the "Nauplius" of a kind of Prawn. The three pairs of branched limbs are well seen. Much magnified.

We have not yet done with the various forms assumed by the legs of our three crustaceans—for, actually in front of the mouth, there are two pairs of peculiarly altered legs. Originally in crab-ancestors, and at the present day in the very minute young stage of growth called "the Nauplius" (Fig. 9), the mouth was not behind these two front pairs. It has sunk back as it were, gradually moved so as to leave the legs in front of it. As we now see them in the crab, lobster, and prawn, the two pairs of legs in front of the mouth are jointed filamentous things—the feelers or antennæ—very long in prawns and lobsters, short in crabs. In the ancestors of crabs, lobsters, and prawns these feelers were undoubtedly swimming legs. In the "nauplius" stage (Fig. 9) of some prawns, and in many minute crustaceans often called "water-fleas," we find these feelers not acting as mere sensory organs of touch, but relatively strong and large, with powerful muscles, striking the water and making the little creatures bound or jump through it in jerks.

It has been discovered that in the growth from the egg of many crustaceans the young hatches out as a "nauplius" with only three pairs of legs. The front two pairs later gradually grow to be the feelers, the third pair become eventually the mandibles or first pair of jaw-legs. These legs all present themselves at first as active, powerful swimming "oars," beset with peculiar feathery hairs and not in the shape which they later acquire. The kite-shaped nauplius baby-phase, smaller than a small flea, with its three pairs of violently jerking legs, is a very important little beast. It is the existence of this young stage in the growth of barnacles and sea-acorns which has demonstrated that they are crustaceans, that is to say, belong to the crab class. The fixed shell-like barnacles and sea-acorns hatch from their eggs each as a perfect little "nauplius," like that drawn in Fig. 9. They swim about with jerking movements caused by the strokes of the two front legs and of the pair which will become the mandibles. Their limbs have the special form and are beset with the feather-like hairs, and the whole creature has the kite-like shape—characteristic of the nauplius young of other Crustacea. They are indeed indistinguishable from those young. Whilst it was the Army doctor, Vaughan Thompson, who discovered that barnacles are strangely altered "shrimps," it was Darwin who made one of the most interesting discoveries about them—a discovery of which he was always, and rightly, very proud—as I will explain in the next chapter.

CHAPTER XIII
BARNACLES AND OTHER CRUSTACEANS

THE ship's barnacle looks at first, when you see one of a group of them hanging from a piece of floating timber, like a little smooth, white bivalve shell, as big as your thumb-nail, at the end of a thickish, worm-like stalk, from one to ten inches long (Fig. 10). But you will soon see that there are not only two valves to the white shell, but three smaller ones as well as the two principal ones. This does not separate them altogether from the bivalve-shelled molluscs (mussels, clams, oysters), for the bivalve molluscs, which bore in stone and clay, have small extra shelly plates, besides the two chief ones, whilst the Teredo, or ship's worm—a true bivalve mollusc—has an enormously long, worm-like body which favours a comparison with it of the long-stalked barnacle. If a group of barnacles is floating attached to a piece of timber undisturbed in a tank of sea-water you will see the little shells gape, and from between them a bunch of curved, many-jointed feelers will issue and make a succession of grasping or clawing movements, as though trying to draw something into the shell, which, in fact, is what they are doing—namely, industriously raking the water on the chance of bringing some particle of food to the mouth which lies within the shell (Fig. 10).

Fig. 10.—The Common Ship's Barnacle, Lepas anatifera, natural size. The name "Anatifera," the "goose-bearer," was given to this species by Linnæus in reference to the legend of its giving birth to young geese.

st., stalk.

cir., cirri, or double hairy legs.

pe., opening of the seminal duct.

sc., scutum; t, tergum, the two plates or shells of the left side; c, the middle piece or shell called the "carina."

It is not every one who has the chance of seeing living ship's barnacles (Lepas), but anyone can pick up a stone or bit of rock on the seashore with live sea-acorns or acorn-barnacles (Balanus) adherent to it. Each is like a little truncated volcano (Fig. 11), the sides of which correspond to the pair of larger shells of the ship's barnacle, fused together and grown into a cone-like wall. The acorn-barnacle has no stalk, but adheres by its broad base to the stone. Just within the shelly crater are four small hinged plates or valves in pairs, identical with the smaller shelly bits of the ship's barnacle. When you first see your specimen, the valves are tightly closed. After a few minutes in a glass of sea-water they open right and left, and up jumps—jack-in-the-box-wise—a tuft of bowing and scraping feelers or tentacles, like those of the ship's barnacle. If disturbed, they shoot inwards, and the valves close on them like a spring trapdoor.

Fig. 11.—A large
British Sea-acorn,
Balanus porcatus,
allied to the Ship's
Barnacle. l, the
feather-like legs
issuing from the
shell. Drawn of
the natural size.

Now, these clawing, feathery little plumes are found, when we examine them with a hand-glass, to be six pairs in number, and each of them is Y-shaped, like the swimmerets of a lobster. The arms of the Y are built up of many little joints and covered with coarse hairs. As a result of the study of the young condition of the ship's barnacle and the sea-acorn, we find that these six pairs of Y-shaped plumes are six pairs of legs corresponding to those of the mid-body (some of the walking legs and some of the foot-jaws) of the lobster, and that the shelly hinged plates of the barnacles correspond to the overhanging sides of the "head" of the lobster and prawn, which one can imagine to be hinged along a line running down the back so as to open like the covers of a book. There are very common little, free-swimming "water-fleas" (minute crustaceans) of many hundreds of kinds which have hinged shells of this description when in the full-grown condition, and it is found that the young barnacles and sea-acorns pass through a free-swimming phase of growth (the Cyprid stage), in which they greatly resemble these "water-fleas."

In fact, it is quite easy to hatch the young from the eggs of either ship's barnacles or acorn-barnacles at the right season of the year. They commence life as do so many Crustacea—in the "nauplius state," with three pairs of jerking limbs ([Fig. 9]). As they grow the overhanging pair of shells, delicate and transparent, appear; the three pairs of nauplius legs lose their swimming power; the most anterior (always called antennules in all crustaceans) become elongated and provided each with an adhesive sucker, on the face of which a large cement gland opens, secreting abundant adhesive cement; the second pair (antennæ) shrivel and disappear altogether; the third pair lose their long blades for striking the water and remain as simple, but strong, stumps—the mandibles! Two new pairs of little jaw-feet appear behind these, and farther back on the now enlarged body (the whole creature is not bigger than a small canary seed!) six pairs of Y-shaped legs appear and strike the water rhythmically, so that the little creature swims with some sobriety. The region to which these legs are attached is marked with rings or segments, and behind it follows a small, limbless, hind body of four segments, or joints, ending with two little hairy prongs like a pitchfork. The right and left movable, shell-like fold, or downgrowth, of the sides of the body encloses the whole creature except the protruding antennules with their suckers.

Fig. 12.—Two stages in the growth of the Common Barnacle from the Nauplius stage. Diagrammatic.

cir., the double legs or cirri; m, mouth; o, the single eye; d, the digestive canal.

a′, one of the antennules or "feelers" (that of the right side of the head) provided with a sucking disk by means of which the young animal becomes fixed.

In this condition it swims about for a time, and then, once for all, fixes itself by means of the suckers and their abundant cement, on to rock, stone, or floating wood—and there remains for the rest of its life (Fig. 12). It increases enormously in size, the delicate transparent shell develops into hard calcareous plates, opening and shutting on the hinge-line of the back. In the stalked kinds a peculiar elongated growth of an inch or several inches in length takes place between the mouth and the fixed suckers of the antennules ([Figs. 10] and 12); in the short, so-called, "acorn" kinds, this stalk does not form, but a separate part of the shell grows into a ring-like protective wall or cone. The creature is thus actually fastened by its head—"upside down, with its legs sticking up" not in the air, but in the water. Those six pairs of Y-shaped legs, though no longer enabling the barnacle to swim, increase in relative size, and keep up their active movements. It is they which emerge like a plume when the valves of the shell open and carry on the rhythmic bowing and scraping movement described above.

The barnacles have, in fact, undergone a transformation which may be compared to that experienced by a man who should begin life as an active boy running about as others do, but be compelled suddenly by some strange spell or Arabian djin to become glued by the top of his head to the pavement, and to spend his time in kicking his food into his mouth with his legs. Such is the fate of the barnacles, and it is as strange and exceptional amongst crustaceans as it would be amongst men. Indeed, to "earn a living" human acrobats will submit to something very much like it. It is this change from the life of a free-living shrimp to that of a living lump, adherent by its head to rocks or floating logs, that Vaughan Thompson in 1830 discovered to be the story of every barnacle, and so showed that they were really good crustaceans gone wrong, and not molluscs. It is a curious fact that the young ascidian or sea-squirt which swims freely and has the shape of a tadpole, also when very young fixes itself by the top of its head to a rock or piece of seaweed, and remains immovable for the rest of its life. Though agreeing in their strange fixation by the head, the barnacle and the ascidian are very different kinds of animals. (For some account of the Ascidian the reader may consult the chapter "Tadpoles of the Sea" in "Science from an Easy Chair," Second Series. Methuen, 1912.)

The name "Cirripedes" is commonly used for the order or group formed by the barnacles—in allusion to the plume-like appearance of their "raking" legs. Stalked barnacles often are found in the ocean attached to floating pumice-stone, and one species has been discovered attached to the web of the foot of a sea-bird. They, like many other creatures, benefit by being carried far and wide by floating objects. Whales have very large and solid acorn-barnacles peculiar to them, fixed deeply in their skin. Others attach themselves to marine turtles.

With few exceptions the crustaceans are of separate sexes, male and female. But in nearly all classes of animals we find some kinds, even whole orders, in which the ovaries and spermaries are present in one and the same individual. "Monœcious" or "one-housed"—that is to say, possessing one house or individual for both ovaries and spermaries—is the proper word for this condition, but a usual term for it is "hermaphrodite." "Diœcious" is the term applied to animals or plants in which there are two kinds of individuals—one to carry the spermaries, the male, and the other to carry the ovaries, the female. It is probable that the monœcious condition has preceded the diœcious in all but unicellular animals. In vertebrate animals as high as the frogs and the toads we find rudimentary ovaries in the male, and in individual cases both ovaries and spermaries are well developed. Such a condition is not rare as an individual abnormality in fishes. In some common species of sea-perch (Serranus) and others it is not an exception but the rule.

Many groups of molluscs are monœcious, and it is not in any way astonishing to find a group of crustaceans which are so. The Cirripedes or barnacles are an example. It is probable that the presence of ovaries and spermaries in the same individual—the monœcious condition—is an advantage to immovable fixed animals. During the voyage of the "Beagle," and making use on his return of the collections then obtained, Darwin carried out a very thorough study of the Cirripedes of all kinds from all parts of the world. He worked out their anatomy minutely, classified the 300 different kinds then known, and described many new kinds. The stalked barnacles often occur in groups, the individuals being of different ages and sizes, the small young ones sometimes fixing themselves by their sucker-bearing heads to the stalks of their well-grown relatives. In all the varied kinds studied by Darwin he found that the full-grown individuals were monœcious—that is, of combined sex—as was known to be the case in those studied before his day. But Darwin made the remarkable discovery that in two kinds of stalked barnacles (not the common ship's barnacles), comprising several species, "dwarf males" were present perched upon the edge of the shell of the large monœcious (bi-sexual) individuals. These dwarf males were from one-tenth to one-twentieth the length of the large normal monœcious individuals, but usually possessed the characteristic details of the shell-valves and other features of the latter.

This existence of a sort of supernumerary diminutive kind of male as an accompaniment to a race of normal monœcious individuals was quite a new thing when Darwin discovered it. That all the males in some diœcious animals are minute as compared with the females was known, and has been established in the case of some parasitic crustaceans, in some of the wheel-animalcules, and in the most exaggerated degree in the curious worms, Bonellia and Hamingia. But the existence of "complemental males," as Darwin called them, existing apparently in order to fertilize the eggs should they escape fertilization by the ordinary monœcious individuals, was a new thing. And it was doubted and disputed when Darwin described his observations fifty-six years ago. They were, in fact, by many regarded as a distinct species parasitic upon the larger barnacles on which they were found until Darwin's conclusion as to their nature was confirmed by the report of Dr. Hoek, on the barnacles brought home by the "Challenger" expedition.

It is an interesting fact that recent studies have shown that in some of the barnacles with dwarf males (species of Scalpellum) the large individuals are no longer monœcious, but have become purely females, whilst in some other species dwarf males have been discovered which have rudimentary ovaries. Thus we get gradations leading from one extreme case to the other. Darwin always felt confidence in his original observations on this matter, and was proportionately delighted when, after thirty years, his early work was proved to be sound. In the Natural History Museum at the Darwin centenary in 1909, a temporary exhibition of specimens, note-books, and letters associated with Darwin's work, was brought together. His original specimens and drawings of Cirripedes and of the wonderful little "complemental males" of the barnacles were placed on view.

CHAPTER XIV
THE HISTORY OF THE BARNACLE AND THE
GOOSE

THE curious belief, widely spread in former ages—that the creatures (described in the last chapter) called "barnacles" or "ship's barnacles"—often found attached in groups to pieces of floating timber in the sea as well as fixed to the bottoms of wooden ships—are the young of a particular kind of goose called "the barnacle goose," which is supposed to hatch out of the white shell of the long-stalked barnacle, is a very remarkable example of the persistence of a tradition which is entirely fanciful. It was current in Western Europe for six or seven centuries, and was discussed, refuted, and again attested by eminent authorities even as late as the foundation of the Royal Society—the first president of which, Sir Robert Moray, read a paper at one of the earliest meetings of the society in 1661, in which he described the bird-like creature which he had observed within the shell of the common ship's barnacle, and favoured the belief that a bird was really in this way produced by a metamorphosis of the barnacle.

The story was ridiculed and rejected by no less a philosopher than Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century, and was also discredited by the learned Aristotelian Albertus Magnus at about the same time. No trace of it is to be found in Aristotle or Herodotus or any classical author, nor in the "Physiologus." The legend seems to have originated in the East, for the earliest written statement which we have concerning it is by a certain Father Damien, in the eleventh century, who simply declares: "Birds can be produced by trees, as happens in the island of Thilon in India." We have also a reference to the same marvel in an ancient Oriental book (the "Zohar," the principal book of the Kaballah), as follows: "The Rabbi Abba saw a tree from the fruits of which birds were hatched." The earliest written statements of the legend are, it appears, to the effect that there is a tree which produces fruits from which birds are hatched. The belief in the story seems to have died out at the end of the seventeenth century, when the structure of the barnacle lying within its shell was examined without prejudice, and it was seen to have only the most remote resemblance to a bird. The plumose legs or "cirrhi" of the barnacle (Fig. 10) have a superficial resemblance to a young feather or possibly to the jointed toes of a young bird, and there the possibilities of comparison end.

The notion that a particular kind of black goose (a "brent"), which occurs on the marshy coast of Britain in great numbers, is the goose, the bird, produced by the barnacle was favoured by the fact that this goose does not breed in Britain, and yet suddenly appears in large flocks, in districts where barnacles attached to rotting timber are often drifted on to the shore. It was accordingly assumed by learned monks—who already knew the traveller's tale, that in distant lands birds are produced by the transformation of barnacles—that this goose is the actual bird which is bred from the barnacles, and it was accordingly called "the barnacle goose." I think that this identification was due to the exercise of a little authority on the part of the clergy in both France and Britain, who were thus enabled to claim the abundant "barnacle goose" as a fish in its nature and origin rather than a fowl, and so to use it as food on the fast-days of the Church. Pope Innocent III (to whom the matter was referred) considered it necessary in 1215 to prohibit the eating of "barnacle geese" in Lent, since although he admitted that they are not generated in the ordinary way, he yet maintained (very reasonably) that they live and feed like ducks, and cannot be regarded as differing in nature from other birds.

Thus we see that in early and even later days a good deal hung on the truth of this story of the generation of barnacle geese. The story was popularly discussed by the devout and by sceptics, and appears to have been known in France as "l'histoire du canard." At last in the seventeenth century it was finally discredited, owing to the account given by some Dutch explorers of the eggs and young of the barnacle goose—like those of any other goose—and its breeding-place in the far north on the coast of Greenland. The discredited and hoary legend now became the type and exemplar of a marvellous story which is destitute of foundation, and so the term "un canard" (short for histoire d'un canard), commonly applied in French to such stories, receives its explanation. Our own term for such stories, in use as long since as 1640, namely, "a cock-and-bull story," has not been traced to its historical source.[3]

[3] Probably it means "a silly story told by a cock to a bull!" as suggested by the French word coq-à-l'âne, which means a story told or fit to be told by a cock to an ass!

That the story of the goose or duck and the transformed barnacle was a popular one in Shakespear's time, whether believed or disbelieved, appears from his reference to barnacles in "The Tempest." Caliban says to Stephano and Trinculo, when they have all three been plagued by Prospero's magic, and plunged by Ariel into "the filthy mantled pool" near at hand, "dancing up to their chins": "We shall lose our time and all be turned to barnacles, or to apes with foreheads villainous low." Probably enough, this is an allusion to the supposed Protean nature of barnacles. They are not alluded to elsewhere in Shakespear.

One of the most precise accounts of the generation of geese by barnacles is that of the mediaeval historian Giraldus Cambrensis, who visited Ireland and wrote an account of what he saw in the time of Henry II, at the end of the twelfth century. He says: "There are in this place many birds which are called Bernacæ; Nature produces them, against Nature, in a most extraordinary way. They are like marsh-geese, but somewhat smaller. They are produced from fir timber tossed along the sea, and are at first like gum. Afterwards they hang down by their beaks as if they were a seaweed attached to the timber, and are surrounded by shells in order to grow more freely. Having thus in process of time been clothed with a strong coat of feathers, they either fall into the water or fly freely away into the air." "I have frequently seen," he proceeds, "with my own eyes, more than a thousand of these small bodies of birds, hanging down on the seashore from a piece of timber, enclosed in their shells and ready formed. They do not breed and lay eggs like other birds; nor do they ever hatch any eggs nor build nests anywhere. Hence bishops and clergymen in some parts of Ireland do not scruple to dine off these birds at the time of fasting, because they are not flesh nor born of flesh!"

It is noteworthy that Giraldus does not state—in accordance with the tradition as reported by earlier writers—that there is a tree the buds of which become transformed into the geese, but says merely that the "small bodies of birds," clearly indicating by his description groups of ship's barnacles, are "produced from fir timber tossed along the sea." It is also noteworthy that he calls the geese themselves "Bernacæ," which is the Celtic name for a shell-fish.

Later the belief seems to have reverted to the older tradition, or probably enough the complete story, including the existence of the bird-producing tree, existed in its original form in "seats of learning" in other parts of the British Islands outside Ireland, and also in Paris and other places in Western Europe. For we find that in 1435 the learned Sylvius, who afterwards became Pope Pius II, visited King James of Scotland in order, among other things, to see the wonderful tree which he had heard of as growing in Scotland from the fruit of which geese are born. He complains that "miracles will always flee further and further," for when he had now arrived in Scotland and asked to see the tree, he was told that it did not grow there, but farther north, in the Orkneys. And so he did not see the tree.

In 1597, John Gerard, in the third book of his "Herbal, or History of Plants," writes as follows: "There are found in the north parts of Scotland and the Islands adjacent called Orchades, certaine trees whereon do grow certaine shell-fishes of a white colour tending to russett, wherein are contained little creatures which shels in time of maturity doe open and out of them grow those little living things which, falling into the water, doe become foules whom we call Barnacles, in the north of England Brent Geese, and in Lancashire Tree Geese." Gerard is here either adopting or suggesting an identification of the tradition of the tree which produces birds from its buds, with the floating timber bearing ship's barnacles, which were supposed to give birth to the brent geese. He does not say that he has seen, or knows persons who have seen, the barnacles attached to the branches of living trees. Nevertheless, he gives a picture of them so attached ([Fig. 13]). It has been suggested, in later times, that such a fixation of barnacles to the branches of living trees might occur in some of the sea-water lochs of the west of Scotland,—just as oysters become attached to the mangrove trees in the West Indies,—and it has further been suggested that willows might thus droop their branches into the sea-water, and that the catkins on the willow-shoots might be taken for an early stage of growth of the barnacles; but I have not come across any record of such fixation of barnacles on living shrubs or branches of trees, and I am inclined to think that Gerard's story of what occurs in the distant Orkneys is merely an attempt to substantiate the bird-producing tree of the Oriental story, by quietly assuming that the sea-borne timber covered with barnacles existed somewhere as living trees and exhibited this same property of budding forth barnacles which on opening liberated each a minute gosling. Gerard continues as follows: "But what our eyes have seen and hands have handled we shall declare." There is, he tells us, a small island in Lancashire called the Pile of Foulders, and there rotten trees and the broken timbers of derelict ships are thrown up by the sea. On them forms "a certain spume or froth which in time breeds into certaine shells." He then gives a description of these shells and the fish contained therein, which is a correct enough account of the common ship's barnacle. He proceeds, however, to an assertion which is not of something which he saw or handled, namely, that the animal within the shell, though like the fish of an oyster, gradually grows to a bird and comes forth hanging to the shell by its bill. Finally, he says, it escapes to maturity. At the end of his chapter on this subject, Gerard says: "I dare not absolutely avouch every circumstance of the first part of this history concerning the tree which beareth those buds aforesaide, but will leave it to a further consideration."

Fig. 13.—The picture of the "Goose Tree," copied from the first edition of Gerard's "Herbal."

The fruit-like oval bodies are "barnacles" (Lepas) fancifully represented as growing like buds or fruit on a little tree. Some of the young geese are drawn as in the act of escaping from the barnacle-shells, and others are represented swimming in the water.

Gerard's "Herbal" was reprinted forty years later (in 1636) and edited by Johnson, a member of the Society of Apothecaries. He writes with contempt of Gerard's credulity as to the story of the barnacle and the goose, and states that certain "Hollanders" in seeking a north-east passage to China had recently come across some islands in the Arctic Sea which were the breeding-place of the so-called barnacle goose, and had taken and eaten sixty of their eggs, besides young and old birds.

Probably there were always lovers of the marvellous and the occult who favoured and would favour to-day the tradition of the conversion of one animal into another and such wonders; and there were also both in the days of ancient Greece and Rome, and even in the darkest of the Middle Ages, men with a sceptical and inquiring spirit, who accepted no traditional testimony, but demanded, as the basis of their admitting something unlikely as nevertheless true, the trial of experiment and the examination of specimens. What has happened since Gerard's time and the incorporation of the Royal Society in 1662, is that the sceptical men have got the upper hand, though not without much opposition. In this country, owing to the defective education administered in our public schools and older universities, there is still quite a large number of well-to-do people ready to believe in any "occult" imposture or fantasy that may be skilfully brought to their notice.

On the other hand, we must bear in mind when we consider these strange beliefs held by really learned and intelligent men in the past, that the investigation of nature had not advanced very far in their time. It was not held, as it is to-day, as an established fact that living things are generated only by slips or cuttings of a parent or from eggs or germs which are special detached particles of the parent. It was held to be a matter of common observation and certainty that all sorts of living things are "spontaneously generated" by slime, by sea foam, by mud, and by decomposing dead bodies of animals and trees. It was also held, in consequence of a blind belief in, and often a complete misunderstanding of, the legends and fairy tales of the ancients and of the preposterous "Bestiaries" and books on magic which were the fashion in mediaeval times, that it is quite a usual and natural thing for one animal or plant to change into another. Hence there was nothing very surprising (though worthy of record) in a barnacle changing into a young goose, or in the buds of a tree becoming in some conditions changed into barnacles!

So, too, the notion that rotting timber can "generate" barnacles was not, to our forefathers, at all out of the way or preposterous. Sir Thomas Browne in 1646 was unable to make up his mind on this matter, and believed in the spontaneous generation of mice by wheat, to which he briefly alludes in his curious book called "Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or an Enquiry into Vulgar and Common Errors." The account of the creation given by the poet Milton was based upon the belief in the daily occurrence of such spontaneous generation of living things of high complexity of structure and large size, from slime and mud. The process of creation of living things conceived by him was but a general and initial exhibition of an activity of earth and sea which in his belief was still in daily operation in remote and undisturbed localities.

In 1668 the Italian naturalist, Redi, demonstrated that putrefying flesh does not "spontaneously breed" maggots. He showed that if a piece of flesh is protected by a wire network cover from the access of flies, no maggots appear in it, and that the flies attracted by the smell of the meat lay their eggs on the wire network, unable to reach the meat, whilst if the wire cover is removed they lay their eggs on the meat, and from them the maggots are hatched. It took a long time for this demonstration by Redi to affect popular belief, and there are still country folk who believe in the spontaneous generation of maggots.[4]

[4] See the chapter, "Primitive Beliefs about Fatherless Progeny," in "Science from an Easy Chair," Second Series.

But few, if any, persons of ordinary intelligence or education now believe that these sudden productions of living things, without regular and known parentage, take place. The spontaneous generation of large, tangible creatures having ceased to be an article of general belief, the conviction nevertheless persisted for some time that at any rate minute microscopic living things were generated without parentage. This theory was more difficult to test on account of the need for employing the microscope in the inquiry, which was not brought to a high state of efficiency until the last century. By experiments similar to those of Redi, it was shown in the first half of last century by Theodor Schwann that even the minute bacteria do not appear in putrescible material when those already in it are killed by boiling that material, and when the subsequent access to it of other bacteria is prevented by closing all possible entrance of air-borne particles, or insect carriers of germs. It took another fifty years to thoroughly establish by observation and experiment the truth of Schwann's refutation of the supposed "spontaneous generation" of the minutest forms of life.

As an example of the strange incapacity for making correct observation and the failure to record correctly things observed which are frequently exhibited by the most highly placed "men of education," as well as by uneducated peasants and fisher folk, we have the short paper entitled, "A Relation concerning Barnacles," by Sir Robert Moray—the first president of the Royal Society of London (from 1661 until its incorporation in 1662)—a very distinguished man, and an intimate friend of King Charles II. This paper was read to the society in 1661 and published in 1677 in vol. xii. of the "Philosophical Transactions." Sir Robert relates how he found on the coast a quantity of dead barnacles attached to a piece of timber, and that in each barnacle's shell was a bird. He writes: "This bird in every shell that I opened, as well the least as the biggest, I found so curiously and completely formed that there appeared nothing wanting, as to the external parts, for making up a perfect sea-fowl; every little part appearing so distinctly that the whole looked like a large bird seen through a concave or diminishing glass, colour and feature being everywhere so clear and near. The little bill like that of a goose, the eyes marked, the head, neck, breast, wings, tail and feet formed, the feathers everywhere perfectly shaped and blackish coloured, and the feet like those of other waterfowl—to my best remembrance. All being dead and dry, I did not look after the inward parts of them." If the reader will now look at Fig. 15, C, which represents the soft parts of a barnacle when the shells of one side are removed, he will see how far Sir Robert Moray must have been the victim—as so many people naturally are under such circumstances—of imagination and defective memory when he wrote this account. I have put into italics in the above quotation from his "Relation" his confession that he is writing, not with his specimens before him, but from remembrance of them. Moreover, he tells us, with admirable candour, that the specimens were dead and dry when he examined them! One could not desire a better justification for the motto adopted by the Royal Society, "Nullius in verba," and for the procedure upon which in its early days the Society insisted—namely, that at its meetings the members should "bring in" a specimen or an experiment, and not occupy time by mere relations and reports of marvels. It is necessary even at the present day to insist on such demonstration by those who urge us to accept as true their relations of mysterious experiences with ghosts, and their "conviction" that they have conversed with "discarnate intelligences."

CHAPTER XV
MORE AS TO THE BARNACLE AND THE
GOOSE

IT is clear that there was a widespread tradition known to the learned in the early centuries of the Christian era, according to which there existed in some distant Eastern land a tree which bore buds or fruits which became converted into birds. Connected with this, and perhaps really a part of it, there existed a tradition that marine "barnacles" gave birth to geese from within their shells, or are in some way converted into geese. The two stories were in some localities and narrations combined, though in others they were distinct. On the coast of Ireland the early missionaries of the Church (learned men acquainted with the traditions of their time) identified the migratory brent goose with the bird said to be produced by the barnacle; and elsewhere, on the Scottish coast, the barnacles were (it was reported) found growing on trees. There is no such resemblance between barnacles and brent geese as to have suggested to the Irish monks the regular and natural conversion of one into the other. It seems most probable that the learned churchmen knew the traditional story already before arriving in Ireland, and applied it to the barnacles and the geese which they discovered around them. Eventually the word "barnacle" without qualification was applied to the geese, as we see in Gerard's account given in the last chapter. Is there, it may be asked, anything further known as to such a tradition, and the place and manner of its origin? In the absence of such knowledge, an ingenious attempt was made by my old friend, Professor Max Müller, to account for the tradition by the similarity of the names, which he erroneously supposed had been given independently to the barnacle and to the "Hibernian" goose. I will refer to this below, but now I will proceed to give the most probable solution of the mystery as to the tradition of the tree, the goose, and the barnacle. Its discovery is not more than twenty years old, and is due to M. Frederic Houssay, a distinguished French zoologist of the Ecole Normale, who published it in the "Revue Archeologique" in 1895. It has not hitherto been brought to the notice of English readers, and I shall therefore give a full account of it.

Fig. 14.—Fanciful designs by Mykenæan artists, showing change of the cuttle-fish (octopus or "poulpe") into a bull's head and other shapes.

a, Octopus drawn on a goblet from Crete, the arms reduced to two, the eyes detached.

b and c, Bull's head variations of the octopus, from designs found at Koban in the Caucasus.

d, Spiral treatment of the arms of the octopus (a pose actually seen in living specimens).

e, f, Human faces painted on Cretan jars across the whole width of the neck, the design being derived from the octopus with detached eyes as in Fig. a. Such designs survive long after their origin is forgotten, as (according to M. Houssay) the legend of the barnacle and the goose survived two thousand years after the Mykenæan drawings assimilating one to the other had been forgotten.

The solution is as follows: The Mykenæan population of the islands of Cyprus and Crete, in the period 800 to 1000 years before Christ, were great makers of pottery, and painted large earthernware basins and vases with a variety of decorative representations of marine life, of fishes, butterflies, birds, and trees. Some of these are to be seen in the British Museum at Bloomsbury, where I examined them a few years ago. Others have been figured by the well-known archæologists, MM. Perrot and Chipiez, in the sixth volume of their work, "L'Ossuaire de Crète." M. Perrot consulted M. Houssay, in his capacity of zoologist, in regard to these Mykenæan drawings, which bear, as M. Houssay states, the evidence of having been designed after nature by one who knew the things in life, although they are not slavishly "copied" from nature. These early Mykenæan painters on pottery were members of a community who worshipped the great mother—"Nature"—as Astarte or Aphrodite risen from the foam of the sea. Being sailors and fishermen, marine life was even more familiar to them than that of the land, and they placed little models of sea animals as votive offerings in the temples of the great mother, and also honoured her in decorating their pottery with marine creatures. The little fish, Hippocampus, called the sea-horse, the sea-urchin, the octopus, the argonaut and its floating cradle, the sea-anemone, and the butterfly-like Pteropod, were subjects used by these artists for which they found terrestrial counterparts. The sea-horse was convertible decoratively into a true horse, with intermediate phases imagined by the artists; the sea-urchin into a hedgehog, the sea-anemone into a flower, and the Pteropod into a true butterfly. These artists loved to exercise a little fancy and ingenuity. By gradual reduction in the number and size of outstanding parts—a common rule in the artistic "schematizing" or "conventional simplification" of natural form—they converted the octopus and the argonaut, with their eight arms, into a bull's head with a pair of spiral horns (Fig. 14). In the same spirit it seems that they observed and drew the barnacle floating on timber or thrown up after a storm on their shores. They detected a resemblance in the marking of its shells to the plumage of a goose, whilst in the curvature of its stalk they saw a resemblance to the long neck of the bird. The barnacle's jointed plumose legs or cirri and other details suggested points of agreement with the feathers of the bird. They brought the barnacle and the goose together, not guided thereto by any pre-existing legend, but by a simple and not uncommon artistic desire to follow up a superficial suggestion of similarity and to conceive of intermediate connecting forms. Some of their fanciful drawings with this purpose are shown in Figs. 15, 16, and 17. These (excepting the drawing of the barnacle lying within its opened shell) are copied from M. Houssay's paper on the subject, and were taken from the work of M. Perrot on Cretan pottery.

Fig. 15.—The Goose and the Barnacle.

A, Drawing of a Ship's Barnacle attached to a piece of timber by its "peduncle" or stalk, which represents the neck of a goose, if we regard the shell-covered region as the goose's body. From a sketch by M. Frederic Houssay published in the "Revue Archæologique," January 1895.

B, Copy of a drawing on an ancient Mykenæan pot found in Crete, and figured by M. Perrot in his "Ossuaire de Crète" vol. vi. p. 936. It is a fantastic blend of the goose and the barnacle. The barnacle's stalk is given a beak and an eye; the body of the bird corresponds to the shells of the barnacle both in shape and marking. There are no wings or legs, but the curious single limb which I have marked pe is obviously the same thing as that marked pe in figure C, which represents the barnacle when cut open so as to show the structures within the shell, pe is the rod-like body at the end of which the seminal duct opens. It is seen in the drawing of the expanded barnacle (Fig. 10), lying between the two groups of six forked and jointed legs or "cirri."

C, A correct modern drawing of a ship's barnacle, with the shells of one side removed so as to show the six double legs of one side, the seminal rod (pe), and the internal organs. This is what Sir Robert Moray and his mediaeval predecessors saw on opening the barnacle's shell and described as "a young bird complete in every detail."

Fig. 16.—Copy of a series of modified geese painted on an early Mykenæan pot, figured by M. Perrot. Each has two jointed appendages on the back, which suggest the wing feathers of the bird or two of the jointed legs (cirri) of the barnacle, which issue in life from this part of the barnacle's shell. The legs of the geese are very small and absent in the fifth. The markings on the body differ in each bird, but recall the shell of the barnacle divided into several valves marked with parallel striations. They may also pass for the plumage of the bird.

The intention of the artist to fantastically insist on intermediate phases between goose and barnacle is placed beyond doubt by certain details. For instance, in Fig. 16, the little jointed processes on the back of the goose marked a, correspond in position to the cirri or legs of the barnacle. They are reduced in number to two, and simplified in form so as to pass for the tips of the wings of the goose. The goose's own feet are represented in their natural position. The most extraordinary piece of resemblance in detail is that given in Fig. 15, B, which is a copy of a very much "barnaculized" goose from one of these ancient dishes. What does the Mykenæan artist mean to represent by the strange single leg-like limb marked pe? When we carefully examine the barnacle's soft body concealed by its shell, it becomes obvious that this leg-like thing corresponds to the single stalk-like body, ending in a bunch of a few hairs which is marked pe in Fig. 15, C. This last-named figure is a careful modern representation of the soft living barnacle, as seen when the shells of one side are removed. The cylindrical body pe of Fig. 15, C, which is drawn by the Mykenæan artist on an exaggerated scale in Fig. 15, B, is the external opening of the seminal duct of the barnacle. It is remarkable that the Mykenæan pottery-painter had observed the soft "fish" of the barnacle so minutely as to select this unpaired and very peculiar-looking structure, and represent it of exaggerated size attached in its proper position on the barnacle-like body of a goose. This very striking transference of a peculiar and characteristic organ of the barnacle to the body of the goose by the artist seems not to have been noticed by M. Houssay.

Fig. 17.—Two drawings
on pottery of
modified geese, from
Perrot's "Ossuaire
de Crète." The three
lines above the back
of the upper figure
probably represent
the legs or cirri of
the barnacle, which
are represented by
two jointed appendages
in the geese
shown in Fig. 16.

M. Houssay further points out the existence on some of the Mykenæan pottery of drawings (see "L'Ossuaire de Crète," by MM. Perrot and Chipiez) of leaves attached to tree-like stems. These leaves (Fig. 18, a, b, c) exhibit the same markings ("venation") which we see on the bodies of the geese in Fig. 16, especially the middle one of the five. The leaves (or fruits?) copied by M. Houssay from the Mykenæan pottery are attached in a series to a stem—but no one, at present, has suggested what plant it is which is represented. The corners of the leaf or fruit to the right and left of its stalk are thrown into a spiral—and the half leaf or half fruit represented in Fig. 18, b, leads us on to that drawn in Fig. 18, c, in which the spiral corner is slightly modified in curvature so as to resemble the head and neck of the goose as drawn in Fig. 16. Though Fig. 18, c, is as yet devoid of legs or wing feathers (compare Fig. 16, d), the black band along the belly with the band of vertical markings above it agrees closely with the design on the body of the middle goose of the series drawn in Fig. 16. As these are associated in the decoration of the Mykenæan artists, it is fairly evident that the intention has been to manipulate the drawing of the leaf or fruit so as to make it resemble the drawing of the goose, whilst that in its turn is modified so as to emphasize or idealize its points of resemblance to a barnacle.

Fig. 18.—Leaves from
the tree, drawn on a
Mykenæan pot which,
according to M. Perrot,
are fancifully designed
so as to assume step by
step (a, b, c) the form
of a goose. This appears
either to represent
the tree which, according
to legend, produced
birds as buds on its
branches, or to be a
fanciful design which
gave rise to that legend.
The artist's intention of
making the leaf gradually
pass into the semblance
of a goose, is
strongly emphasized by
the purely fanciful
"venation" of the
leaf which agrees with
the equally fanciful ornament
of the bodies of
the geese in Fig. 16,
especially the middle
one of the series.

It is true enough that the drawings from Mykenæan pots here submitted cannot be considered as a complete demonstration that the legend of the tree-goose originated with these drawings. But it must be remembered that we have only a small number of examples of this pottery surviving from a thousand years B.C. It is probable that the fanciful decorative design of a master artist was copied and used in the painting of hundreds of pots by mere workmen or inferior craftsmen, and that more complete and impressive designs showing the fanciful transformation of leaf or fruit to goose, and of goose to barnacle, existed both before and after the making of the particular pots and jars which have come down to us. The supposition made by M. Houssay (which I entirely support) is that some later Levantine people—to whom these decorated pots or copies of their decorations became known either in the regular way of trade or as sailors' "curios"—were led to attempt an explanation of the significance of the pictures drawn upon them, and in accordance with a well-known and rooted tendency—interpreted the fancies of the artist as careful representations of astonishing fact. The existence of a tree which produces buds which become birds, and of a barnacle which becomes transformed into a goose—is the matter-of-fact interpretation of the few pictures of these animals which have come down to us, modern men, painted on the few pots of that remote Mykenæan industry now in our museums. It is not at all unlikely that in the vast period of time between 1000 B.C. and 1000 A.D., the more striking of these designs had been copied and familiarized in some part of the ancient world. It is true that we do not at present know in what part: we have not yet come across these designs of later date than 800 B.C. The absence of the story of the tree-goose from Greek and Roman lore is striking. Neither Aristotle nor Herodotus knew of it, although it has been erroneously stated that they refer to it. Yet the source of it was there in the Greek isles almost under their noses (if one may speak of the noses of such splendid and worshipful men of old) in the artistic work—otherwise not unknown to the Greeks—of a civilization which preceded their own by hundreds of years. There is other and ample evidence—as for instance that of the representation of the "flying gallop" (see "Science from an Easy Chair," Second Series, pp. 57 and 63), showing that Mykenæan art had little or no direct effect on the Hellenes, although the reputation of the skill of the old race in metal work came through many generations to them. Mykenæan art seems to have migrated with Mykenæan settlers to the remote region of the Caucasus. In the necropolis of Koban and other remote settlements, Mykenæan designs in bronze and gold—including the horse in flying gallop and octopods transformed to bull's heads—have been found and pictured (Ernest Chantre, "Recherches anthropologique dans Caucase," 4 vols.: Paris, 1886). They are believed to date from 500 B.C. It is possible that in such remote regions or in some of the Greek islands the pictures of the tree-goose and the barnacle may have survived until the new dispensation—that is, until the days of the Byzantine Empire. Once we can trace either the pictures or the legend up to that point, there is no difficulty about admitting the radiation of the wonderful story from that centre to the Jews of the Kabbalah, to Arabic writers, and so to the learned men of the Christian Church and the seats of learning throughout Europe and a great part of Asia.

Of the history of the legend during two thousand years we have no actual knowledge. It remains for investigation. But undoubtedly these Mykenæan pottery paintings remove the origin of the story to a period two thousand years older than that of the Irish monks.

One additional fact I may mention as to the existence of the goose and barnacle legend in the East. I am informed that in Java there is, according to "native" story, a shell-fish the animal of which becomes transformed into a bird—said to be a kind of snipe—and flies from the shell. I have been shown the shell by a Dutch lady who has lived in Java. It is a large fresh-water mussel, one of the Unionidæ. I have failed to obtain, after inquiry, any further information as to the prevalence or origin of this story in Java, and hope that some one who reads this page may be able to help me.

Before leaving the story of the goose and the barnacle, the explanation of the myth given by Prof. Max Müller in his lectures on the science of language nearly fifty years ago, should be cited. It is an excellent example of the misuse of hypothesis in investigation, and the attempt to explain something which we cannot get at and examine by making a supposition which it is even more difficult to examine and test.

Max Müller made use of the observation—a perfectly true and interesting one—that a whole people or folk will be led to a wrong conclusion, or to a belief in some strange and marvellous occurrence, by the misunderstanding of a single word, attributing to that word a sense which now fits the sound, but one quite different from that with which the word was originally used in the tradition or history concerned. Words are, in fact, misinterpreted after a lapse of time, or when imported from distant lands, just as we have seen that pictures and sculpture often have been. For instance, Richard Whittington, who was Lord Mayor of London in 1398 and other later years, did business in French goods, which was spoken of in the city as "achat," and pronounced "akat." Hence in later centuries, when the prevalence of Norman French was forgotten, it was stated (in a play produced in 1605) that Whittington owed his fortune to "a cat," and the story of the wonderful cat and its deeds was built up "line upon line" or "lie upon lie." Max Müller suggested that the story of the barnacle and the goose could be similarly explained. The brant or brent goose which frequents the Irish shore was, he supposes, called "berniculus" by the Latin-speaking clergy as a diminutive of Hibernicus, meaning "Irish." There is absolutely no evidence to support this. Max Müller supposes that Hibernicus became "Hiberniculus," and then dropping the first syllable became "Berniculus," and that this word was applied to the "Irish goose." It might have been, but there is nothing to show that it was. Meanwhile the ship's barnacle and other sea-shells were called in the Celtic tongue "barnagh," "berniche," or "bernak," and the hermit-crab is still called on the Breton coast, "Bernard l'hermite," a modification of "bernak l'hermite." There is no doubt that the word "barnacle" as applied to the stalked shell-fish growing on ships' bottoms is a diminutive of the Celtic word "bernak," or "barnak." It became in Latin "barnacus," and then the diminutive "barnaculus," and so "barnacle" was used for the little stalked shell-fish encrusting old timber. According to Max Müller, later generations thus found the two animals, goose and shell-fish, called by the same name, "bernikle," or "barnacle." "Why?" they would ask: and then (he supposes) they would compare the two and detect points of resemblance, until at last a very devout and astute monk had the happy thought of declaring that the Hibernian goose was called "berniculus," or "barnak-goose," because it did not breed from eggs as other birds do, but is hatched out of the shell of the shell-fish, also very naturally and rightly called "berniculus," or barnak, as any one may see by carefully examining the fish contained in the shell of the barnacle or little stalked "barnak," which has the complete form of a bird. Since, however, it is not a bird, but a fish in nature and origin, this holy man declared that the "berniculus," or "barnacle-goose," may be eaten on fast days. Max Müller's explanation of the origin of the story is too adventurous in its unsupported assumption that the particular goose associated with the story was peculiarly Irish, or that, in fact, any kind of goose was so. He also put aside the evidence of Father Damien (earlier than the Irish story of Giraldus) referring the goose-tree to an island in the Indies, and the report cited in the Oriental book the "Zohar." However plausible Max Müller's theory may have appeared, it absolutely crumbles and disappears in the presence of the Mykenæan pictures of "barnaculized" geese, and trees budding birds—two thousand years older than the Irish record, and nearly three thousand years earlier than the essay of the charming and persuasive professor.

CHAPTER XVI
SEA-SHELLS ON THE SEASHORE

ANY hard coat or covering enclosing a softer material is called a "shell"—thus we speak of an egg-shell, a nut-shell, a bomb-shell, and the shell of a lobster. But there is a special and restricted use of the word to indicate as "true" and "real" shells the beautiful coverings made for their protection by the soft, mobile animals called Molluscs. These animals expand and contract first this and then that region of the body by squeezing the blood within it (by means of the soft muscular coat of the sac-like body) into one part or another in turn. There is not enough blood to distend the whole animal, and accordingly one part is swollen out and protrudes from the shell, whilst another shrinks as the blood is propelled here or there by the compressing muscular coat. These creatures are the Molluscs, a name which has come into general use (and has even served as the title for a stage-play), as well as being the zoologist's title for the great division of animals which they constitute.

They are sometimes called "shell-fish," but this is no good as a distinctive name—since it is applied in the fish-trade to lobsters, crabs, and shrimps as well as to Molluscs. Lobsters, crabs, and shrimps are Crustacea, and totally different in their architecture and their mechanism from Molluscs. Familiar examples of Molluscs are the oyster, the mussel, the various "clams," and, again, the snails, periwinkles, whelks, and limpets. It is the shells of these animals which are "true" shells in the sense in which the word is used by "collectors" of shells, and in the sense in which we speak of "the shells of the seashore." These shells are usually very hard, solid things, made up of layers of lime-salts and horny matter mixed, and they remain for a long time undestroyed, washed about by the currents of the sea, and thrown up on to the beach, after the soft, oozy creature which formed them—chemically secreted them on its soft skin—has decomposed and disappeared. They are readily distinguished into two sorts—(1) those which are formed in pairs, or "bivalves," each member of the pair being called a "valve"; and (2) those which are single, or "univalves," often spirally twisted, as are those of snails and whelks, but sometimes cap-like or basin-like, as are the shells of the limpets. There is not so great a difference between bivalve and univalve shells as there seems to be at first sight. For if you examine the pair of shells of a mussel or a clam when they are quite fresh, you will find that the valves are joined together by a horny, elastic substance, and are, in fact, only one horny shell, or covering, which is made hard by lime deposited on the right and on the left, as two plates or valves, but is left soft and uncalcified along a line where these two valves meet, so as to allow them to move and gape, as it were, on an elastic hinge. It is the fact that the two valves of the shell of the bivalve, lying right and left on its body, correspond to the single shell of the snail or limpet, which differs from the bivalve-shell in not being divided along the back by a soft part into right and left pieces. That there is this real agreement between bivalve and univalve molluscs is quite evident when we examine the soft animal which forms the shell and is protected by it.

Fig. 19.—Some British Marine Bivalve Molluscs.

a, The smaller Piddock, Pholas parva, which bores into chalk, clay, and hard rock. Natural size.

b, The Razor-shell, Solen siliqua. The muscular foot is seen protruding from the shell. One-third the natural size, linear.

c, Venus verrucosa. Natural size.

d, Cardium echinatum. Two-thirds the natural size, linear.

e, Pinna pectinata, the "cappy longy." One-fifth of the natural size, linear.

Though "shells" are often numerous on parts of the seashore, some beaches (as, for instance, at Falmouth, at the mouth of the Eden of St. Andrews, and at Herm in the Channel Islands) being so placed in regard to the currents and waves of the sea that great quantities of shells of dozens of species are thrown up, and even "make up" the beach, yet there are not so very many Molluscs which live commonly on the shore between tide-marks. The shells which are accumulated as shell-beaches have come from animals which lived in quantity at depths of ten or twenty fathoms, whence they can be brought up alive by the dredge. There are, however, certain bivalves and certain univalves which are commonly to be found in the living state between tide-marks. You will not find the oyster there on our own coast, but in Australia they have picnic parties where every guest provides himself with a hammer and a bottle of vinegar and a pepper-pot, and at low tide proceeds to chip the oysters off the rocks on which they grow tightly fixed, and to eat them "right away" before they have time to lose their good temper and sweetness! In Jamaica they show you oysters apparently growing on trees high up in the air, but they are dead, having attached themselves to the branches of a young tree which dipped into the water. Once fixed there, they were unable to move as the tree grew and carried them up with its branches above the sea-level.

The only bivalve at all common and visible to the eye between tide-marks is the common or edible sea-mussel, which is attached in purple clusters to the rocks (as in North Cornwall), or forms a wide-spreading pavement, called a "scalp," of as much as an acre in extent, on which thousands of mussels lie side by side. But by digging in the sand and mud between tides there are other living bivalves to be found, which burrow more or less deeply. The razor-shell ([Fig. 19, b]) is one of these [(see p. 80)]. Often (as at Teignmouth and Barmouth) we find "cockles" buried in the sand, and those delicate, smooth bivalves not an inch long, white outside and purple within, which are made into soup at Naples and are called "vongoli," but have no English name. Other "clams" (Tapes, which is eaten in France, even in Paris, and Mya, and Scrobicularia which lives in black mud) may be dug up, but they are devoid of English names because we do not eat them; hence I have to speak of them by their Latin scientific names. As to univalves, there are three which are found almost everywhere on our coasts where there are rocks, namely, the periwinkles (one species of which actually lives above high tide-mark), the limpet, and the dog-whelk. A small species of top-shell or trochus is also very common, and so is the chiton, or armadillo-shell, which, though really the most primitive and nearest representative of the ancestors of all univalve molluscs, yet has its own shell of a very peculiar character (sometimes with very minute eyes—true eyes—dotted about on it), and always divided transversely to its length (not right and left) into eight separate pieces, which, indeed, seem to be really separate, independent little shells, corresponding to eight segments like the segments of a shrimp or an earth-worm.

Let us now compare the soft animal of one of the bivalves—say the common cockle—with the soft animal to which a univalve shell belongs—say the limpet. They can be kept alive and watched in a finger-glass of sea-water, and can be removed from their shells and examined more closely—by killing them by dipping them for half a minute into very hot (not boiling) water. Both these molluscs—like all others—adhere tightly at one place to the shell. They cannot be removed from it alive, and make a new shell or creep back into the old one, as can some worms (e.g. the serpula) and other creatures which form a hard shell to live in. Certain muscles of the soft mollusc are so closely fixed to the shell that they must be torn in order to separate it. These muscles draw the two valves of the bivalve together, and shut it tight. You can verify this whenever the oyster-man "opens" an oyster for you. When at rest the shells gape, being kept open by the horny, elastic hinge-piece. Some bivalves (for instance, the common scallop, or pilgrim's shell, which can often be dredged in shallow water, and of which a large kind is sold in the London fish shops) actually swim in the sea-water by aid of this mechanism, the shells opening by elasticity and being closed by the muscle joining one to the other, at rapid intervals, flapping like the wings of a butterfly.

In the univalves the attachment of the muscle to the shell gives a fixed point for all the movements of the animal. The limpet has a well-marked head and neck—a pair of sensitive tentacles, and a small pair of dark-coloured eyes. The mouth is at the end of a sort of short snout. Just within the mouth, and capable of being pushed forwards to the level of the lips, is a most extraordinary rasp. It consists of a long ribbon, beset with fine horny teeth—very sharp and complicated in pattern. The ribbon extends far back into the body, and is worn away by constant use at the orifice of the mouth. It grows forward, like one of our finger-nails, as it wears out, and a new, unworn portion takes the place of that worn away. It is constantly in use to rasp and bring into the mouth the particles of the seaweed on which the limpet feeds. It is easy to remove this rasping ribbon with a needle or pen-knife, and examine it with a microscope. Every one of the hundreds of kinds of univalve molluscs has this ribbon-rasp, and its teeth are of different patterns in the various kinds. It is worked by very powerful little muscles, backwards and forwards, and is strong enough in the whelks to bore a round hole into other shells (for instance, that of the oyster), when the whelk proceeds to eat the soft animal, whose protecting shell has been thus penetrated. Some of the large marine snails produce a poisonous secretion from the mouth, which renders their attack with the ribbon-rasp all the more deadly to other marine creatures. The cuttle-fishes and octopods, which are molluscs too, possess, like the univalve limpets, snails, and whelks, this terrible ribbon-rasp in the mouth. It is an indication of a common parentage or ancestral relationship in the forms which possess it.

The cockle ([Fig. 19, d]), to which we now turn, has not got a ribbon-rasp, nor anything of the kind. It has a mouth with four flapper-like lips, but no projecting head, no eyes, no biting mechanism, nor have any of the bivalves, excepting a few which like the scallop have a series of eyes on the edge of the soft mantle or flap which lines the shell. This constitutes a greater difference between bivalves and the univalves than does the shape of the shell. They are a very quiescent, peaceful lot, feeding on microscopic floating plants (diatoms and such), which are drawn to the mouth by currents of water set going by millions of vibrating hairs arranged on four soft plates hanging under the protecting arch of the shell, and called in the oyster—in which bivalve most people know them—the "beard."

The limpet adheres to rocks by a great disk-like mass of muscle, which is called "the foot." It is really the whole ventral surface, and it can loosen its hold, and, by curious ripples of contraction, cause the animal to creep or glide over the rock. At low tide the limpet is exposed to the air, and remains motionless, but when the tide is up it makes a small excursion in search of food, never going more than a foot or two from the spot which it has chosen, and returning to it, so that in the course of time it actually wears away a sort of cup or depression at this spot—if the rock is not of exceptional hardness. The word "foot" is applied to the ventral disk-like surface of the limpet, because in many univalves this region becomes drawn out, and is connected by a comparatively narrow and nipped-in stalk or pillar with the rest of the animal. This occurs in the univalves which have large spiral shells, into which the whole of the soft animal can be deeply withdrawn, which is not the case with the limpet. You may find on the shore at Torquay a sea-snail (Natica), in which the animal is quite invisible, drawn far up into the shell. Place this in sea-water and watch it. Soft semi-transparent lobes begin to issue from the mouth of the shell, part of the soft distensible foot appears swelling out and growing bigger and bigger, and soft folds spread out from the mouth of the shell, and gently creep over it, and completely envelop it; the foot begins to grip the bottom of the vessel, and the animal "crawls." At last, swelling out from the other folds of soft but tense "molluscan" substance, the head and its tentacles emerge. Touch the animal and it shrinks rapidly, disappearing into the shell.

It used to be thought (about twenty-five years ago) that the molluscs expand their bodies in this manner by taking water, through definite apertures provided with valves, into their blood, and that, having thus swelled themselves out, they could shrink and reduce themselves by pouring out again the in-taken water. The behaviour of some other marine animals, namely the sea-anemones, which really do act in this way, made this explanation of the swelling and shrinking of molluscs seem probable. It was also known that the star-fishes and sea-urchins actually do take in the sea-water into a system of vessels connected with their wonderful sucker-bearing tentacles. But it turned out on close examination that the molluscs do not take in or shed out water in this way. A hole, which was thought to let in water into the blood of sea-snails, was shown to be only the opening of a great slime-gland. In the case of some bivalves which have red-blood corpuscles, I showed that the blood is never made paler, nor are the red corpuscles shed during the great distensions and contractions of the body. Measurements were made to determine the removal of water from a glass jar by an expanding sea-snail, and it was found that none is removed or taken up; in fact, the whole of what is very often an astonishingly large and bulky distension of the foot, or of lobes of the body, and the subsequent rapid shrinking of the same parts, depend entirely on the blood being injected from the rest of the body into the swelling part, and squeezed from it into the depleted region when the swollen part shrinks again. The firm, opaque shell hides from view the change of shape of the concealed body, and we see only the distended foot or other lobes which project from the shell.

The cockle has a "foot" of a very curious scythe-like shape, usually carried bent up between the two valves of the shell. Those who rightly like to confirm statements about unfamiliar animals can do so by buying a cockle or two at the fishmonger's. Some bivalves (the Noah's-ark-shell, called "Arca," and a few others) have a great flat foot, like that of the univalves, and crawl about on it. But in most bivalves it is curiously elongated and modified, for the purpose of burrowing into sand by vigorous strokes, and in some it is suppressed altogether, as in the oyster. The cockle is remarkable for the fact that when placed on a board or a rock it will give such a vigorous kick with its bent foot as to throw itself up a yard or so into the air. A naturalist (Stutchbury) dredging in Port Jackson, Australia, many years ago was overjoyed at discovering in his net three specimens of a very peculiar kind of cockle (Trigonia), which was till then only known in the fossil state from the oolite strata of Europe. He placed the three novelties on the seat of his boat, and was looking at other things when he heard a click-like sound, then another. He turned his head and saw that two of his newly-discovered "living fossils" had jumped overboard, and had the pleasure of seeing the third perform the same feat!