Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore E-Book

Charles Kingsley

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• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

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Glaucus, or, The wonders of the shore

Glaucus, or, The wonders of the shore

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Glaucus, or, The wonders of the shore

Kingsley, Charles, 1819-1875

Sowerby, G. B. (George Brettingham), 1812-1884, ill

Dickes, William, 1815-1892, ill

Rossall, John H., former owner. DSI

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Smithsonian Institution Libraries

s

OR,

THE WONDEES OF THE SHORE.

LONDON: B. CLAY, PRINTER, BREAD STREET HILL.

l2^

KSS

acN/H?^3 DEDICATION.

My deae 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,

A2yril 24, 1855.

The hasis of this little hook loas an Article which appeared in the North British Review for November, 1854.

Beyond the shadow of the ship I watch'd the water snakes; They moved ia tracks of sliining wliite, And when they rear'd, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes.

* « * *

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

Coleridge's Ancient Mar\

GLAUCUS;

THE WONDEES OF THE SHOEE.

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 tlie telescope, an attempt to take a bad sketch, a walk up one parade and down another, interminable

B

reading of the silliest of novels, over wliicli you fall asleep on a bencli 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 recJiauffe 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 :"

r^'

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 w^isdom 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 \vrapt up each in their 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 Whicli they do glare withal" ?

Why not, then, try to discover a few of the Wonders of the Shore? For wonders there are there b2

around you at every step, stranger than ever opiumeater 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 "Pancy-work"— that standing cloak for dreamy idleness (not to mention th,e 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 difi&cult 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 liim in tlie collecting the spare liours 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 Eailway, and into the damp forest like a deer-stealer, a sober whiteheaded 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?

It is puzzling, truly. I shall be very glad if these pages help you somewhat toward solving the puzzle.

We shall agree at least that the study of N'atural History has become now-a-days an honourable one. A Cromarty stonemason was till lately—God rest his noble soul!—the most important man in the City of Edinburgh, by dint of a work on fossil fishes; and the successful investigator of the minutest animals takes place unquestioned among men of genius, and, like the philosopher of old Greece, is considered, by virtue of his science, fit

company for dukes and princes. Nay, the study is now more than honourable ; it is (what to many readers will be a far higher recommendation) even fashionable. Every well-educated person is eager to know something at least of the wonderful organic forms which surround him in every sunbeam and every pebble; and books of lN"atural History are ■finding their way more and more into drawingrooms and school-rooms, and exciting greater thirst for a knowledge which, even twenty years ago, was considered superfluous for all but the professional student.

What a change from the temper of two generations since when the naturalist was looked on as a harmless enthusiast, wlio went " bug-hunting," simply because he had not spirit to follow a fox! There are those alive who can recollect an amiable man being literally bullied out of the New Forest, because he dared to make a collection (at this moment, we believe, in some unknown abyss of that great Avernus, the British Museum) of fossil shells from those very Hordwell Cliffs, for exploring which

there is now established a society of subscribers and correspondents. They can remember, too, when, on the first appearance of Bewick's " British Birds," the excellent sportsman who brought it down to the Forest was asked, Why on earth he had brought a book about '' cock sparrows" ? and had to justify himself again and again, simply by lending the book to his brother sportsmen, to convince them that there were rather more than a dozen sorts of birds (as they then held) indigenous to Hampshire. But the book, perhaps, which turned the tide in favour of Natural History, among the higher classes at least, in the south of England, was White's " History of Selborne." A Hampshire gentleman and sportsman, whom everybody knew, had taken the trouble to write a book about the birds and the weeds in his own parish, and the every-day things which went on under his eyes, and every one else's. And all gentlemen, from the Weald of Kent to the Vale of Blackmore, shrugged their shoulders mysteriously, and said, "Poor fellow !" till they opened the book itself, and disco

vered to tlieir surprise that it read like any novel. And then came a burst of confused, but honest admiration; from the young squire's " Bless me ! who would have thought that there were so many wonderful things to be seen in one's own park !" to the old squire's more morally valuable "Bless me ! why I have seen that and that a hundred times, and never thought till now how wonderful they were ! "

There were great excuses, though, of old, for the contempt in which the naturalist was held; great excuses for the pitying tone of banter with which the Spectator talks of " the ingenious" Don Saltero (as no doubt the Neapolitan gentlemen talked of Ferrante Imperato the apothecary, and his museum) ; great excuses for Yoltaire, when he classes the collection of butterflies among the other " bigarrures de I'esprit humain." For, in the last generation, the needs of the world were different. It had no time for butterflies and fossils. While Buonaparte was hovering on the Boulogne coast, the pursuits and the education which were needed

were siicli as would raise up men to figlit liim; so the coarse, fierce, liard-handecl training of our grandfathers came when it was wanted, and did the work which was required of it, else we had not been here now. Let us be thankful that we have had leisure for science; and show now in war that our science has at least not unmanned us.

Moreover, N'atural History, if not fifty years ago, certainly a hundred years ago, was hardly worthy of men of practical common sense. After, indeed, Linne, by his invention of generic and specific names, had made classification possible, and by his own enormous labours had shown how much could be done when once a method was established, the science has grown rapidly enough. But before him little or nothing had been put into form definite enough to allure those who (as the many always will) prefer to profit by others' discoveries, than to discover for themselves; and Natural History was attractive only to a few earnest seekers, who found too much trouble in disencumbering their own minds of the dreams of bygone generations (whether

facts, like cockatrices, basilisks, and krakens, tlie breeding of bees out of a dead ox, and of geese from barnacles;—or theories, like those of the four elements, the vis plastrix in Nature, animal spirits, and the other musty heirlooms of Aristotleism and Neo-platonism), to try to make a science popular, which as yet was not even a science at all. Honour to them, nevertheless. Honour to Eay and his illustrious contemporaries in Holland and France. Honour to Seba and Aldrovandus; to Pomet, with his " Historic of Drugges;" even to the ingenious Don Saltero, and his tavern-museum in Cheyne Walk. Wliere all was chaos, every man was useful who could contribute a single spot of organized standing ground in the shape of a fact or a specimen. But it is a question whether I^atural History would have ever attained its present honours, had not Geology arisen, to connect every other branch of Natural History with problems as vast and awful as they are captivating to the imagination. Nay, the very opposition with which Geology met was of as great benefit to the sister sciences as to itself

For, when questions belonging to the most sacred hereditary beliefs of Christendom were supposed to be effected by the verification of a fossil shell, or the pro"vdng that the Maestricht "homo diluvii testis" was, after all, a monstrous eft, it became necessary to work upon Conchology, Botany, and Comparative Anatomy, with a care and a reverence, a caution and a severe induction, which had been never before applied to them; and thus gradually, in the last half century, the whole choir of cosmical sciences have acquired a soundness, severity, and fulness, which render them, as mere intellectual exercises, as valuable to a manly mind as Mathematics and Metaphysics.

But how very lately have they attained that firm and honourable standing gi'ound! It is a question whether, even twenty years ago, Geology, as it then stood, was worth troubling one's head about, so little had been really proved. And heavy and uphill was the work, even within the last fifteen years, of those who steadfastly set themselves to the task of proving and of asserting at all risks, that the

Maker of the coal seam and the diluvial cave could not be a " Deus quidam deceptor/' and that the facts which the rock and the silt revealed were sacred, not to be warped or trifled with for the sake of any cowardly and hasty notion that they contradicted His other messages. "When a few more years are past, Buckland and Sedgwick, Murchison and Lyell, Delab^che and Phillips, Forbes and Jamieson, and the group of brave men who accompanied and followed them, will be looked back to as moral benefactors of their race; and almost as martyrs, also, when it is remembered how much misunderstanding, obloquy, and plausible folly, they had to endure from wellmeaning fanatics like Fairholme or Granville Penn, and the respectable mob at their heels, who tried (as is the fashion in such cases) to make a hollow compromise between fact and the Bible, by twisting facts just enough to make them fit the fancied meaning of the Bible, and the Bible just enough to make it fit the fancied meaning of the facts. But there were a few who would have no compromise ; who laboured on with a noble recklessness, deter

14 GLAUCUS; OE,

mined to speak the thing which they had seen, and neither more nor less, sure that God could take better care than they of His own everlasting truth; and now they have conquered; the facts which were twenty years ago denounced as contrary to Eevelation, are at last accepted not merely as consonant with, but as corroborative thereof; and sound practical geologists—like Hugh Miller, in his " Footprints of the Creator," and Professor Sedgwick, in the invaluable notes to his " Discourse on the Studies of Cambridge"—are wielding in defence of Christianity the very science which was faithlessly and cowardly expected to subvert it*

* It is with real pain that I have seen my friend Mr. Gosse, since this book was written, make a step in the direction of obscurantism, which I can only call desperate, by publishing a book called " Omphalos." In it he tries to vindicate what he thinks (though very few good Christians do so now) to be the teaching of Scripture about Creation, by the suj)position that fossils are not the remains of plants and animals which have actually existed, but may have been created as they are and where they are, for the satisfaction of the Divine mind ; and that therefore the whole science, not merely of palaeontology, but (as he seems to forget) of geognosy also, is based on a mistake, and cannot truly exist, save as a play of the fancy.

It seems to me that such a notion is more likely to make infidels, than to cure them. For what rational man, who knows even a little

But if you seek, reader, rather for pleasure than for wisdom, you can find it in such studies, pure and undefiled.

Happy, truly, is the naturalist. He has no time for melancholy dreams. The earth becomes to him transparent; everywhere he sees significancies, harmonies, laws, chains of cause and effect endlessly interlinked, which draw him out of the narrow sphere of self-interest and self-pleasing, into a pure and wholesome region of solemn joy and wonder. He goes up some Snowdon valley; to him it is a solemn spot (though unnoticed by his companions), where the sta2f's-horn clubmoss ceases to strasfole across the turf, and the tufted alpine clubmoss takes its

of geology, will not be tempted to say—If Scripture can only be vindicated by snch an outrage to common sense and fact, then I will give up Scripture, and stand by common sense ? For my part, I have seen no book for some years past, which I should more carefully keep out of the hands of the young. I am sorry to have to say this of the work of a friend, both because he is my friend, and because there are thoughts therein, about the creative workings of the Divine mind, which however misapplied, are full of deep truth and beauty, and are too much forgotten now-a-days. But, as Aristotle says where he differs from Plato, " Truth and Plato are both my friends; hut it is a sacred duty to prefer Truth"

16

place: for he is now in a new world; a region whose climate is eternally influenced by some fresh law (after which he vainly guesses with a sigh at his own ignorance), which renders life impossible to one species, possible to another. And it is a still more solemn thought to him, that it was not always so ; that seons and ages back, that rock which he passed a thousand feet below was fringed, not as now with fern, and blue bugle, and white brambleflowers, but perhaps with the alp-rose and the " gemsen-kraut" of Mont Blanc, at least with Alpine Saxifrages which have now retreated a thousand feet up the mountain side, and with the blue Snow-Gentian, and the Canadian Ledum, which have all but vanished out of the British Isles. And what is it which tells him that strange story ? Yon smooth and rounded surface of rock, polished, remark, across the strata, and against the grain ; and furrowed here and there, as if by iron talons, with long parallel scratches. It was the crawling of a glacier which polished that rock-face; the stones fallen from Snowdon peak into the half

liquid lake of ice above, wliicli ploughed those furrows, ^ons and aeons ago, before the time when Adam first—

" Embraced his Eve in liappy hour. And every bird in Eden burst In carol, every bud in flower,"

those marks were there ; the records of the " Age of ice ;" slight, truly; to be effaced by the next farmer who needs to build a wall; but unmistakeable, boundless in significance, like Crusoe's one savage footprint on the sea-shore: and the naturalist acknowledges the finger-mark of God, and wonders, and worships.

Happy, especially, is the sportsman who is also a naturalist: for as he roves in pursuit of his game, over hills or up the beds of streams where no one but a sportsman ever thinks of going, he will be certain to see things noteworthy, which the mere natui'alist would never find, simply because he could never guess that they were there to be found. I do not speak merely of the rare birds which may be shot, the curious facts as to the habits of fish which

C

.may be observed, great as these pleasures are. I speak of the scenery, the weather, the geological formation of the country, its vegetation, and the living habits of its denizens. A sportsman out in all weathers, and often dependent for success on his knowledge of "what the sky is going to do," has opportunities for becoming a meteorologist which no one beside but a sailor possesses; and one has often longed for a scientific gamekeeper or huntsman, who, by discovering a law for the mysterious and seemingly capricious phenomena of "scent," might perhaps throw light on a hundred dark passages of hygrometry. The fisherman, too,—what an inexhaustible treasury of wonders lies at his feet, in the subaqueous w^orld of the commonest mountain burn! All the laws which mould a world are there busy, if he but knew it, fattening his trout for him, and making them rise to the fly, by strange electric influences, at one hour rather than at another. Many a good geognostic lesson too, both as to the nature of a country's rocks, and as to the laws by which strata are deposited, may an

observing man learn as lie wades up the bed of a trout-stream; not to mention the strange forms and habits of the tribes of water-insects. Moreover, no good fisherman but knows, to his sorrow, that there are plenty of minutes, ay hours, in each day's fishing, in which he would be right glad of any employment better than trying to