CHAPTER II.

THE MILKY SEA.

The water of the Sea, even the purest, examined when you are far away from land, and from all possible admixture, is somewhat viscuous; take some between your fingers, and you find it somewhat ropy and tenacious. Chemical analysis has not yet explained this peculiarity; there is in that an organic substance which Chemistry touches only to destroy, taking from it all that it has of special, and violently reducing it back to general elements.

The marine plants and animals are covered with this substance, whose mucousness gives them the appearance of a coating of jelly, now fixed, anon trembling, and always semi-transparent. And nothing more than this contributes to the fanciful illusions presented to us by the world of waters. Its reflections are irregular, often strangely variegated, as, for instance, on the scales of fish and on the molluscæ, which seem to owe to it the exquisite beauty of their pearly shells.

It is that which most attracts and enchains the interest of the child when he first sees a fish. I was very young when I first saw one, but I still remember how vividly I felt the impression. That creature with variously colored lights flashing from its silvery scales, threw me into an astonishment, a fascination, a rapture, which no words can describe. I endeavored to catch it, but found that it could no more be held than the water which glided through my small weak hand. That fish seemed to me to be identical with the element in which it swam, and gave me a confused idea of animated, organized and surpassingly beautiful water.

A long time after, in my maturity, I was scarcely less impressed when on a sea beach I saw, I know not what of shining and transparent substance, through which I could clearly see the sand and pebbles. Colorless as crystal, slightly, very slightly solid, tremulous when ever so slightly touched, it seemed to me as to the ancients and to Réaumur, that which Réaumur so graphically named it--_gelatinised water_.

Still more forcibly do we feel this impression when we discover in the early stage of their formation the yellowish white threads in which the sea makes her first outlines of the fuci and algæ which are to harden and darken to the strength and color of hides and leather. But when quite young, in their viscuous state, and in their elasticity, they have the consistence of a solidified wave, all the stronger because it is soft. What we now know of the generation and the complex organization of the inferior creatures, animal or vegetable, contradicts the explanation of Réaumur and the ancients. But all this does not forbid us to return to the question which was first put by Borg. de Saint Vincent; viz: What is the _mucus_ of the Sea? That viscuousness which water in general presents? Is it not the universal element of life?

Much engaged with these and the like reflections, I called upon an illustrious chemist, a man at once positive and sound, an innovator no less prudent than bold, and I abruptly asked him this plain question--"What, in your opinion, is that whitish, viscuous matter which we find in sea water?" "Nothing else than life," was his reply, then retracting, or rather explaining his somewhat too simple and too absolute dictum, he added, "I should rather say a half organized and wholly organizable matter. In certain waters it is a dense mass of infusoriæ, in others a matter which is not yet, but which is to become infusoriæ. In fact, we have yet to begin, at all seriously, the study of this matter."

This was spoken on the 17th of May, 1860.

On leaving our great Chemist, I went to a Physiologist, whose opinion has no less weight with me, and to him I put the same question. His reply was very long and very beautiful. In substance it ran thus: "We know in reality no more about the composition of water than we know about that of blood. What we best know and can most safely affirm about the _mucus_ of sea water, is that it is at once an Alpha and an Omega, a beginning and an end. Is it the result of the numberless deaths which furnish forth materials for new lives? No doubt, that is the general law; but in the case of the sea, that world of rapid absorption, the majority of the creatures there are absorbed while in full life; they do not slowly linger on towards death, as we on land do. The sea is a very pure element; war and death purvey to it. But life, without arriving at its final dissolution, is incessantly approaching it, exuding and exhaling all that is superfluous. With us, the animals of the earth, the epidermis, through its millions of pores, wastes the body at every instant; we suffer, as it were, a partial death at every breath we draw. Now this partial death, this vast exudation, in the case of the marine world, fills that vast world of waters with a gelatinous wealth of which the young world has the instant benefit. It finds in suspension the oily superabundance of this common exudation, the still living atoms and liquids which have not had time to die. All this does not fall back into the inorganic, but enters quickly into new organisms. Of all the theories on the subject, this seems the most reasonable; rejecting this theory, we plunge into a sea of extreme difficulties."

These ideas of the most enlightened and earnest thinkers of the present day, are not irreconcilable with those which, nearly thirty years ago were promulgated by Geoffrey Saint Hilaire, upon that general _mucus_ in which nature seems to find all life. He calls it "the _animalisible_ substance, the raw material of organic bodies. Not a creature, whether animal or vegetable, but both absorbs and produces it from the earliest to the latest breath; indeed, the weaker the creature, the more abundant that is."

This remark suggests a broad and bright light upon the life of the seas. Their tenants seem, for the most part, foetuses in the gelatinous stage, which absorb and produce the mucous substance, permeate and saturate with it all the waters, and give to them the fecund and nourishing powers of a vast womb, in whose depths an infinite succession of generations, perpetually float, as in warm milk.

Let us make ourselves present in this divine work. Let us take a drop from the sea; in it we shall be able to espy the very process of the primitive creation. Nature's God is ever consistent; he does not work in one fashion to-day, and in another to-morrow. This drop of water, I doubt not, will tell us in its transformations, the tale of the Universe. Let us be patient, and observe. Who can foresee or guess the history of this drop of water? Which will it first produce, the vegetable-animal, or the animal-vegetable? Will this drop be the infusoriæ, the primitive _monad_, which, vibrating, shall shortly become _vibrion_, and ascending step by step, from rank to rank, polypus, coral, or pearl, may perchance in ten thousand years reach the dignity of insect? Will it produce the vegetable thread, so slight and silken that one would scarcely discern it, and yet already is no less than the first born hair, amorous and sensitive, which is so well known as _Venus's hair_? This is no fable--it is true natural history. This hair, of double nature, at once animal and vegetable, is, in fact, the commencement of life.

Look quite down into the depths of a vessel of water; at first you discover nothing; patience for a few moments and you perceive drops, atomies, that are moving. Bring a good glass into the service, and you see a whole cloud of these atomies. Are they gelatinous or fleecy? Under the microscope this seeming fleece becomes a group of filaments, of finest and silkiest threads; a thousand times finer, it is believed, than the finest hair that adorns the head of woman. You are now looking upon the first timid attempt of life that is struggling to achieve organization. These confervæ, these hair-weeds, are to be found wherever there is stagnant water, whether fresh or salt. They are the commencement of that double series of the primary vegetation of the sea which became terrestrial when the earth emerged from the watery depths. Once above and beyond the waters, they become the vast, the numberless Fungus-family; in the water, they are the hair-weeds, the many-formed and many-named Algæ.

This is the primitive, the indispensable element of organized vitality, and we find it even where we should, at the first glance deem it to be impossible. Even in the dark depths of the ferruginous waters, supersaturated with iron; even in the all but boiling hot springs, you find this mucus, this abounding mass of little creatures, moving, writhing, agitated ever, which to your first glance, seem only so many lifeless specks. You need not greatly care into what class our finite and dim science consigns them. If Candolle honors them with the title of animals, if Dujardin, on the other hand, degrades them into the low rank of the lowest vegetation--let us not stay to heed these mere names. Such as they are, all that they ask is that they may live and that their humble existence may open up the long series of beings which, but for them, would never be. These atomies, whether we call them living or dead, or passing from life to death, or vigorously struggling from death into organic life, are self-supporting, independently struggling, and ever taking and giving from and to the maternal waters, the life creating and the life supporting gelatine.

It really is without any approach, even, to probability, that they show us, as specimens of the first creation, the primitive organization, the fossil imprints, more or less complex, whether of animal or vegetable--of the Trilobites, for instance, already furnished with the superior organs--eyes, &c.,--or gigantic vegetation, widely branched and richly foliaged. It is beyond all computation more probable that these were preceded and heralded, and prepared, by species far more simple, but of such yielding and destructible matter that it could make no impress, leave no mark behind. How can we expect that those gelatinous, those almost liquid creatures should _not_ "die and make no sign" when we see that the hard shells are ground into very dust? In the South Seas we see fish with teeth so sharp, at once, and of such iron strength that they browse on the tough coral, even as the timid sheep browses on the tender grass-blades. Oh! Depend upon it, generation after generation of the soft gelatinous germs of life have breathed before nature put forth its robust Trilobite and its imperishable ferns.

Let us be just to these conservæ; let us restore to them their pretty obvious right to eldership in this glad and various world of ours. Be they animal or be they vegetable, or do they vibrate and struggle between both--let us at least do them justice, let us speak about them all that is evidently true.

Upon them, and at their expense, arose the immense, the really marvellous marine Flora.

At that starting point I will not hesitate to express my tender sympathy. For three very sound and sufficient reasons I love and I bless that vast vegetation; small or large, that vegetation has three lovely qualities:--

Firstly, how innocent are all its members. Not one of them all is poisonous. Vainly in the whole marine vegetation shall you search for one poisonous plant. Seek in every sea, and in every latitude, you will find the vegetation wholesome, genial, a blessing and a mercy.

Those innocent plants ask for nothing more than to nourish or to heal animality. Many of them, the Laminaires, for instance, contain a luscious sugar; and others, as, for instance, the Corsican or Irish Moss, have a health-restoring bitter; and all, without exception, contain a concentrated and most nourishing mucilage, not a few of them saviours to the weak, worn, perishing lungs of presumptuous and ungrateful man. Where we now exhibit iodide, the English formerly used nothing but a confection of that same Corsican, or Irish, Moss.

The third characteristic of that vegetation is its marvellous amorousness. We cannot doubt that if we pay the slightest attention to its strange hymeneial metamorphoses, here is the striving to be, beyond being, to be potent beyond power. We see it in the fire flies and the like small things, and we see it no less, if we will only look for it, in the sea weeds which, at the consecrated moment, seem to quit their merely vegetable life and leap into animality.

Where do these wonders commence? Where are these first sketches of animality made? Where are we to look for the primitive scene of organization?

Formerly these things were hotly disputed; in our own day there seems to be a certain agreement in the learned world of Europe. I can find the reply to these questions in many recognized and authorized volumes, but I prefer to borrow it from an Essay recently crowned by the Academy of Sciences, and, consequently, shielded by its high, unquestionable authority.

Living creatures are found in the hot waters of eighty, even up to ninety, degrees. It is when the cooled globe gets down to that temperature that life becomes possible. The water has then absorbed, at least in part, that terrible element of death--carbonic acid gas. It becomes possible to breathe.

All the seas were at first like those parts of the great Pacific Ocean, which are comparatively shallow, and are studded with small, low islets. These islets are extinct craters of by-gone volcanoes; the seaman knows them only by the summits which the slow but steadfast toil of the coral insect has upheaved from the depths. But the depths between these volcanoes are probably themselves no less volcanic, and must have been, for the first essays of primitive creation, so many receptacles of life.

Popular tradition has, for ages past, attributed to volcanoes the guardianship of buried treasures, which from time to time give out to our upper world the gold that lies buried in the depths.--Poetic fiction, which yet has its firm foundation in fact. The volcanic regions have within themselves the treasure of our globe, potent virtues of fecundity. It is they that most largely dower the otherwise sterile earth; from the dust of their lavas, from their still warm ashes, life springs, expands, glows, and creates new life. We recognize the wealth of Vesuvius, and of Etna in the long offshoots that they send far into the Sea, and we know what a lovely paradise is formed under the Himalayas, by the volcanic circle of the vale of Cachemire. And the same thing is repeated in the lovely isles of the far South Sea.

Even under the least favorable circumstances, the vicinity of volcanoes, and the warm currents which are their concomitants, create and preserve animal life, even in the most desolate and dreary places. Amidst all the freezing horrors of the Antarctic pole, not far from the volcanic Erebus, Captain James Ross found living coral insects at the depth of a thousand fathoms below the surface of the frozen sea.

In the early ages of our world, innumerable volcanoes exerted a submarine action far more powerful than they exhibit now. Their clefts and their intermediate valleys allowed the marine mucus to accumulate in places, and to be electrified into life by the warm currents. No doubt the _mucus_ affected those parts, fixed itself there and worked and fermented to the utmost of its young power. Its leaven was the attraction of the substance for itself. The creative elements, originally dissolved in the sea formed combinations, leagues, I had well nigh written marriages. First appeared, merely elementary lives--death following almost inseparably, indistinguishably, upon young life; and other lives following close upon, and nourished by, those wrecks and spoils, had firmer hold on life, became preparatory beings, slow but sure creators, which, thenceforth, began beneath the waters that eternal labor which, even in our own day and beneath our own scrutiny, they still continue.

The sea nourishing them all, gives to each that which best suits it. Each draws from that great nursing-mother, in its own fashion, and for its own especial behoof, that which it most needs, must have, to make it what we see of naked, or of shelled, of seeming vegetable, or of fierce, vigorous, and pugnacious life. And whether in life or in death, whether building actively or passively decomposing, they clothe the sad nudity of the virgin rocks, those daughters of the volcanic fires from which flaming and sterile, they were hurled from the planetary nucleus.

Quartz, basalt, porphyry, and semi-vitrified flints, each and all receive from these minute laborers a new, a more graceful, and a more fecund garb; from the fecund maternal milk (for such we must call the _mucus_ of the Sea) they absorb and restore, and thus build up, and secure, and fructify, and beautify, this, our habitable earth. It is from these more favoring localities that have arisen our primal species.

These works must have been commenced among the volcanic isles and islets, in the depths of their Archipelagoes, in those sinuous windings, those peaceful labyrinths where the tides enter timidly and gently, warm and sheltered cradles for the newly-born.

But the bolder strength of the fully-expanded flower, is to be sought for in, for instance, the vast depths of the Indian Gulfs. There, the Sea is veritably a great artist. There she gives to the earth its most adorable forms, lively, loving, and lovable. With her assiduous caresses she rounds or slopes the shore, and gives it those maternal outlines, and I had almost said the visible tenderness of that feminine bosom on which the pleased child finds so softly safe a shelter, such warmth, such saving warmth, and rest.