CHAPTER II.
THE FLOOR OF THE OCEAN.
The wonders of the ocean floor do not reveal themselves to vulgar eyes. As the oracle was inaudible to sacrilegious listeners, and as none but poetic ears heard the cadenced beating of the feet that danced to unearthly music, near the fountain haunted by the Muses of classic fable—so, none but the initiated can see the myriad miracles that each receding tide reveals on the ocean floor. The initiation, however, is not mysterious; there are no dark rites to observe—no Herculean labours to accomplish, before entering upon the noviciate, which at once opens a large area of unexpected pleasures, and an ample field for admiration and investigation. A few elementary works carefully studied, or even this present little book attentively perused, would supply the first helps towards _seeing_, at all events, a portion of the “wonders of the shore,” as the brilliant author of “Glaucus” has eloquently termed those revelations of the retiring deep.
It is the _seeing_ that is everything. But let none despair of acquiring that power. “The name of the Devonshire squire, Colonel George Montague” (thus wrote the late Professor Edward Forbes), “might have become one of the greatest in the whole range of British science, had his whole career been devoted to marine physiology;” and that mainly because, from a sincere devotion to a favourite pursuit of his leisure, he acquired the art of _seeing_—an art sought by so few, though open to all who will earnestly seek it.
Each department of science requires a separate and distinct kind of sight. The astute merchant deciphers at a glance the precise state of the most intricate accounts, in the midst of thousands of seemingly conflicting figures; but of the thousand interesting and wonderful things concerning the little beetle that crosses his path in his country walk, he is incapable of seeing any single particle; while the despised entomologist, whom he has contemptuously observed turning over the stones at the road-side, and peering curiously beneath them, could tell him a tale of wonder, could preach him a sermon upon that tiny type, such as would surely wake up many latent and unsuspected powers in his mind, that would enable him to _see_ wonders where all had previously been blank, and teach him that there are things well worthy of investigation beyond the region of money-making, and the attractive but narrow circle distinguished by the fascinating characters, £ _s._ _d._
Those who cannot _see_ Nature, who cannot see more than an unclean thing in the little creeping beetle, are like one gazing at a carved Egyptian record, who perceives, in the hieroglyphic scarabæus, simply the sculptured figure of a beetle, and no more—they are in a state of “Egyptian darkness” as regards one of the highest and most enchanting fields of human research. But to those who have acquired this rare though easy art, and learned to _see_ Nature, even to a moderate extent (for in that art are an infinite number of degrees and gradations), the aspect of the ocean floor must present an appearance as beautiful and strange, and seemingly as supernatural, as the wildest imagination could depicture.
When poets would travel, in their inventive flights, to other floating and revolving worlds than ours, they describe rosy skies, instead of azure, and trees like branching crystals, with jewel-like fruits glittering on every stem. They present us with pictures, in short, in which all the ordinary aspects of our planet are reversed, or metamorphosed, in the region of their invention; but in their most fanciful pictures they do not surpass in strangeness the wonders of the world beneath the sea.
On the land, we have, as the ordinary aspect of Nature, the green herbaceous mantle of the earth below the eye, and the azure sky above; while a spectator, standing beneath the water on the ocean floor, would see these features more than reversed: he would see above him a liquid atmosphere of green, and below, an herbage of red or of purple hue, exhibiting strange yet exquisite forms, such as no terrestrial vegetation displays. Roseate shrubs of jointed stone, and arborets of filmy glass, and creatures full of active, energetic life, whose forms are stranger still, both in structure and in appearance; mere worms, whose colours are gorgeous as the tints of the butterfly’s wing, or the peacock’s tail, or the humming-bird’s breast.
What scenery is formed by that translucent and miniature forest of _Delesseria sanguinea_, how lovely in its tones of soft rich crimson; and those fan-like shrubs, in crisply graceful tufts, the bright and singular _Padina pavonia_; and the tree-like masses of _Callithamnion arbuscula_, and the delicate _Ptilota plumosa_, and the purple-tinted _Corallines_, forming those
“Arborets of jointed stone.”
And then the high waving fronds of the grandly graceful _Porphyra vulgaris_, the deep carmine of the _Iridæa edulis_, the nacreous tinges of the _Chondrus crispus_, and the blood-red of the splendid _Rhodymenia lacinata_, with its embroidered and lace-like edges; these, with the gorgeous tufts of the rich purple _Bangia_, and other objects which form the elements of still life in a submarine landscape, surely cannot be surpassed, either for magnificence of colour or variety of structure.
But to these features must be added others more extraordinary—forms that the elder naturalists imagined to be links between the animal and vegetable creation, but which are now known to have no affinity whatever with plants, though they exhibit the appearance of expanded flowers of various hues, displaying the forms of the Carnation, the Anemone, the Mesembryanthemum, and other beautiful flowers whose names they bear. These curiously beautiful Zoöphytes, the wonderful _Actiniæ_, exhibit every tone of colour, from purple and scarlet, to green and white, and might be taken in their picturesquely-placed groups for rare exotic flowers, planted among the rosy-tinted shrubs expressly to add the last touch of richness and effect to the scenery of an ocean flower-show.
Yet they are not flowers, but animals—sea monsters, whose seeming delicate petals are but their thousand Briarean arms, disguised as the petals of a flower, and expanded to seize the unconscious victim as he passes near the beautiful form—fatal to him as the crater of a volcano; in which he is soon engulphed by the closing tentacles of his unsuspected enemy. And if he pass not near enough for that deadly floral embrace, those pretty crimson tubercles that dot so gracefully the seeming stalk, beneath the seeming flower, can shoot forth a thread, armed, like the fisher’s line, with a barbed hook, which strikes and secures the distant prey; and so the unwary _Annelid_ or _Infusory_ is captured and devoured. In this capacity the creature has been compared to Pope’s spider, who
“Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.”
But then the living thread of the _Actinia_ (or of the _Cirriped_, which has a similar power) is a fact, while the sensitive gossamer of the poet is a fiction.
But notwithstanding these ogre-like attributes, the lovely _Actinia_ long deceived our naturalists as to its true nature—and of course the poets—from whom his flower-like disc and petaloid tentacles completely concealed his grosser nature. Then, as the tide recedes, he so meekly closes his beautiful _oubliette_, with so much grace, and looking so much like those shrinking flowers that close at eve, as though they dared not to look on the black darkness of the night, that it is no wonder poets were beguiled, and that the romantic Southey sings of the _Actinia_ as of some lily of the deep that, on the retiring of the ocean,
“Sinks down within its purple stem to sleep.”
To add to the wonders of this strange landscape come the creeping _Nudibranchs_ and _Tectibranchs_, gliding over the gracefully-waving _Algæ_; their elegant forms decorated with their external breathing apparatus, like the pale skeleton of some delicate flower, so fine are its milk-white filaments, arranged nearly always in a symmetrical and star-like form. And then there are the singular and shadowy _Medusæ_ floating past, in the form of parachutes, with low suspended cars, just as though the science of ballooning had been carried to perfection under the sea; and that they were made of elastic glass, instead of silk, though richly flushed with iridescent and varying tinges, sometimes metallic azure, and anon emerald green; hues that seem added by some delicate process which the glass-blowers above the water have not yet discovered. Some of these creatures are fragile as a soap-bubble, to which their transparency and prismatic flashes of colour give them a curious resemblance; and their ephemeral existence, dependent upon the will of even an angry ripple of the element in which they live, is doubtless as brief.
The deep has even its butterflies, as well as the land. The fluttering of the fins of some small and brightly-coloured fish has been compared to the action of the wings of moths—as also the members, likewise used for locomotive purposes, of some of the animals of the univalve shells. Then there are minute phosphorescent animals, which represent the fire-flies of the south, pouring a living flood of light as they glide along—some emitting silvery, and others golden flashes, like floating lamps that seem hurrying to light up the darkness of the far ocean depths.
Even the worms are gorgeous and wonderful in this subaqueous world. The _Serpulæ_, with their radiating coronets of crimson _branchiæ_; the _Pectinaria_, with its golden comb, glittering in burnished brightness; and the _Nereis_, with white and crimson stripes—are all wonderful as well as beautiful objects. But the _Halithea_, or sea-goddess, as Lamark has named it, from the extraordinary beauty and the gorgeous colours that radiate from the silky hairs with which it is clothed, surpasses them all.
These, and other wonders of still greater beauty, will reward the persevering student who learns to _see_ them; but then he _must_ learn. Even the intellectual giant, Shakspeare, could not see clearly many of the minuter things of Nature. In his line upon the slow-worm, for instance, vulgarly called the blind-worm, which he describes as
“The eyeless, venomed worm,”
are concentrated two mistakes; in the first place, the minute eyes of this little creature are brilliant in the extreme, and not very difficult to discover, to the naturalist who has learnt to see nature; and, in the second place, it has no venom, its tiny bite being perfectly harmless. In another place he speaks of
“The blind-worm’s _sting_.”
But it is useless to multiply examples of the physiological errors of great men who had not learned to _see_ Nature; or, Milton’s errors in regard to the leaf of the Banyan-tree, and many others, might be readily cited.
There are many glorious things to be seen in the sea, but we have to learn to _see_ them; and those who find they cannot see with their own eyes, must do so through the more gifted sense of others. To many—how many, unguided by an able Cicerone—the fields round Selborne would appear common and uninteresting enough; but guided by a Gilbert White, whose searching eye knew even the hidden forms of plants, whose ear at once distinguished and classified the song of birds, and even the buzz of insects—guided by him, things assume a far different aspect; like another Prospero, he waves his wand, and every object begins to brighten, and a thousand new and beautiful features develop themselves under the magic of his descriptions; crowds of marvels springing up around, as from enchanted ground. In like manner, guided by the fascinating science of a Johnston or a Harvey, or the persuasive industry of a Gosse, or the eloquently glowing descriptions of a Kingsley, students, who have not the energy or leisure to work for themselves, will find the dark ocean glow with an unexpected light; and the delighted explorer will long for the power to renew the impressions of his sea-side rambles after his return to his inland home, perhaps in the heart of a densely-populated city. Even this he may now do through the medium of the marine Aquarium, within the narrow boundaries of which he may, with a little care and experience, establish in healthy existence some of the most beautiful of the animal and vegetable forms that people the caves and depths of the ocean, and make its watery world a region of wonders.