Glaucus

Part 1

Transcribed from the 1890 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

GLAUCUS OR THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE

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BY CHARLES KINGSLEY

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WITH COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS

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London MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1890

The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved

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RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BUNGAY.

First Edition (Fcap. 8vo), May 1855. Second Edition, August 1855. Third Edition, 1856. Fourth Edition (with Coloured Illustrations), 1859. Fifth Edition (Crown 8vo), 1873. Reprinted 1878, 1879, 1881, 1884, 1887, 1890.

Dedication.

MY DEAR MISS GRENFELL,

I CANNOT forego the pleasure of dedicating this little book to you; excepting of course the opening exhortation (needless enough in your case) to those who have not yet discovered the value of Natural History. Accept it as a memorial of pleasant hours spent by us already, and as an earnest, I trust, of pleasant hours to be spent hereafter (perhaps, too, beyond this life in the nobler world to come), in examining together the works of our Father in heaven.

Your grateful and faithful brother-in-law,

C. KINGSLEY.

BIDEFORD, April 24, 1855.

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The basis of this little book was an Article which appeared in the North British Review for November 1854.

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BEYOND the shadow of the ship, I watch’d the water snakes: They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they rear’d, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes.

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O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gush’d from my heart, And I bless’d them unware.

COLERIDGE’S Ancient Mariner.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

WOOD ENGRAVINGS. FIG. PAGE 1. Nymphon Abyssorum, NORMAN 81 2. Caprella spinosissima, NORMAN 83 3. Pentacrinus asteria, LINNÆUS 85 COLOURED PLATES. PLATE 1. 1. FLUSTRA LINEATA; (a) enlarged with polypes 73 protruding. 2. FLUSTRA FOLIACEA. 3. VALKERIA CUSCUTA; (a) natural size; (b) two tentacles; (c) tentacles bent inwards; (d) enlarged, showing the gradual eversion of the animal. 4. CRISIA DENTICULATA; (a) natural size. 5. GEMELLARIA LORIOATA; (a) natural size. 6. SERTULARIA ROSEA; (a) natural size. 7. CELLULARIA CILIATA; (a) natural size; (b) one of the bird’s heads; (c) cell and bird’s head, much enlarged. 8. CAMPANULARIA SYRINGA; (a) natural size. 9. CAMPANULARIA VOLUBILIS, enlarged. 10. SERIALARIA LENDIGERA. 11. NOTAMIA BURSARIA; (a) natural size; (b) two pairs of polype cells with the tobacco pipe appendages 2. 1. CARDIUM RUSTICUM, (TUBERCULATUM). 2. PAGURUS 65 BERNHARDI, in a Periwinkle Shell 3. 1. NEMERTIES BORLASII. 2. SABELLA? 3. 136 Sand-tube of TEREBELLA CONCHILEGA (See Plate 8) 4. 1. SYNAPTA DIGITATA; (a) Ditto separating and 109 throwing out capsuliferous threads. 2. THALASSIMA NEPTUNI 5. 1. BALANOPHYLLEA REGIA, expanded; (a) Ditto, 117 contracted; (b) Ditto coral; (c) Ditto, tentacle enlarged; 2. CARYOPHYLLEA SMITHII partly expanded; (a) Ditto, section of bony plates; (b) Ditto, tentacle. 3. SAGARTIA ANGUICOMA closed; (a) Ditto, basal disc showing radiating septa. 4. SYNAPTA DIGITATA (See Plate 4); (a, b) Ditto, fingered tentacles enlarged; (c) Ditto, Spiculæ; (d) Ditto, anchor lying on its transparent anchor-plate. 5. S. VITTATA? perforated anchor-plate; (a) Spicula 6. 1. ACTINIA MESEMBRYANTHEMUM, partially expanded; 135 (a) Ditto, closed. 2. BUNODES CRASSICORNIS. 3. CARYOPHYLLEA SMITHII Front 7. 1. ECHINUS MILIARIS, creeping over Modiola 168 barbata. 2. Ditto, creeping up the glass. 3. Hiding under stones 8. 1. LITTORINA LITTOREA (See Plate 9); (a) 201 operculum; (b) pallet; (c) part of pallet, magnified. 2. NASSA RETICULATA (See Plate 11); (a) egg capsules; (b, c) fry; (d) shell of fry; (e) pallet, magnified. 3. PATELLA VULGARIS; (a) palate, natural size; (b, c) Ditto, enlarged. 4. ECHINUS MILIARIS (See Plate 7); (a) teeth and digesting mill; (b) suckers, enlarged; (c) spine and socket; (d) shell denuded; (e) Pedicellaria. 5. NEMERTES BORLASII (See Plate 3); (a) head, enlarged; (b) head expanded swallowing a Terebella 9. 1. CUCUMARIA HYNDMANNI. 2. LITTORINA LITTOREA. 114 3. SIPHUNCULUS BERNHARDUS in shell of TURRITELLA, with living BALANI 10. 1. SERPULA CONTORTUPLICATA. 2. HINNITES PUSIO. 129 3. DORIS REPANDA. 4. EOLIS PELLUCIDA. 5. PHOLADIDÆA PAPYRACEA. 6. PHOLAS PARVA. 7. FISSURELLA GRÆCA 11. 1. SYNGNATHUS LUMBRICIFORMIS. 2. SAXICAVA 163 RUGOSA; (a) Shell of SAXICAVA RUGOSA. 3. NASSA RETICULATA 12. 1. PEACHIA HASTATA. 2. URASTER RUBENS 92

GLAUCUS; OR, THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE.

Part 2

YOU are going down, perhaps, by railway, to pass your usual six weeks at some watering-place along the coast, and as you roll along think more than once, and that not over-cheerfully, of what you shall do when you get there. You are half-tired, half-ashamed, of making one more in the ignoble army of idlers, who saunter about the cliffs, and sands, and quays; to whom every wharf is but a “wharf of Lethe,” by which they rot “dull as the oozy weed.” You foreknow your doom by sad experience. A great deal of dressing, a lounge in the club-room, a stare out of the window with the telescope, an attempt to take a bad sketch, a walk up one parade and down another, interminable reading of the silliest of novels, over which you fall asleep on a bench in the sun, and probably have your umbrella stolen; a purposeless fine-weather sail in a yacht, accompanied by many ineffectual attempts to catch a mackerel, and the consumption of many cigars; while your boys deafen your ears, and endanger your personal safety, by blazing away at innocent gulls and willocks, who go off to die slowly; a sport which you feel to be wanton, and cowardly, and cruel, and yet cannot find in your heart to stop, because “the lads have nothing else to do, and at all events it keeps them out of the billiard-room;” and after all, and worst of all, at night a soulless réchauffé of third-rate London frivolity: this is the life-in-death in which thousands spend the golden weeks of summer, and in which you confess with a sigh that you are going to spend them.

Now I will not be so rude as to apply to you the old hymn-distich about one who

“—finds some mischief still For idle hands to do:”

but does it not seem to you, that there must surely be many a thing worth looking at earnestly, and thinking over earnestly, in a world like this, about the making of the least part whereof God has employed ages and ages, further back than wisdom can guess or imagination picture, and upholds that least part every moment by laws and forces so complex and so wonderful, that science, when it tries to fathom them, can only learn how little it can learn? And does it not seem to you that six weeks’ rest, free from the cares of town business and the whirlwind of town pleasure, could not be better spent than in examining those wonders a little, instead of wandering up and down like the many, still wrapt up each in his little world of vanity and self-interest, unconscious of what and where they really are, as they gaze lazily around at earth and sea and sky, and have

“No speculation in those eyes Which they do glare withal”?

Why not, then, try to discover a few of the Wonders of the Shore? For wonders there are there around you at every step, stranger than ever opium-eater dreamed, and yet to be seen at no greater expense than a very little time and trouble.

Perhaps you smile, in answer, at the notion of becoming a “Naturalist:” and yet you cannot deny that there must be a fascination in the study of Natural History, though what it is is as yet unknown to you. Your daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing “Pteridomania,” and are collecting and buying ferns, with Ward’s cases wherein to keep them (for which you have to pay), and wrangling over unpronounceable names of species (which seem to be different in each new Fern-book that they buy), till the Pteridomania seems to you somewhat of a bore: and yet you cannot deny that they find an enjoyment in it, and are more active, more cheerful, more self-forgetful over it, than they would have been over novels and gossip, crochet and Berlin-wool. At least you will confess that the abomination of “Fancy-work”—that standing cloak for dreamy idleness (not to mention the injury which it does to poor starving needlewomen)—has all but vanished from your drawing-room since the “Lady-ferns” and “Venus’s hair” appeared; and that you could not help yourself looking now and then at the said “Venus’s hair,” and agreeing that Nature’s real beauties were somewhat superior to the ghastly woollen caricatures which they had superseded.

You cannot deny, I say, that there is a fascination in this same Natural History. For do not you, the London merchant, recollect how but last summer your douce and portly head-clerk was seized by two keepers in the act of wandering in Epping Forest at dead of night, with a dark lantern, a jar of strange sweet compound, and innumerable pocketfuls of pill-boxes; and found it very difficult to make either his captors or you believe that he was neither going to burn wheat-ricks, nor poison pheasants, but was simply “sugaring the trees for moths,” as a blameless entomologist? And when, in self-justification, he took you to his house in Islington, and showed you the glazed and corked drawers full of delicate insects, which had evidently cost him in the collecting the spare hours of many busy years, and many a pound, too, out of his small salary, were you not a little puzzled to make out what spell there could be in those “useless” moths, to draw out of his warm bed, twenty miles down the Eastern Counties Railway, and into the damp forest like a deer-stealer, a sober white-headed Tim Linkinwater like him, your very best man of business, given to the reading of Scotch political economy, and gifted with peculiarly clear notions on the currency question?

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