Chapter 5

are deposited, are numbered from 13 to 24. The four first cases (13-16) are covered with Crabs of various kinds, including the long-legged spider-crabs, common crabs with oysters growing upon their backs, and fin-footed swimming crabs. The next case (17) contains in addition to the long-eyed or telescope crab, varieties of the land-crab, which is found in various parts of India; one kind, that swarms in the Deccan, commits great ravages in the rice-fields. The two next tables are covered with Chinese crabs, square-bodied crabs; those crabs with fine shells known as porcelain crabs, and the curious death's head crab, which seems to build a kind of nest of sponge or shells. But upon the next table (20) the visitor will find the most remarkable of the crabs, together with an astonishing lobster. This crab is known as the hermit crab. The visitor will perceive, that it has a long naked tail; and he should know that the one all-absorbing care of its life seems to be to find a place of safety in which this unprotected part may be screened from the dire mischances of war. Accordingly, at an early age, it sets out in search of a deserted shell into which it backs its tail; or if an unoccupied shell be not at hand, without much ceremony, the hermit contrives a summary ejectment of the lawful tenant, that it may shield its tail and be at rest. Upon the same table with this unceremonious hermit, lies the tree-lobster, which is believed to climb cocoa-trees in search of the nuts. Upon the next table (21) are the sea craw-fish and sea locusts; and upon the succeeding table (22) the visitor will remark the destructive scorpion-lobster of India, the excavations of which seriously damage the roads of that part of the world; Shrimps in all their varieties; the delicate alima, with its pale thin shell; and the long king crab. Upon the last two tables devoted to shell fish, or crustacea, are spread the goose shells or barnacles, whale lice, and I the sea acorn.

Having examined these crustacea, the visitor should turn his attention to the twelve tables (1-12) upon which a fine collection of

INSECTS

is spread. The first eight tables are covered with varieties of

THE BEETLE TRIBE.

These include some beautiful insects. The care with which the many thousand varieties have been classified by zoologists, and the minuteness with which the habits of each variety have been traced, have raised these insects to a conspicuous position in the great Animal Kingdom. Their beauty, as they lie here in vast numbers before the spectator, is dazzling. Every colour and every combination and shade of colour can be traced upon them; and in these varieties of tint there appears to be a wise provision of nature, the blue coloured beetle being the frequenter of the bark of trees, the green beetle revelling among the leaves; and the gay red and light beetles being the _habitées_ of flower cups. Upon the first table of the series (1) are some curious varieties. Here are the remarkable burying-beetle, that deposits its eggs in the rotting flesh of small dead animals, and then, with the assistance of some kindred beetles buries the body, leaving its progeny to enjoy the carrion when they quicken; the sacred scarabaeus of the Egyptians, and the British variety of the same beetle, that bury their eggs in their dung. Upon the next table (2) are the golden tropical beetles, whose wings are used by the natives as ornaments; the celebrated glow worms, the females of which emit a phosphorescent light, in order to attract the attention of the males--thus these lights are love signals; the Brazilian diamond-beetle, a splendid insect, and the harlequin beetle. The third table (3) is covered with varieties of the kangaroo beetles, a brilliant collection of ladybirds, the varieties of earwigs, cockroaches, originally tropical insects only; the praying insects, called so from their habit of erecting their fore legs and assuming a prayerful attitude, when, in fact, they are preparing for an attack upon their prey: and the insects which the uninitiated visitor has already mistaken for pieces of stick, but which are the walking leaf-insects; some with wings like dead leaves, and others wingless. The fourth table (4) is covered with the varieties of the Cricket, including the great Chinese cricket, dragon-flies, scorpion-flies, the terrible tropical white ants, caddis flies, wasps, saw-flies, bees, hornets, and sand wasps.

BUTTERFLIES AND MOTHS.

Then follow three tables (5-7) of splendid butterflies, with their brilliant tints. The two tables (8, 9) ranged next in order to those upon which the butterflies are distributed, are covered with varieties of the moth. Here are the silkworm moth and its cocoon as kept in Siberia; the ghost moth of our hop grounds; the hawk moth, the death's head moth, and the large Brazilian owl moth.

The next table (10) is covered with a great variety of flies and bugs, including the Chinese lantern flies.

The eleventh table is given up to Spiders in all their varieties, including the tarantula, a formidable insect with a power of severe biting; and the curious spider that bores a nest in the ground, lines it sumptuously with its own silk, and then constructs a lid that closes inevitably, as the insect leaves its house. Here too are the scorpions. The last table of the series (12) is covered also with varieties of the spider, including the land and shepherd spiders; the African scarlet tick, and the centipedes. The visitor has now completed his survey of the contents of this room, and should at once pass forward in an easterly direction, traverse the British zoological room, which he has already examined throughout, and pass into the fourth room of the gallery.

The table-cases in this room present nothing that can greatly interest the unscientific visitor. They are covered with varieties of

STARFISH; SEA-EGGS, ETC.

The sea-eggs are scattered over the first nine tables (1-9) in the room. They live on small animals and sea-weed. The varieties include a flat kind, vulgarly called sea-pancakes. The remaining cases of the room are loaded with varieties of the star-fish. The mouth of the star-fish is on its lower side, through which it takes its food. It has innumerable feet, which it displays when in the water, and by means of which it can climb rocks. Some of the varieties fall to pieces on being taken from their native element, as the lizard, or brittle star-fish. The gorgon's head, which has innumerable branches from its central part, should be observed by the visitor; and the sea-wigs, which are a kind of star-fish, somewhat resembling the gorgon's head, with innumerable radii. They are placed upon table 24, near a cast of a stem and flower, that has the appearance of a fossil plant, but is in reality a cast of a crinoid star-fish that once existed in great abundance. In the most eastern room of this gallery are a few tables upon which are deposited the shells and tubes of molluscous animals, to illustrate their changes, and the way in which the animal adapts them to his position. The third and fourth tables will, perhaps, interest the general visitor. Here he will find specimens exhibiting the growth of Shells, and also how the animal repairs any damage to its shell. Here, too, are the shells upon which the modern cameo-cutters of Rome, work. As the visitor will perceive, the design is engraved in relief upon the light outer layers of the shell, leaving the darker under part exposed, as a back-ground.

The visitor's way now lies out of the northern gallery, by its eastern door, near which he should notice a remarkable sun fish, of a bulky and squat appearance. Having regained the first, or most northerly room of the great eastern zoological gallery, the visitor should turn to the south, examining the table cases of this gallery as he returns through its spacious rooms. All the table cases of this gallery, with the exception of a few small side tables, are covered with the vast varieties of the

SHELLS

of molluscous or soft animals. These shells, scattered over no less than forty-nine tables, represent the architectural capacities of the great order of soft-bodied animals, only inferior in rank, in Cuvier's "Animal Kingdom," to the Vertebrate animals.

Upon the first table, before which the visitor will find himself (49), are some interesting specimens of the well-known Cuttle fish, exhibiting its varieties, including the common cuttle fish found upon our coasts; those which have the power of secreting a dark fluid, and those from India, whose ink-bags furnish artists with that valuable brown called sepia. Here, too, are the skeletons of the slender loligos, or sea leaves, known also as sea-pens; and the crozier shell. Upon the next six tables (48-53), proceeding southward, are the varieties of the Oyster, the Mussel, and beautiful Mother-of-pearl shells. But hence the visitor will probably proceed rapidly to the south; inasmuch as the varieties of the mussel family, including the Chinese pearl mussel and Scotch pearl mussel, the borers, the club shell, and the cockle family, are not generally interesting; but he will probably linger for a few moments near the pond mussels placed upon some of the tables (38-41). The tables numbered from 24 to 30 are covered with the varieties of hard shells, which, however, present no points of interest to the general visitor, who may at once pass on to the varieties of the Nautilus and Argonaut, (tables 23, 24). And here, too, we must entreat the visitor to forget the poetic history of the inhabitants of those beautiful shells, and learn that the extended arms of the nautilus are used only to clasp its shell; that it has no sails of any kind. The varieties of the paper nautilus, or argonaut, are the most delicate and beautiful. The next table (22) displays the shell of the curious carrier, that embodies all kinds of foreign substances with its shell; the slipper shell, and the rose bud. Upon the next table (21) are the Screws; the curious ladder shells from China; and upon table 20, are the varieties of fresh water Clubs. The next two tables (18, 19) display some curious and beautiful shells, including Venus's ear, the pagoda shell, and varieties of Snails, including the apple snails. Proceeding on his southern way, the visitor should pause to notice the ear shells, placed upon tables 18, 17, including the beautiful rainbow; the button shells, the rainbow eardrop, and the pyramid upon table 16; the pomegranate from the Cape of Good Hope, New Zealand imperial, and pheasant, and the West Indian golden sun, upon table 15; the weaver's shuttle and pig cowries, including the Chinese variety, highly valued by the Chinese, as an ornament; also upon table 15, more varieties of cowries, including the money cowry of Africa, used there as money, and the orange cowry from the Friendly Islands, where it is worn as an ornament; the five varieties of the Volutes, including the red clouded volute, the Chinese imperial volute, the bishop's mitre, and the papal crown, distributed upon tables 12 and 13. The Melons, the large varieties of which are put to domestic uses by the Chinese, the olives, and butter shells, upon table 11; the magilus, whelks, and the needle shell upon table 10; the purple shell that emits the colour from which it is named, the mulberry shell, and the unicorn shell, distributed upon table 9; the tun shell, the harps, the harp helmets, and the helmets upon which cameos are carved, distributed about tables 8 and 7; the spindle shells, including the great tulip shells, and the turnip shells, occasionally used as oil-vessels in Indian temples, distributed about the tables 5, 6, and 7 are all worth examination. The splendid cone shells, which include the king of the collection, pointed out to visitors as the glory of the sea, from the Philippine Islands, and the African setting sun cone, upon tables 5 and 4; the rock shells upon table 4: the trumpet shells upon table 3, so called after the large kinds which savage tribes have been known to use as horns; and upon the last two tables, the stombs, including the beautiful varieties from the West Indies and China, close the list.

* * * * *

The visitor has now reached the Southern Extremity of the Eastern Zoological Gallery, and brought his first visit to a conclusion. He may well pause, however, before dismissing from his mind the objects which have engaged his attention.

First, then, he examined the varieties of MAMMALIA. The mammalia, of which man himself is the highest type, are the leading class of the great order of vertebrate, or back-boned animals, and fishes are the lowest, the intermediate classes being birds and reptiles. VERTEBRATA are of higher rank in the animal kingdom than the mollusca, or soft-bodied animals, those having "red blood and a double-chambered heart." The mammalia are the class which suckle their young; second to them are the BIRDS; and then the blood cools, the organisation is inferior, and the REPTILES are produced; and lastly come the FISHES, with cold blood, and wanting aerial lungs. Philosophers, who have settled the scheme of the world as one of progression, complication, or development, trace animal life from the polypus, (which belongs to the order of Radiata, or animals that have a central point in which the vital force of the animal appears to preside, diverging in radii, as in the sea-eggs, starfishes, coral, sponges); the polypus advances to the Articulata, or jointed animals, including all kinds of worms, leeches, or ringed animals, of which insects are the most highly organised developments; next to the Mollusca, or soft-bodied animals; and then from these, which include the shell-fish, the scheme gradually progresses to the fish with backbones; and here the lowest order of Vertebrata is developed: the fish merges into the reptile, the reptile into the bird; the bird, as in the ornithorhyncus, into the Mammalia.

Thus the gradations of life may be clearly apprehended by the visitor. The highest development of animal life he has seen in the MAMMALIA SALOON, all the animals of which produce their young alive and suckle them; the order of life immediately below the mammalia, he has examined in the marvellous varieties of birds arranged in the NORTHERN GALLERY; then he turned to the west, and examined the third order of animal life in the REPTILES; then the fourth order represented by FISH; and so on till he watched the simpler forms of life in the STAR-FISH and the SPONGE.

The history of this marvellous progress of animal life, so far as scientific men have gazed into its deep mysteries, is surely worth attention. Few have the courage and the enthusiasm to follow each footstep of the tiny ant at his complex labours,--few are the Hubers that dwell among us; but to us all is given the love of that knowledge which opens our eyes to a few of the mysteries that lie thickly on our path, in the formation of the gravel upon which we tread, the clouds that grandly glide above us, and the leaves that gather upon the trees. After all the labours of our learned men, we are only now pressing, with trembling footsteps, the avenue to the endless schemes, and systems, and wonders, that lie buried in and about our world. Still let all who enter our museum, go there with the resolve to accomplish something by their visit. Even in the common concerns of life; in the petty matters that wear away the brain at last; in the market-places of the world, this insight is not without its effect. The heart is humbled as the eyes open to the grandeur of the scheme, and to the consequent littleness of individual manhood; but again, the breast swells with the purest of all pride, when the thinker says to himself: I am the King--because the hero or highest type of the Articulata, Radiata, Mammalia, or any order of vegetable or animal life. All these great and complicated developments are the beautiful works of the Great Unseen, but I am His masterpiece. One may well dream in this zoological museum, amid the staring glass-eyed skins of an inferior brotherhood--of the long, long time ago when the fossils, which are now scattered here and there, to assure us of their former vitality, moved about the world, before they were stricken with universal death, and buried by nature, deep in her teeming bosom, to flourish presently in the veins of plants--the plants to die again, and be dug, long ages after, from our deep coal-fields. These thoughts towards nature, towards the marvellous records of an antiquity, the remoteness of which we cannot realise, will rise to the minds of all visitors who can see in the vast collection of animal life through which we have guided them, revelations of the endless forms and the endless beauties that pass often unnoticed, because not understood, under every step that man takes in the many journeys that lie between his hopeful cradle and his inevitable grave.

END OF THE FIRST VISIT.

VISIT THE SECOND.

On entering the British Museum for the second time, the visitor should ascend the great staircase, pass through the south, central, and mammalia saloons; traverse the eastern zoological gallery, and continue north, direct into the first room of the most northern gallery of the northern wing;--where the studies of his second visit should begin. His first visit was occupied in the examination of the varieties of animal life distributed throughout the surface of the globe. The greater part of his time on this occasion will be devoted to the study of the wonders that lie under the surface of the earth; of the revelations of extinct animal life made by impressible rocks; and of the metallic wealth which human ingenuity has adapted to the wants and luxuries of mankind. In the fossil remains he will be able to recognise traces of an animal life, of which we have no living specimens; of trees, the like of which never rise from the bosom of the soil at the present time. The lessons that lie in these indistinct, disjointed revelations of the remote past, are pregnant with matter for earnest thought to all men. They are part of our history--links that hold us to the sources of things, and recall us again and again to the condition of our universe, as it trembled into space, and as now we inhabit it--a great and marvellous globe, every grain of which has an unfathomable story in it. Philosophers have laboured long at the story of the earth; and their revelations have tended to settle it, in a form not unlike the following:--

Originally, within the space bounded by the orbit of Uranus, a gaseous matter was diffused at a high temperature. By laws, the origin of which we have not yet traced, the condition of the diffused heat was changed, and the particles of the gaseous matter, condensed and agglomerated by attraction, into a series of planets, of which our earth is the third in point of size. That the earth has undergone vast changes, is evident to the most superficial geological student. We are only able to investigate the crust of the earth, with all our ingenious boring instruments: but even in this crust we may trace a gradual change, and recognise the silent operations of nature in ages never counted by man. According to the popular theory, the earth must have been sixty times as large as its present size, and have cooled to its present dimensions, retaining still, in its unfathomable bowels, a burning heat. The conclusions of geologists, after long and patient examination, are, that certain rocks mark the age of the world--that, in fact, the crust of the globe consists of a certain number of strata, each belonging to a certain era, as the rings of a tree tell its years of growth. The more they test this theory, the more certain are they that the history of our globe may be accurately read in the strata which compose its crust. "A granitic crust, containing vast and profound oceans, as is proved by the extent and thickness of the earliest strata, was the infant condition of the earth. Points of unconformableness in the overlying aqueous rocks, connected with protrusions of granites, and other similar presentments of the internal igneous mass, such as trap and basalt, mark the conclusions of subsequent sections in this grand tale. Dates, such as chronologists never dreamed of--compared with which, those of Egypt's dynasties are as the latter to a child's reckoning of its birthdays--have thus been presented to the now living generation, in connexion with the history of our planet."[5] These changing masses have been discovered with remains of organic life wrapped in their particles, each mass enclosing a petrified museum of the life that flourished while it was in course of formation: thus not only have we distinct proof of extinct forms of animal and vegetable life, but we are also able to assign the dates of their existence.

The MOST EASTERLY ROOM of the NORTHERN MINERAL and FOSSIL GALLERY, is that to which the visitor's attention will be first directed. In this room, as in the next three, the table cases are devoted to the minerals; and the wall cases, along the southern side of the gallery, are filled with

FOSSIL VEGETABLES.

The wall cases of this room contain the various strata which have traces of vegetable life. The earliest vegetable life of which the geologist has found fossil remains is in the form of sea-weeds, specimens of which the visitor will notice in case 1. The grand harmony of the world's development is shown in this adaptation of the earliest vegetable life to that of the earliest animal life--the polypus drawing its sustenance from the sea-weed. In the next three cases the visitor will notice various remains of fossil ferns (in clay slate) and horse-tails, all indicating the former high temperature and moisture of the localities in which they are found, since they are of large proportions, and it is observable that these plants grow in bulk according as they near the tropics. That the ferns and club mosses have diminished with the decrease of temperature of the earth, is proved by comparing the fossil club mosses, which have been found as large as beech trees, whereas at the present time the most gigantic club moss rarely exceeds three feet in height. In the lower sections of the third, fourth, and fifth cases, the visitor may notice some fine specimens of polished fossil woods; but the varieties of vegetable fossils can hardly engage his serious attention for any length of time, unless he have some real knowledge of botany and geology; yet he may gather the solemn teaching that lies in those dark masses of early coal formation and clay slate, even though he be unable to explain the first principles of botanical science. He may notice, however, in the fifth and sixth wall cases, fossil specimens of extinct plants, including the sigillaria, which, when living, is supposed to have attained often to the height of seventy feet. Having noticed these vegetable remains, the visitor should cross to the northern wall of the room, and examine the sandstones upon which the tracks of an extinct animal called the chirotherium--and footprints, supposed to be of birds, are distinguishable.

The central object in the room is a tortoise found in Hindostan, near Allahabad. It is carved out of nephrite or jade, and is deposited upon a curious table of inlaid ancient marbles. Against the eastern wall are deposited some beautiful varieties of branched native silver from Norway; Lady Chantrey's specimen of part of a coniferous tree, semi-opalised; and a mass of websterite from Newhaven, Sussex. The table cases now remain for examination. These are devoted to varieties of

MINERALS.