Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore

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 discover...

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 thin...

I have said, that there were excuses for the old contempt of the study of Natural History. I have said, too, it may be hoped, enough to show that contempt to be now ill-founded....

Follow us, then, reader, in imagination, out of the gay watering-place, with its London shops and London equipages, along the broad road beneath the sunny limestone cliff, tufte...

Then look at the Hyalonemas, or glass-rope ocean floor by a twisted wisp of strong flexible flint needles, somewhat on the principle of a screw-pile. So strange and complicated...

Colonel Montagu found them here some forty years ago; and after him, Mr. Alder, in 1845. I found hundreds of them, but only once, in 1854 after a heavy south-eastern gale, washe...

And now, worshipper of final causes and the mere useful in nature, answer but one question,—Why this prodigal variety? All these Nudibranchs live in much the same way: why would...

Such a rhapsody may be somewhat out of order, even in a popular scientific book; and yet one cannot help at moments envying the old Greek imagination, which could inform the sou...

You ought, besides, to dredge many handsome species of shells, which you would never pick up along the beach; and if you are conchologizing in earnest, you must not forget to br...

Go down at low spring-tide to the nearest ledge of rocks, and with a hammer and chisel chip off a few pieces of stone covered with growing sea-weed. Avoid the common and coarser...

First and foremost, certainly, come Mr. Gosse’s books. There is a playful and genial spirit in them, a brilliant power of word-painting combined with deep and earnest religious...

Another species of British madrepore, found by Mr. Gosse at Ilfracombe, and by Mr. Kingsley at Lundy Island. It is smaller than O. Smithii, of a very bright colour, and always c...