THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Biology BEQUEST OF Theodore S. Palmer DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST POPULAR WORKS ON SCIENCE BY SIR RAY LANKESTER, K.C.B., F.R.S. Published by METHUEN & Co. LTD. SCIENCE FROM AN EASY CHAIR. First Series. SCIENCE FROM AN EASY CHAIR. Second Series. Published by CONSTABLE & Co. FROM AN EASY CHAIR. EXTINCT ANIMALS. Published by the RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION THE KINGDOM OF MAN. A CORNER IN A MARINE AQUARIUM, PAINTED KY PHILIP HENRY GOSSE, F.R.S. The scene shows the great white Sea Anemone of Weymouth. In front are two richly coloured sea-worms (Serpula) issuing from their calcareous tubes, attached to a dead scallop's shell. The green sea-gtass(Zostera) and a translucent pink sea-weed, left and right, complete the picture DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST BY SIR RAY \LANKESTER K.G.B., F.R.S. WITH A FRONTISPIECE IN COLOUR AND FORTY-THREE OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS THIRD EDITION METHUEN & GO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.G. LONDON First Published . . . September ibth Second Edition. . . . October Third Edition .... 79/9 GIFT Q-n PREFACE AT this time of stress and anxiety we all, however steadfast in giving our service to the great task in which our country is engaged, must, from time to time, seek intervals of release from the torrent of thoughts which is set going by the tremendous fact that we are fighting for our existence. To very many relief comes in splendid self-sacrificing action, in the joyful exercise of youthful strength and vigour for a noble cause. But even these, as well as those who are less fortunate, need intervals of diversion brief change of thought and mental occupation after which they may return to their great duties rested and refreshed. I know that there are many who find a never-failing source of happiness in acquaintance with things belonging to that vast area of Nature which is beyond and apart from human misery, an area unseen and unsuspected by most of us and yet teeming with things of exquisite beauty ; an area capable of yielding to man knowledge of inestimable value. Many are apt to think that the value of " Science " is to be measured mainly if not exclusively, by the actual power which it has 513 vi DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST conferred on man mechanical and electrical devices, explosives, life-saving control over disease. They would say of Science, as the ignoble proverb tells us of Honesty, that it is "the best policy." But Honesty is far more than that, and so is Science, Science has revealed to man his own origin and history, and his place in this world of un-ending marvels and beauty. It has given him a new and unassailable outlook on all things both great and small. Science commends itself to us as does Honesty and as does great Art and all fine thought and deed not as a policy yielding material profits, but because it satisfies man's soul. I offer these chapters to the reader as possibly afford- ing to him, as their revision has to me, a welcome escape, when health demands it, from the immense and inexorable obsession of warfare. The several chapters have been selected from articles entitled " Science from an Easy Chair" written in recent years by me for the " Daily Telegraph." Under that title I have already pub- lished two volumes of similar selections. I have chosen a new title, " Diversions of a Naturalist," for this third volume in order to avoid confusion with the earlier ones. Illustrative drawings have been introduced into several of the articles and a few alterations made in the text. But they remain essentially what their origin implies namely, detached essays addressed to a wide public. 1 wish to thank my friend Dr. Smith Woodward of the Natural History Museum for the figures 23, 25, 26, PREFACE vii 27, 28, 29, and 30, illustrating Chapter X, and also to thank Messrs. Veitch for the use of figures 33, 34, 35, 40, and 42. I have copied figures 4 to 8, n, 19, and 20 from the drawings made by Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S., and published by him in that wonderful little book " Marine Zoology," now long out of print. I have also borrowed my frontispiece from the book on "The Aquarium" by that great naturalist and lover of the seashore. Many beautiful coloured plates of marine animals executed by his skilful hand are to be found in that and other works published by him. E. R. L. 16 June 1915 CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. ON A NORWEGIAN FIORD i II. NATURE-RESERVES . . . . .13 III. FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD . . -23 IV. THE GREAT GREY SEAL . . . .32 V. THE GROUSE AND OTHER BIRDS . . .41 VI. THE SAND AND PEBBLES OF THE SEASHORE . 48 VII. THE CONSTITUENTS OF A SEABEACH . . -55 VIII. QUICKSANDS AND FIRE-STONES . . .64 IX. AMBER ....... 70 X. SEA- WORMS AND SEA-ANEMONES . .77 XI. CORAL-MAKERS AND JELLY-FISH . . .88 XII. SHRIMPS, CRABS, AND BARNACLES . . .98 XIII. BARNACLES AND OTHER CRUSTACEANS . . 108 XIV. THE HISTORY OF THE BARNACLE AND THE GOOSE 117 XV. MORE AS TO THE BARNACLE AND THE GOOSE . 129 XVI. SEA-SHELLS ON THE SEASHORE . . .142 IX DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST CHAP. PAGE XVII. SAND-HOPPERS . . . . .152 XVIII. A Swiss INTERLUDE . . . .160 XIX. SCIENCE AND DANCING . . . .170 XX. COURTSHIP . . . . . .180 XXI. COURTSHIP IN ANIMALS AND MAN . .189 XXII. COURTSHIP AND DISPLAY . . . .197 XXIII. COURTSHIP, INSTINCT AND REASON . . 205 XXIV. DADDY-LONG-LEGS . . . . .216 XXV. THE MOTH AND THE CANDLE . . .226 XXVI. FROM APE TO MAN . . . .236 XXVII. THE SKELETON OF APES AND OF MAN . . 245 *XVIII. THE BRAIN OF APES AND OF MAN . .253 XXIX. THE MIND OF APES AND OF MAN . . 262 XXX. THE MISSING LINK. . . . .275 XXXI. THE SUPPLY OF PURE MILK . . .292 XXXII. CHRISTMAS TREES AND OTHER PINE TREES . 302 XXXIII. THE LYMPH AND THE LYMPHATIC SYSTEM 332 XXXIV. THE BLOOD AND ITS CIRCULATION 342 XXXV. FISH AND FAST DAYS . 351 XXXVI. SCIENCE AND THE UNKNOWN . . . 361 CONTENTS xi CHAP. PAGE XXXVII. DIVINATION AND PALMISTRY . . .367 XXXVIII. TOADS FOUND LIVING IN STONE . . -376 XXXIX. THE DIVINING-ROD . 3^3 XL. BIRTH-MARKS AND TELEGONY . . .396 XLI. HOW TO PROMOTE SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY BY MONEY . . . . .408 INDEX t 4 : 7 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS THE WEYMOUTH ANEMONE, ACTINOLOBA DIANTHUS, AND THE CONTORTED TUBE-WORM SERPULA CONTOR- TUPLICATA ..... Frontispiece FIG. PAGE 1. A PORTION OF THE BRANCHING TUBULAR GROWTH FORMED BY R.HABDOPLEURA NORMANI . 5 2. ONE OF THE POLYPS OF RHABDOPLEURA . . . 7 3. A PIECE OF THE WHITE BRANCHING CORAL (LOPHO- HELIA PROLIFERA) . ... 9 4. BRITISH MARINE WORMS OR CH^ETOPODS . .78 5. THE SHELL OF THE HEART-URCHIN (SPATANGUS PUR- PUREUS) WITH ITS SPINES RUBBED OFF . . 80 6. BRITISH SEA- ANEMONES . . . . .85 7. A COMMON BRITISH JELLY-FISH . . 94 8. A COMMON BRITISH JELLY-FISH . . .96 9. THE LARVAL OR YOUNG FORM OF CRUSTACEA KNOWN AS "THE NAUPLIUS" .... 105 10. THE COMMON SHIP'S BARNACLE, LEPAS ANATIFERA . 109 11. A LARGE BRITISH SEA-ACORN, BALANUS PORCATUS . no 12. Two STAGES IN THE GROWTH OF THE COMMON BARNACLE FROM THE NAUPLIUS STAGE . .112 13. THE PICTURE OF THE " GOOSE TREE," COPIED FROM THE FIRST EDITION OF GERARD'S "HERBAL" . 123 xiii xiv DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST FIG - PAGE 14. FANCIFUL DESIGNS BY MYKEN^LAN ARTISTS, SHOWING CHANGE OF THE CUTTLEFISH (OCTOPUS OR " POULPE ") INTO A BULL'S HEAD AND OTHER SHAPES 1 3 1 15. THE GOOSE AND THE BARNACLE . . . .133 16. COPY OF A SERIES OF MODIFIED GEESE PAINTED ON AN EARLY MYKEN/EAN POT, FIGURED BY M. PERROT 134 17. Two DRAWINGS ON POTTERY OF MODIFIED GEESE, FROM PERROT'S "OSSUAIRE DE CRETE" . -135 1 8. LEAVES FROM THE TREE, DRAWN ON A MYKEN/EAN POT 136 19. SOME BRITISH MARINE BIVALVE MOLLUSCS . . 144 20. THE Two COMMON KINDS OF "SAND-HOPPER". . 153 21. A PHOSPHORESCENT SHRIMP (EUPHAUSIA PELLUCIDA) . 154 22. THE CRANE-FLY (DADDY-LONG-LEGS), TIPULA OLERACEA 217 23. COMPARISON OF THE RIGHT HALF OF THE LOWER JAW OF A, MODERN EUROPEAN ; B, EOANTHROPUS FROM PlLTDOWN; AND C, CHIMPANZEE . . . 277 24. DIAGRAMS OF THE LOWER SURFACE OF THE LOWER JAW OF A, MAN ; B, THE EOANTHROPUS OF PILT- DOWN (THE LEFT HALF RE-CONSTRUCTED) ; AND C, THE CHIMPANZEE . . . . .283 25. THE PILTDOWN JAW AND THE HEIDELBERG JAW . 286 26. THE CANINE TOOTH OF THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE LOWER JAW OF EOANTHROPUS DAWSONI . . . 287 27. CANINE TOOTH OF THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE LOWER JAW OF A EUROPEAN CHILD, MILK DENTITION . 287 28. THE PILTDOWN JAW (EOANTHROPUS) . . .288 29. COMPLETE SKULL AND JAW OF EOANTHROPUS DAWSONI 290 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xv FIG. PAGE 30. THE COMPLETE SKULL AND JAW OF A YOUNG CHIMPANZEE . . . . . .290 31. A FERTILE BRANCH OF THE SCOTS FIR, PINUS SYLVESTRIS ...... 305 32. THE COMMON YEW, TAXUS BACCATA , . .310 33. A THIN SLICE ACROSS ONE OF THE FOLIAGE NEEDLES OF THE COMMON SPRUCE . . . .314 34. A THIN SLICE ACROSS ONE OF THE FOLIAGE NEEDLES OF THE SILVER FIR . . . . .315 35. THE UPRIGHT FEMALE CONE OF THE SILVER FIR, ABIES PECTINATA . . . . .316 36. STRUCTURE OF THE FEMALE CONE OF THE SILVER FIR 317 37. THE FEMALE CONE OF THE COMMON SPRUCE, PICEA EXCELSA . . . . . . . 318 38. THE FEMALE CONE AND THE FOLIAGE OF THE COMMON LARCH, LARIX EUROPCEA . . . .319 39. FEMALE CONE OF THE PINASTER, OR MARITIME PINE (PINUS PINASTER) . . . . .323 40. FEMALE CONE OF THE MONTEREY PINE OF CALIFORNIA (PINUS INSIGNIS) . . ... .325 41. FEMALE CONE OF PINUS MURICATA . . .326 42. FEMALE CONE OF THE DOUGLAS FIR OF NORTH-WEST AMERICA, PSEUDOTSUGA DOUGLASII . . .327 43. THE FORE-ARM OF MAN, WITH THE SKIN REMOVED so AS TO SHOW THE LARGE SUPERFICIAL LYMPHATIC VESSELS RESTING ON THE MUSCLES . . .334 OH ! how light and lovely the air is upon the earth ! How beautiful thou art, my earth, my golden, my emerald, my sapphire earth ! Who, born to thy heritage would choose to die, would wish to close his eyes upon thy serene beauties and upon thy magnificent spaces ? FEODOR SOLOGUB. XVI DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST 4* CHAPTER I ON A NORWEGIAN FIORD THE splendour of our Sussex Weald, with its shady forests and lovely gardens, around which rise the majestic Downs sweeping in long graceful curves marked by the history of our race, has charmed me during these sunny days of June. The orchids, the water-lilies, the engaging and quaintly named " petty whin," and the pink rattle are joined with the tall foxgloves and elder-blossoms in my memory. And for some reason perhaps it is the heat I am set thinking of very different scenes the great, cool fiords of Norway, with their rocky islets and huge, bare mountain-tops, where many years ago I had the "time of my life " in exploring with the naturalist's dredge the coral-grown sea-bottom 1000 and even 2000 feet in a straight line below the little boat in which I and my companion and three Norwegian boatmen floated on the dark purple waves. To let a dredge an oblong iron frame some three feet long, to the edges of which a bag of strong netting is laced, whilst the frame is hung to a rope by a mystical triangle sink from the side of a boat and scrape the 2 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST surface of the ocean-floor far below for some ten or twenty minutes, and then to haul it up again and see what living wonders the unseen world has sent you, is, in my opinion, the most exciting and delightful sport in which a naturalist can indulge. There are difficulties and drawbacks connected with it. You cannot, in a small boat and without expenditure of large sums on a steam yacht and crew, reach from our coast with rare excep- tions in the north-west with a fair prospect of returning in safety, those waters which are i oo fathoms deep. And it is precisely in such depths that the most interesting " hauls " are to be expected. I had had in former days to be content with 10 fathoms in the North Sea and 30 to 40 off the Channel Islands. Then there is the question of sea-sickness. Nothing is so favourable to that diversion as slowly towing a dredge. I used to take the chance of being ill, and often suffered that for which no other joy than the hauling in of a rich dredgeful of rare sea creatures could possibly com- pensate, or induce me to take the risk (as I did again and again). I remember lying very ill on the deck of a slowly lurching " lugger " in a heaving sea off Guernsey, when the dredge came up, and as its contents were turned out near me, a semi-transparent, oblong, flattened thing like a small paper-knife began to hop about on the boards. It was the first specimen I ever saw alive of the " lancelet " (Amphioxus), that strange, fish-like little creature, the lowest of vertebrates. I recognized him and immediately felt restored to well-being, seized the young stranger, and placed him in a special glass jar of clear sea-water. A few years later the fishermen at Naples would bring me, without any trouble to myself, twenty or more any day of the week (" cimbarella " they called them), and I not only have helped to make out the cimbarella's anatomy ON A NORWEGIAN FIORD 3 Wr but also to discover the history of the extraordinary changes it undergoes as it grows from the egg. I sent my pupil Dr. Willey, now professor in Montreal, one summer to a nearly closed sea-lake, the " pantano " of Faro, near Messina, where the lancelet breeds. He brought home hundreds of minute young in various stages, and again later made a second visit to that remote sea-lake in order to complete our knowledge of their growth and structure by observation on the spot. The advantage of the Norwegian fiords for a naturalist who loves to " dredge " is that at many parts of the coast you can sail into water of 200 fathoms depth and more, within three minutes from the rocky shore ; and, secondly, that the great passage between the islands and the mainland is, to a very large extent, protected from those movements of the surface which cause such torture to many innocent people who venture on the sea in boats! Accordingly, in 1882, when I heard from the greatest naturalist-dredger of his day the Rev. Canon Norman, of Durham that he knew a farmhouse at Lervik, on the island of Stordo, near the mouth of the Hardanger Fiord, between Bergen and Stavanger where one could stay, and where a boat could be hired for a couple of months I determined to go there. I was confirmed in my purpose by the fact that Canon Norman had obtained in his dredge, at a spot near Lervik, which he marked for me on the large- scale official map of the region, a very curious little polyp-like animal, attached to and branching on the stems of the white coral which one dredges there at the depth of 150 fathoms. The little animal in quest ol which I went, though other wonderful things were to be expected also, had been dredged originally by Dr. Norman off the Shetland Islands, and described by 4 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST Professor Allman, of Edinburgh. But they had not examined it in the living state with the microscope, and though they showed that it was quite unlike other polyps, yet there was obvious need for further examina- tion of it. I hoped to obtain its eggs and to watch its early growth. The name given to it by Allman was " Rhabdopleura," meaning " rod-walled," alluding to a rod-like cord which runs along the inside of the delicate branching tube (only the one-twentieth of an inch wide), which the little animal constructs and inhabits. I sent a chest containing glass jars, microscopes, books, chemicals, etc., and my dredge, as well as a large windlass, on which was coiled 600 fathoms of rope, by sea to Lervik, and started in early July, with my assistant, Dr. Bourne (afterwards Director of Education in the Madras Presidency), overland, via Copenhagen, for Christiania. Thence we drove in " carioles " across Norway to Laerdalsoren, on the west coast, making acquaintance with the magnificent waters rivers, lakes, and cascades of that pine-grown land. After visiting the Naerodal and the glaciers which descend from the mountains into the sea on the Fjaerlands Fiord, we took steamer to Lervik, and were welcomed at our farmhouse by its owner, the sister of the member of Parliament for the surrounding region (about four times the area of Yorkshire), whose son secured for me a fair-sized sailing boat, and with two other men of Lervik engaged as my crew for six weeks. After a day or two we had everything in order, and at seven o'clock one morning sailed out of the harbour to make our first cast of the dredge. The mouth of the harbour of Lervik is 40 fathoms deep, and the great north-bound steamers enter it and come alongside the FIG. i. A portion of the branching tubular growth formed by Rhabdopleura Normani, fixed to and spreading over the smooth surface of an Ascidian, dredged at Lervik and drawn of three times the natural dimensions. The colourless tubes (b) stand urj freely from the surface to which the rest of the growth is adherent, and from each of them issues in life (as seen at bb) a polyp such as that shown in Fig. 2. Each polyp is continuous with the dark internal cord (or rod) which is seen traversing the whole of the tubular system, a, points to the main and oldest portion of the branching stem ; c, points to a " leading " shoot which is still adherent and will give rise to young buds right and left which will form upright tubes like b. The inset d represents a piece of the tube magnified so as to show the rings by which it is built up. 6 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST rocks on which the village stands. Outside the harbour the depth increases precipitously to 200 fathoms. We sailed about 10 miles along the fiord, and determined precisely the spot indicated by Dr. Norman on the map, and here we lowered our dredge. We had fixed around the mouth of the dredge long tassels of hemp fibre, since on rocky ground, such as we were now dredging, one cannot expect much to be " scooped up " by the slowly travelling dredge as it passes over the bottom, whilst the threads of the hemp, on the contrary, entangle and hold all sorts of objects with which they come into contact. We were 1000 feet from the bottom, and our dredge took a good five minutes to sink as we paid out the rope from the winch in the stern of our boat. When it reached the bottom we let out another 2000 feet of rope, and then very slowly towed the dredge for about a quarter of an hour. Then the laborious task commenced of winding it up again, two men turning the handles of the winch for a quarter of an hour. At last the dredge could be seen through the clear water, and soon was at the surface and lifted into the boat. The hempen tangles were crowded with masses of living and dead white coral (Fig. 3), star-fishes, worms, and bits of stone covered with brilliant-coloured sponges, Terebratulae (a deep-water, peculiar shellfish, the lamp-shell), and other animals. There were only a few fragments of coral in the bag of the dredge. We filled glass jars with sea water and placed the bits of coral in them, and I eagerly examined them for the creeper-like " Rhabdopleura." There, sure enough, it was on several of the dead stems of coral, and we sailed back to Lervik with our booty in order to examine it at leisure with the microscope whilst still fresh and living. In our temporary laboratory at the farmhouse ON A NORWEGIAN FIORD ^ "a FIG. 2. One of the polyps of Rhabdopleura which is attached by its soft contractile stalk (c) to the dark internal cord seen in Fig. I. A similar polyp issues during life from the open end of each of the upright tubes seen in Fig. i, and is, when disturbed, pulled back into the tube by the contraction of the cord c. a, mouth ; b, vent ; c, contractile stalk ; d, head-shield or disk ; e, the left gill-plane ; f, the body-mass enclosing the intestine, etc. (From a drawing made by the author in Lervik, Stordo, in 1882.) For a full account of Rhabdopleura, see the "Quart. Journal of Microscopical Science," vol. xxiv., 1884. 8 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST the little polyp which it had been my chief object to study, issued slowly from its delicate tubes when placed in a shallow trough of sea-water beneath the microscope. I was able on that day, and many others subsequently with renewed supplies from the depths of the fiord to make coloured drawings of it, and to find out a great deal of interest to zoologists about its structure. The minute thing (Fig. 2) was spotted with orange and black like a leopard, and had a plume of tentacles on each side of its mouth, which was overhung by a mobile disk the organ by means of which it creeps slowly out of its tube, and by which also the transparent rings which form the tube are secreted and added one by one to the tube's mouth, so as to increase its length. The creature within the tree- like branching system of tubes (Fig. i) is also tree-like and branching, fifty or more polyp-like individuals terminating its branches and issuing each from one of the upstanding terminal branches of the tube system. I was able to determine the " law " of its budding and branching, and I also found the testis full of spermatozoa in several of the polyps, but I failed to find eggs. I believe that we were too late in the season for them ; and they are still unknown. One of the most interesting deep-sea creatures dis- covered by the " Challenger " proved to be closely allied to our little Rhabdopleura, % and received the name ' Cephalodiscus." Several species of this second kind have been discovered in the last twenty years in the deep sea, and the largest and most remarkable in some respects was one which " jumped to my eyes " among the booty of marine dredgings sent home from the Antarctic expedition of the " Discovery " by Captain Scott, when I unpacked the cases containing these marine treasures, in the basement of the Natural History ON A NORWEGIAN FIORD FIG. 3. A piece of the white branch- ing coral (Lopho- helia prolifera) dredged in great quantity by the author off Lervik in 1882. Drawn of the natural 10 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST Museum. I published a photograph of it in the " Proceed- ings of the Royal Society," and named it " Cephalodiscus nigrescens." But nothing more of importance has, as yet, been brought to light as to " Rhabdopleura." Our rule at Lervik was to go out dredging from seven to twelve, and work at the material with micro- scope and pencil for some three or four hours after lunch. Of all the many beautiful things we dredged, the most striking were the various kinds of corals, the large, glass- like shrimps, the strange apple-green worm Hamingia (actually known previously by t(b specimens only), and the large, disc-like and branched, sand-covered or sausage-like Protozoa (from a shelly bottom of 200 fathoms depth). My friend Dr. Norman joined me at Lervik after I had been there for a month, and showed his extraordinary skill in choosing the most favourable spots for sinking the dredge and in pouncing on interesting specimens as we sorted its contents (when we had been on a soft bottom) by passing them through the sieves, specially provided for naturalists' use, whilst we gently rocked on the dark surface of the clear, deep water, many miles from our island. The colours and light of that region are wonderful the mountains of a yellow tint, far paler than the purple sea, whilst the rocky islands are fringed with seaweed of rich orange-brown colour, and clothed with grass and innumerable flowers. The white coral of two kinds (Lophohelia and Amphihelia) is accompanied by beautiful purple and salmon-coloured softer kinds of coral (Alcyonarians), known as Primnoa, and by the gigantic Paragorgia. On one occasion our dredge became fast. For long nothing would move it, and we feared we should have ON A NORWEGIAN FIORD 11 to cut it and lose some 300 fathoms of rope. At last the efforts of four men at the oars set it free, and we wound it in. As the dredge came up we found en- tangled in the rope an enormous tree-like growth, as thick as a man's arm, seven feet long, and spreading out into branches, the whole of a pale vermilion colour (like pink lacquer) a magnificent sight ! It was a branch of the great tree-coral of these waters the Para- gorgia and we preserved many pieces of it in alcohol and dried the rest. But the gorgeous colour could not be retained. One day the green worm, Hamingia (named after a Norwegian hero Haming) was dredged by us at the mouth of Lervik Harbour, in 40 fathoms. A some- what similar worm lives in holes in the limestone rocks of the Mediterranean, and is named Bonellia (after the Italian naturalist, Bonelli). All the specimens of this Mediterranean worm, which is as large as a big walnut, and has a trunk, or proboscis, a foot long, were found to be females. The male was unknown until my friend the late Alexander Kowalewsky, the most remarkable of Russian zoologists, discovered that it is a tiny threadlike green creature, no bigger than the letter " i " on this page. Three or four are found crawling about on the body of the large female. I found the same diminutive kind of male crawling on my Norwegian Hamingia, at Lervik, and published a drawing and description of him. I was also able to show that, unlike Bonellia, the Norwegian worm has red blood-corpuscles, like those of a frog, and impregnated with haemoglobin, the same oxygen-carrying substance which colours our own blood- corpuscles. The identity of the worm's haemoglobin with that in our own blood was proved by its causing two dark bands of absorption in the solar spectrum 12 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST when light was passed through it and then through the spectroscope dark bands exactly the same in position and intensity as those caused by the red substance of my own blood and changing into one single band inter- mediate in position between the two when deprived by an appropriate chemical of the oxygen loosely combined with it. On the Fiord near Lervik. Of many other things we caught and many other delights of that long-past summer on the Norwegian fiords, of the great waterfalls, the vast forests, the delightful swimming in the sea, the trout-fishing, and the very trying food approved and provided for us by the natives, I must not now tell. My hope is that I may have enabled my readers to understand some of the enjoyment open to the marine zoologist, even when he dispenses with the aid of a big steamship, and modestly pursues his quarry in a sportsmanlike spirit. CHAPTER II NATURE-RESERVES ONE of the new features of modern life the result of the enormous development of the newspaper press and the vast increase in numbers of those who read and think in common is the manifestation of a sensitive " self-consciousness " of the community, a more or less successful effort to know its own history, to value the records of the past, and to question its own hitherto unconscious, unreflecting attitude in mechanically and as it were blindly destroying everything which gets in the way of that industrial and commercial activity which is regarded, erroneously, as identical with " progress." Beautiful old houses and strange buildings priceless records of the ways and thought of our early ancestors which at one time were either guarded by super- stitious reverence or let alone because there was room for them and for everything else in the spacious country- side have been thoughtlessly pulled down as population and grasping enterprise increased. The really graceful old houses of London and other towns, lovingly produced by former men who were true artists, have been broken up and their panelling and chimney-pieces sold to for- eigners in order to make way for more commodious buildings, hideous in their ignorant decoration, or brutally " run up," gaunt, bare, and mis-shapen. The stones of Avebury, of Stonehenge, and of many another temple 13 14 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST have been knocked to pieces by emancipated country- folk no longer restrained either by superstition or by reverence to mend roads and to make enclosures. Happily the new self-consciousness is taking note of these things. That strange lumbering body which we call " the mother of parliaments " has dimly reflected the better thought of the community, and given a feeble sort of protection to ancient monuments. The newspapers have lately managed to excite some public interest in a fine old house in Dean Street, Soho, and to arouse a feeling of shame that the richest city in the richest Empire of the world should allow the few remnants of beautiful things of the past still existing in its midst to be destroyed by the uncontrolled operation of mercenary " progress." I have, in common with many others, visited this doomed mansion. It is a charming old place, of no great size or importance, and, with its well- proportioned panelled rooms and fine staircase, was destined to be a private residence. It is not large enough to be a museum, but its rooms might serve for the show place of a first-rate maker or vender of things of fine workmanship. There ought to be some public authority municipal or departmental with power to acquire such interesting houses as this, not necessarily to convert them into permanent public shows, but to keep them in repair, and to let them on lease, at a reasonable rent, to tenants, subject to the condition of their being open on certain days in the year to artists and others provided with orders of admission by the authority. In other countries such arrangements are made ; with us they are not made simply because we have not assigned to any authority the duty of acting in this way for the public benefit. Our public authorities have little or no public spirit, and resemble private com- NATURE-RESERVES 1 5 mittees, councils, and individuals in evading and refusing even the smallest increase of responsibility and activity beyond that which they are compelled by law to dis- charge. Unless they are legally compelled to interfere, all records of art and nature may perish before they will incur the inconvenience of moving a finger ! Con- sequently the only thing to be done is to assign such duties by law to an existing authority, or to one created for such purposes. The same tale of destruction and irreparable damage has to be told of our dealings with the beauty of once unsullied moorland, meadow, marsh, forest, river-bank, and seashore. But the destruction has here been more gradual, less obvious on account of remoteness, and more subtle in its creeping, insinuating method, like that of a slowly-spreading infective disease. The word " country " has to a very large extent ceased to signify to us " out- lying nature beyond the man-made town," occupied only in little tracts here and there by the immemorial tillers of the soil. The splendid and age-long industry of our field-workers has made much of our land a garden. Now they themselves are disappearing or changed beyond re- cognition, losing their traditional arts and crafts, their distinctive and venerable dialects, and their individuality. The land is enclosed, drained, manured ; food plants produced by the agriculturist replace the native plants ; forests are cut down and converted into parks and pheasant-runs ; foreign trees are substituted for those native to the soil. Commons, heaths, and wild moor- lands have been enclosed by eager land-grabbers, the streams are polluted by mining or chemical works, or if kept clean are artificially overstocked with hand-fed trout ; whilst the open roads reek of tar and petroleum. The " wilderness " is fast disappearing, and it is by this 16 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST name that we must distinguish from the mere " country," as much besmirched and devastated by man as are the sites of his towns and cities, the regions where untouched nature still survives and is free from the depredations of humanity. Many beautiful and rare plants which once inhabited our countryside have perished ; many larger animals (such as wolf, beaver, red-deer, marten-cats, and wild-cats) have disappeared, as well as many insects, great and small, such as the swallow-tailed butterfly and the larger copper butterfly, and many splendid birds. Here and there in these islands are to be found bits of " wilderness " where some of the ancient life now so rapidly being destroyed still flourishes. There are some coast-side marshes, there are East Anglian fens, some open heath-land, and some bits of forest which are yet unspoilt, unravaged by blighting, reckless humanity. It is a distressing fact that some of the recent official attempts to preserve open forest land and commons for the public enjoyment have been accompanied by a mistaken attempt to drain them, and lay them out with gravel walks, to the complete destruction of their natural beauty and interest. The bog above the Leg of Mutton Pond, on Hampstead Heath, where I used to visit, years ago, the bog-bean and the sun-dew, and many a moss-grown pool swarming with rare animalcules, has been drained by an over-zealous board of guardians, animated by a suburban enthusiasm for turf and gravel paths. The same spirit, hostile to nature and eager to reduce the wilderness to vulgar convention- ality, has tamed the finer parts of Wimbledon Common, and is busy laying down gravel paths in Epping Forest. In the New Forest the clamour of the neighbouring residents for " sport " has led to the framing of regula- tions by the officials of the Crown (it is a " Royal " NATURE-RESERVES 17 forest), which are resulting in the destruction and dis- appearance of rare birds which formerly nested there. Many a distant common threatened by the builder has been preserved as an open space by golfers. Such preservation is like that of the boards of conservators, useless from the point of view of the nature-lover. The health-seeking crowd spreads devastation around it. The rare sand-loving plants of the dunes, and the " bog- bean," the " sun-dew," and other refugees from human persecution on our once unfrequented heath-lands, are remorselessly trodden down or hacked up by the golfer. Other destroyers of nature's rarer products are those who greedily search for them and carry them off, root and branch, to the last specimen, in order to sell them. These dealers are " collectors," indeed, but must not be confused with the genuine " naturalist," who may allow himself, with due modesty, to secure a limited sample of treasures from nature's open hand. Under these circumstances a society has been founded for the formation of " nature-reserves " in the British Islands. Its object is to secure, by purchase or gift, tracts of as yet unsullied wilderness of which some are still, though rarely, to be found where beast and bird, insect and plant are still living as of old untouched, unmolested, undisturbed by intrusive, murderous man. The society's object is to enter into relations with those who may know of such tracts, and to arrange for their transference if of sufficient interest to the National Trust. The expense of proper guardianship and the admission to the reserve of duly authorized persons would be the business of the society. Its office is at the Natural History Museum in Cromwell Road, and Mr. Ogilvie Grant, the naturalist in charge of the ornitho- logical collections, is one of the secretaries. Sir Edward 2 1 8 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST Grey and Mr. Lewis Harcourt and several of our most distinguished botanists and zoologists are members of the council. All who sympathize with the objects of the society should write to the secretary for further information. Already two tracts of land were secured as nature- reserves before the society came into existence. One of these is Wicken Fen, not far from Cambridge, renowned for its remarkable plants and insects. It was purchased and placed in the hands of the National Trust by a public-spirited entomologist. Another re- serve, which has been secured, is far away on the links or dunes of the north coast of Norfolk, and is of especial interest to botanists. No one either golfer or bungalow- builder can now interfere there and destroy the inter- woven flora and fauna, the members of which balance and protect, encourage and check one another, as is Nature's method. The interaction of the various species of wild plants in this undisturbed spot is made the subject of continual and careful study by the botanists who are permitted to frequent it. More such " reserves " and of different characters are desirable. Should we, of the present day, succeed in securing some great marsh-land, one or more rocky headlands or islands, and a good sweep of Scotch moor and mountain, and in raising money to provide guardians for these acquisitions, we shall not only enjoy them ourselves but be blessed by future generations of men for having saved something of Britain's ancient nature, when all else, which is not city, will have become manure, shooting greens, and pleasure gardens. In Germany and in Switzerland a good deal has been done in this way. Owing to the existence of NATURE-RESERVES 19 " forestry " and a State Forest Department in Germany which has no representative in this country there is machinery for selecting and guarding such " reserves." A large sum is assigned annually by the Government to this purpose. Last year an international congress, attended by delegates from the English society, as well as by representatives of many other States, was held, and much useful discussion as to methods and results took place. The notion of creating a nature-reserve on a small scale seems to have originated with Charles Waterton, the traveller and naturalist, who in the middle of last century converted the estate surrounding his residence near Pontefract in Yorkshire into a sort of sanctuary, where he made it a strict rule that no wild thing should be molested. For some years now the attempt to create " nature- reserves," on a far larger scale than those of which I have been writing, has been made where civilization is planting its first settlements in primeval forest and prairie. The United States Govern- ment, impressed with the rapid destruction and dis- appearance both of forests and of native animals which have accompanied the opening up by road and rail of vast territories in the West, created in 1872 the national "reserve," called the Yellowstone Park, which is some 3300 square miles in area. We are assured that here under proper guardianship the larger native animals are increasing in number ; whilst the great coniferous trees, which were in danger of extermination by the white man, are safe. Similar reserves have been proclaimed in parts of Africa under British control, but though that known as Mount Elgon an ancient volcanic cup, clad with forest,and ten miles in diameter seems to have been effective, and to have furnished in Sir Harry 20 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST Johnston's time, ten years ago, a refuge for the giraffe, it is scarcely possible, at present, to provide an efficient police force to protect areas of something like 1000 square miles against the depredations of native and commercial " hunters " provided with modern rifles. In May, 1900, I was, with the late Sir Clement Hill, appointed " plenipotentiary " by her Majesty Queen Victoria to meet representatives of Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Congo States in a conference, presided over by the late Marquis of Linlithgow, at the Foreign Office. The conference was arranged by the great African powers in order to consider and report on the means to be taken to preserve the big game animals of Africa from extinction. We spent an extremely interesting fortnight, and finally agreed upon a report, the upshot of which was that whilst certain animals, such as the giraffe, some zebras and antelopes, the gorilla, and such useful birds as the vultures, secretary bird, owls, and the cow-pickers (Buphagus), should be absolutely protected, others should be only protected at certain seasons, or in youth, or in limited numbers, and others again should be killed with- out licence or restraint at any time, such being the lion, the leopard, the hunting-dog, destructive baboons, most birds of prey, crocodiles, pythons, and poisonous snakes. The question of large " nature-reserves " was discussed. It was agreed that such reserves should be maintained for the breeding-places and rearing of the young of desirable animals, and that the destruction of predatory animals or an excess of other forms should be permitted to the administrators of such reserves. Thus it is clear that no absolute " nature-reserves " were considered possible. In fact this is the case whether the reserve be large NATURE-RESERVES 2 1 or small. Once man is present in the neighbourhood, even at a long distance, he upsets the " balance of Nature." The naturalist's small " nature-reserve " may be ravaged by predatory animals driven from the outly- ing region occupied by man, or again, the absence from the " reserve " of predatory animals which act as natural checks on the increase of other animals, may lead to excessive and unhealthy multiplication of the latter. Man must " weed " and artificially manage his " reserve " after all ! Man brings also into the neighbourhood of reserves, great and small, disease germs in his domestic- ated animals, which are carried by insects into the cherished " reserve," and there cause destruction. Con- versely, the animals maintained in a reserve carry in their blood microscopic parasites to the poisons of which they have become immune by natural selection in the course of ages. They act as " reservoirs " of such microscopic germs. These germs carried by flies or other insects to the carefully reared cattle imported by civilized man from other regions of the world into the neighbourhood of such " reserves," cause deadly disease (such as the tsetse-fly diseases or trypanosome diseases) to those imported cattle, as also to man himself. Whilst, then, we may do something to retain small tracts of our own country in the modified state which it attained after the earlier inhabitants had destroyed lion, bear, wolf, and other noxious animals, as well as great herbivora, such as giant deer, red deer, aurochs (or great bull), and bison yet in reality a true " Nature-reserve " is not compatible with the occupation of the land, within some hundreds of miles of it, by civilized, or even semi-civilized, man. Nothing but the isolation given by a wide sea or high mountain ranges will preserve a primeval fauna and flora the indigenous man-free living denizens of the isolated 22 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST region from destruction by the necessary unpremeditated disturbance of Nature's balance by man once he has passed from the lowest stage of savagery. At present we are faced by this difficulty in Africa. Not only the white settlers have large herds of cattle, but before their arrival the native races had imported Indian cattle. These cattle are destroyed by " fly disease," the germs (trypanosomes) being carried by the tsetse fly to the domesticated cattle from wild buffalo which swarm with the germs but are uninjured by them. Consequently, if the rich pasture lands of Africa at present unutilized are to be occupied by herdsmen, the wild game, buffalo and antelopes, must be destroyed. In many regions they have been destroyed. Is this destruction to be con- tinued ? If Africa is to be the seat of a modern human population and supply food to other parts of the world, the whole " balance of Nature " there must be upset and the big wild animals destroyed. There is no alternative. The practical question is, " How far is it possible to mitigate this process ? " Can a great African " reserve " of 100,000 square miles be established in a position so isolated that it shall not be a source of disease and danger to the herdsmen and agriculturists of adjacent territory ? CHAPTER III * FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD SOME men of unbalanced minds have lately proposed deliberately and completely to obliterate all the artistic work of past generations of man in order, as they openly profess, that they themselves and their own pro- ductions may obtain consideration. Even were they able to make such a clearance, it may be doubted whether the consideration given to their own performances would be favourable. These obscure individuals have immodestly dubbed themselves " futurists," and the name has been at once adopted as a mystification and advertisement by a variety of art-posers probably unknown to the originators of the word who have ventured into one or other of the fields of art without even the smallest gift, either of conception or of expression, or even of imitation. They receive undeserved attention from a section of the public ready to dabble in every newly-made puddle. I am led to refer to them because the abolition of the supremely beautiful things slowly evolved by Nature in the long course of ages, and the substitution for them of man's fancy breeds and races and garden paths, is not merely a parallel piece of folly, but is due to a mental defect identical with that of the genuine " futurist," namely, an intellectual incapacity which renders its victim insensible to the charm of historical and evolu- tional complexity. 24 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST The modern man who nourishes a real love for undis- torted nature that is to say, who is a true " naturalist " has one or two resources even in these British Islands. There are ways of access to Nature unadorned by man which are open even to the town-dweller. The chief of these is the seashore. Even from London, in the course of a few hours, one may be transported to territory where there are no traces of man's operations. The region of rock and pool, sand-flat, and shell-bank, exposed by the sea as it retreats, is a real " nature-reserve " effectually so is that deepest area only exposed at spring-tides. The locality chosen by the naturalist must be at a distance from any great harbour or estuary polluted by the cities seated on its banks, and should also be out of the way of the modern steam-driven fish trawlers, which have caused havoc in some sweet bays of our southern coast by pouring out tons of dead, unsaleable fish. The rejected offal has become the gathering-ground of carniv- orous marine creatures, and the balance of Nature has been upset by the nourishment thus thoughtlessly thrown by man into new relations. Some favoured spot on the south or west coast may be known to our city-dwe^ing nature-lover, and thither he will hasten to spend week-ends, and, when he can, longer spells in the supreme delight of undisturbed com- munion with the things of Nature, apart from human " enterprise." In some cottage near the sea marsh, where an unpolluted stream joins the salt water, he has his accustomed lodging ; his host, a cheery long-shore fisherman and handy boatman. Close by is the rising headland and rocky cliff facing the sea. The shore is strewn with rocks, and as the tide goes down long " reefs " are exposed, clothed with brown and green sea- weeds. Here no man has intruded ! When the water FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD 25 recedes still farther, pools and miniature caverns appear, edged with delicate feathery red-coloured seaweeds. Many small fishes, shrimps of various kinds, some- times pale rainbow-tinted " squids " (one of the more delicate cuttle-fishes), are seen darting about the pools, changing their colour with lightning rapidity. The overhanging sides of the rock-pools give protection to gorgeously-coloured "sea-anemones" adhering to them. Here, also, are those exquisite ascidians ill-described by the rough name " sea-squirt " hanging from the rocks like drops of purest crystal in their transparency for which naturalists use the prettier title " Clavellina." The nature-lover now turns one of the large flat slabs of rock lying in such a pool well knowing what loveliness its under-side will reveal to his eyes. That under-side is studded with a dozen or two of the most exquisite gems of green and peach colour, ruby and yellow (Corynactis by name !), which, if the slab of stone is left beneath the water, expand and display each its circlet of brilliant little tentacles. They are sea-anemones no bigger than the precious stone in a signet-ring. Among them a bright salmon-coloured worm hastens with ser- pentine movement and the rippling strokes of a hundred feathery feet to escape from the unaccustomed light. A deep blood-red coloured prawn (Alpheus) darts from concealment and hastily buries itself in the sandy bottom, of the pool, snapping its pincerlike claw with a sharp cracking sound. A couple of bivalved shells (Lima hians) which were concealed beneath the slab swim lazily round the pool by opening and closing their delicate white " valves " an unusual kind of activity in such mussels, oysters, and clams whilst a fringe of long orange-red tentacles trails in the water from each of them. The lifting of another rock may dislodge an " octopus " or a huge brilliantly-coloured star-fish -or one of the 26 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST rarer kinds of crab eager to avoid the observation of the octopus, of which it is the regular food. A spade pushed into the neighbouring sandbanks reveals heart-urchins, gorgeous sea- worms, and burrowing shell-fish and perhaps sand-eels. The human visitor bending over these scenes of wonderment and perhaps venturing to transfer one or two only of the less familiar animals to a glass jar filled with sea-water so that he may see them more clearly at last stands up and straightens his back, gazing over the sun-bathed scene from the tumbled weed-grown rocks, encrusted with crowds of purple-blue mussels, to the patches of golden sand, clear pools, and the blue sea beyond. Then he may note (as I have) a curious rhythmical sound if he is among rocks covered with sea- weeds a quiet but incessant " hiss-hiss," which 1 is heard above the deeper-toned lapping of the little waves among the big stones. This is the sound made by the rasp-like tongues of the periwinkles feeding on the abundant weed, over which they crawl, leaving the water and " browsing " on the surface exposed to the air by the fall of the tide. The browsing sound of these little snails is to the sea- shore what the humming of bees is to inland meadows. Day after day and at various seasons of the year the nature-lover will visit this sanctuary, and, whilst con- templating the lovely forms, colour, and movement of its denizens, will learn the secrets of their life, of their comings and goings, and the mysteries of their re- production, their birth, and their childhood. Each day he finds something unknown to his brother naturalists. He will examine it with his lens, paint it in all its beauty, and tell of it in due course in printed page and coloured portraiture; but he is no mere seeker for novelty, nor is the credit of discovery the motive of his devotion. Beyond and greater than any such gains FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD 27 are the incomparable delight, the never-failing happiness which personal intimacy with the secret things of natural beauty brings to him. He has yet another chance of such enjoyment, if he be a microscopist, and familiar with the inhabitants of fresh-water ponds. A pond is, in many cases, an oasis in the waste of civilization, a miniature nature- reserve, rarely, if ever, affected by human proceedings until haply it is abolished altogether. A fairly deep, stagnant pond under trees in some secluded park is one of the most favourable kind, but all sorts deserve inquiry (even the rain pools on the roofs of old houses in Paris have rewarded the faithful seeker), and may prove, for a time at least, havens of refuge for a wonderful assem- blage of animalcules and minute microscopic plants, which for the most part perish as did the bison of the American plains by the mere disturbance caused by the propinquity of civilized man. I knew such a pond it is now built over near Hampstead. As one lay on the bank and peered into the depths of the pond the transparent, glass-like larvae of the " plume fly " (Corethra) could be seen swimming in the clear water, driving before them troops of minute pink-coloured water- fleas (Daphnia) and other crustaceans. In other parts the water was made bluish-green by crowds of the little floating spherical animalcules called " Volvox globator." The mud contained many curious worms allied to the earth-worm, whilst coiled round fallen twigs were the small snake-like worms known as " Nais serpentina." Desmids, Diatoms, and animalcules of endless variety abounded. A muslin net set on a ring on the end of a stick enabled one to procure samples of the floating life of the water and also to skim the 28 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST surface of the mud, and these spoils were brought home in bottles and searched for hours drop by drop with the microscope. The world of active, graceful, bustling life thus revealed as one gazes for hours through the magic tube of the microscope, is as remote from human civiliz- ation as that uncovered at low tide on the seashore. Many a worried City man, amongst them a great political writer on the staff of a London daily, now passed from among us, has found in this microscopic world so readily accessible even at his own study table a release from care, a refreshing contact with unadulterated natural things of life and beauty. My friend, I wan Miiller, the writer referred to, was as discriminating a judge of the shapes of wheel-animalcules as he was of the faces of the politicians of Europe and South Africa ! There is another and much more difficult escape from the grip and taint of civilization, which is that effected by the explorer who penetrates into sparsely inhabited wilds such as those of the Australian con- tinent. Man is there, but in such small number (one to every 450 square miles!), and in so primitive and child- like a state, that he is not a disturbing element, but simply one of the " fauna " one of the curious animals living there under the domination of Nature not yet " Nature's rebel," but submissive, unconscious, and a more fascinating study for us than any other of her products. He shows us what manner of men were our own remote ancestors. The hunters who have left their flint implements in the earlier river gravels of Western Europe were such men as these Australian natives now are. Naked, using only sticks and chipped stones as implements and weapons, destitute of crops or herds or habitations, wandering from place to place in keen search of food small animals, birds, lizards, and grubs FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD 29 these Australians have none of the arts of the most primitive among other races, excepting that they can make fire and construct a canoe of the bark of trees. They have not even the bow and arrow, but make use of spears and the wonderful " boomerang " in hunting and fighting. They daub themselves with a sort of white paint, and decorate their bodies with great scars made by cutting gashes in the flesh with sharp stones, and they dress their heads and faces and ceremonial wands with wool and feathers, which they fix by the aid of an adhesive fluid always ready to hand namely, their own blood. I recently was present at a lecture given to the Anthropological Institute in London by Professor Baldwin Spencer, of Melbourne, with whom I was closely associated when he was a student at Oxford thirty years ago. He has devoted many years to the study of the Australian natives, and ten years ago published a most valuable work describing his experiences amongst them, to which he has recently added a further volume. He has lived with them in friendship and intimacy in the remote wilderness of the Australian bush, and has been admitted as a member of one of their mysterious clans, of which the " totem," or supposed spirit-ancestor, is " the witchety grub " a kind of cater- pillar. He has been freely admitted to their secret ceremonies as well as to their more public " corro- borees " or dances, and has been able (as no one else has been), without annoyance or offence to them, to take a great number of cinema-films of them in their various dances or when cooking in camp or paddling and up- setting their canoes, and climbing back again from the river. Many of these he exhibited to us, and we found ourselves among moving crowds of these slim-legged, beautifully-shaped wild men. The film presented some of their strange elaborate dances, which soon will be 30 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST danced no more. These wild men die out when civilized man comes near them. It appears that they really spend most of their time in dancing when not looking for food or chipping stone implements, and that their dances are essentially plays (like those of little children in Europe), the acting of traditional stories relating the history of their venerated animal " totem," which often last for three weeks at a time ! Whilst dancing and gesticu- lating they are chanting and singing without cessation, often repeating the same words over and over again. Here, indeed, we have the primitive human art, the emotional expression from which, in more advanced races, music, drama, dancing, and decorative handicraft have developed as separate " arts." The most remarkable and impressive result was obtained when Professor Baldwin Spencer turned on his phonograph records whilst the wild men danced in the film picture. Then we heard the actual voices of these survivors of prehistoric days shouting at us in weird cadences, imitating the cry of birds, and accom- panied by the booming of the bull-roarer (a piece of wood attached to a string, and swung rapidly round by the performer). A defect, and at the same time a special merit, of the cinema show of the present day is the deadly silence of both the performers and the spectators. Screams and oaths are delivered in silence ; pistols are fired without a sound. One can concentrate one's observation on the facial expression and move- ments of the actors with undivided attention and with no fear of startling detonations. And very bad they almost invariably are, except in films made by the great French producers. On the other hand, I was astonished at the intensity of the impression produced by hearing the actual voices of those Australian wild men as they FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD 31 danced in rhythm with their songs. To hear is a greater means of revelation than to see. One feels even closer to those Australian natives as their strange words and songs issue from imprisonment in the phono- graph, than when one sees them in the film pictures actually beating time with feet and hands and imitating the movements of animals. To receive, as one sits in a London lecture-room, the veritable appeal of these remote and inaccessible things to both the eye and the ear simultaneously, is indeed the most thrilling experience I can remember. With a feeling of awe, almost of terror, we recognize as we gaze at and listen to the records brought home by Professor Baldwin Spencer that we are intruding into a vast and primitive Nature-reserve where even humanity itself is still in the state of child- hood submissive to the great mother, without the desire to destroy her control or the power to substitute man's handiwork for hers. CHAPTER IV THE GREAT GREY SEAL IT is always pleasing to find that intelligent care can be brought to bear on the preservation of the rare and interesting animals which still inhabit parts of these British Islands, though it is not often that such care is actually exercised. Mr. Lyell (a nephew of the great geologist Sir Charles Lyell) in April 1914 introduced a Bill into the House of Commons which is called the Grey Seals (Protection) Bill. It came on for considera- tion before the Standing Committee, was ordered to be reported to the House without amendment, and has now passed into law. The Great Grey Seal is a much bigger animal than the Common Seal, the two species being the only seals which can be properly called " British " at the present day, though occasionally the Harp Seal, or Greenland Seal, and the Bladder-nosed Seal are seen in British waters, and may emerge from those waters on to rocky shores or lonely sandbanks. The Great Grey Seal is called " Halichcerus grypus " by zoologists, whilst the Common Seal is known as " Phoca vitulina." The male of the former species grows to be as much as 10 feet in length, whilst that of the Common Seal rarely attains 5 feet. Both these seals breed on the British coast. The Common Seal frequents the north circumpolar region, THE GREAT GREY SEAL 33 being found on the northern coasts on both sides of the Atlantic, and also on both sides of the Pacific, and even makes its way down the coasts of France and Spain into the Mediterranean, where it is rare. A few years ago one appeared on the beach at Brighton ! .It may often be seen on the west coast of Scotland, of Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall, where it breeds in caves. Its hairy coat is silky, and has a yellowish-grey tint spotted with black and dark grey, most abundantly on the back. The Great Grey Seal does not occur in the Pacific, but is limited to the northern shores on both sides of the Atlantic. Its coat is of a more uniform greyish- brown colour than that of the Common Seal, and when dried by exposure to the sun has a silvery-grey sheen. The Great Grey Seal is a good deal rarer on our coasts than is the Common Seal. It is now limited to the south, west, and north coasts of Ireland, to the great islands on the West of Scotland, the Orkneys, the Shet- lands, and some spots on the east coast of Scotland. It is heard of as a rare visitor to the Lincolnshire " Wash," the coasts of Norfolk, Cornwall, and Wales. Some years ago (in 1883) I found a newly-born Grey Seal on the shore of Pentargon Cove, near Boscastle, North Cornwall. It appears that whilst (contrary to the statements of some writers) the Common Seal produces its young most usually in caves or rock- shelters, the Great Grey Seal chooses a remote sand island or deserted piece of open shore for its nursery The Common Seal gives birth to its young a single one or a pair in June ; the Great Grey Seal about the ist of September. While the young in both species is clothed when born in a coat of long yellowish-white hair, this coat is shed in the case of the Common Seal 34 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST within twenty-four hours of birth, exposing the short hair, forming a smooth, silky coat, as in the adult, and the young at once takes to the water and swims. On the other hand, the long yellowish-white coat of hair persists in the young of the Great Grey Seal for six or seven weeks, during which time it remains on shore, and refuses to enter the water. It is visited at sundown by the mother for the purpose of suckling it. According to Mr. Lyell, this renders the young of the Great Grey Seal peculiarly liable to attack by reckless destructive humanity, and he accordingly proposes legislation to render it a penal offence to destroy the young seals or the mothers during the- nursing season. It is estimated that the total number of Great Grey Seals in Scottish waters has been reduced to less than 500, and that in English and Irish waters the total is even less. It has often been desired by naturalists that a check should be put by the Legislature upon the wanton destruction of the common seal, as well as of the grey seal. It is certainly a regrettable result of the increased visitation of our remote rocky shores by holiday-makers, so-called " sportsmen " and thoughtless ruffians of all kinds, that the large, and perfectly harmless, grey seal is likely to be exterminated. In former times in these islands, as to-day in more northern regions, there was a regular " seal fishery," and vast numbers of seals were annually slaughtered for the sake of their skins and fat. The fur of both our native species, though differing vastly from the soft under- fur of the fur-seals, or Otarise, of the North Pacific which belong to a different section of the seal group, having small external " ears," and hind feet which can be moved forward and used in walking is yet largely used for making gloves and thick overcoats THE GREAT GREY SEAL 35 To-day the number of British seals killed and brought to market is so small that no local fishery interests would suffer were all protected by the law during the spring and summer, when breeding and the rearing of the young is in progress. There is even less reason for objecting to the protection of the larger and rarer " Great Grey Seal," which, unless it had been placed under the shelter of an Act of Parliament, would in five or six years have ceased to be a denizen of the British Islands. Owing to my having accidentally made the acquaint- ance of a young grey seal, as mentioned above, in North Cornwall, I feel a special interest in the legislative protection of this kind. I was at Boscastle at the end of August, and was delighted to see there on the morning after my arrival three or four of the common seal swimming in the little rock-bound harbour. I was told by native authorities that there was a cave in the rocks at the side of Pentargon Cove, a couple of miles distant (formerly inaccessible from the cliffs), where these seals breed, and that it had been the custom of some of the young men of the district to go round there in a boat when wind and tide served in the early spring and " raid " the cave. They could get in at low tide, and, armed with heavy cudgels, they would attack the seals which were congregated in the cavern to the number of thirty or forty. A single well-delivered blow on the nose was sufficient, I was assured, to kill a full-grown seal, and if fortunate the raiders might secure ten or a dozen seals, which were then sold for their skins and oil to Bristol dealers. The enterprise was dangerous on account of the rising tide and the struggles of the seals and their assailants among the slippery rocks and deep pools in the darkness of the cave. Cruel and savage as the adventure was, it yet had its justification 36 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST on a commercial basis similar to that claimed for othet " fisheries " of the great beasts of the sea hunted by man for their oil and skins. The seals of this cave were undoubtedly the small common seal the Phoca vitulina and I gathered that little had been heard of late years of successful expeditions to these rocks. I was, however, told that a path had been cut and ropes fastened to iron stanchions in the face of the rocky cliffs of Pentargon Cove just before my visit to Boscastle, which rendered it now comparatively easy to descend the 150 feet of rock from the hill overlooking it and reach the shore of the curiously isolated and enclosed cove. So, with two companions my sisters I set off the next morning for Pentargon Cove. We climbed down the face of the cliff by the aid of the much-needed ropes and found ourselves on the shore, the tide being low. We hoped that we should be able to get a view of the " seal-cave" and some of its inhabitants swimming in its neighbourhood. We were disappointed in this, and my companions hastened down to the water's edge, in order to get as near as possible to the rocky sides of the cove. I was about to follow them when I saw, lying in the open, on the pebbles above high-tide mark, what I took at first for a white fur cloak left there by some previous visitor. I walked up to it, when, to my extreme astonishment, it turned round and displayed to my incredulous gaze a pair of very large black eyes and a threatening array of teeth, from which a defiant hiss was aimed at me. It was a baby seal, covered all over with a splendid growth of white fur, three inches deep. He was twice as big as the fur-covered young of the common seal more than two feet long his black eyes were as big as pennies, and he was lying THE GREAT GREY SEAL 37 there on the upper beach, far from the water, in the full blaze of the sun, as dry and as " fluffy " as a well- dressed robe of Polar bear's skin. We were indeed well rewarded for our excursion in search of the seal's cave of Pentargon Cove ! For this was a new-born pup of the Great Grey Seal, entirely unconnected with the inferior population of the inaccessible cave, laid here in the open by his mother at birth (as is the habit of her species), little suspecting that the long-secluded shore of Pentargon Cove had that year been rendered accessible to marauding land-beasts for the first time. Not knowing the peculiarities of the grey seal and the refusal of its young to enter the water until six weeks after birth, when it sheds its coat of long white hair, we cautiously rolled the little seal on to my outspread coat and carried him to the water's edge. After the hissing with which he had greeted my first approach he was not unfriendly or alarmed, and for my part I must say that I have never yet stumbled upon any free gift of Nature which excited my admiration and regard in an equal degree. His eyes were beautiful beyond compare. We placed him close to the water and expected him to wriggle into it and swim off, but, on the contrary, he wriggled in the opposite direction, and slowly made his way, by successive heaves,. up the beach. He was not more than a day or two old, as was shown by the unshrunken condition of the umbilical cord. We did not like to leave him exposed to the attacks of vagrant boys, who might climb down into the cove, so we carried him on my coat to the shelter of some large rocks, a hundred yards along the shore. There, with much regret, we left him. But on the following evening, as we sat down to dinner, I heard from some other visitors at the Wellington O 38 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST Inn, to whom, under pledge of secrecy, I had confided our discovery, that they had been to Pentargon Cove to visit our young friend, and found that he had been removed (probably by his mother) back to the exact spot where we had found him. They also stated that his presence there had become known in the village, and that the conviction had been expressed that " the boys " would certainly go and stone him to death ! I had already reproached myself for going elsewhere that day instead of to Pentargon Cove to look after my young seal, and now I hastily left my dinner, procured in the village two men and a potato sack, and hurried to Pentargon Cove. As we approached the edge of the cliff the sun was setting, and the cove was very still and suffused with a red glow. Then a weird sound rent the air, like that made by one in the agonies of sea-sickness. It was the little seal calling for his mother ! It is the habit of the females of this species to leave the shore during the day when they go in search of the fish on which they feed, and to return to their young in the evening, in order to suckle them. I could see, from above, my baby friend a little white figure all alone in the deepening gloom of the great cliffs raising his head and, by his cries, helplessly inviting his enemies to come and destroy him. In a few minutes we were down by his side, had placed him in the potato sack, and brought him to the upper air. On the way to the inn I pur- chased a large-sized baby's bottle with a fine indiarubber teat. We placed the little seal on straw in a large open packing-case in the stables, whilst the kitchen-maid warmed some milk and filled the feeding-bottle. Then I brought it to him, looking down on his broad, white- furred head, with its wonderful eyes, set so as to throw their appealing gaze upwards. I touched his nose with the milky indiarubber teat. With unerring precision THE GREAT GREY SEAL 39 his lips closed on it, his nostrils opened and shut in quick succession, and he had emptied the bottle. I gave him a quart of milk before leaving him and getting my own belated meal. He slept comfortably, but at four in the morning his cries rent the air, and threatened to wake every one in the hotel. I had to get up, descend to the kitchen, warm some more milk for him, and satisfy his hunger. He became fond of the bottle, and also of the friend who held it for him. I arranged to take him to the Zoological Gardens when, after three days, I left Boscastle. He travelled to London in the guard's van in a specially constructed cage, and was as beautiful and happy as ever when I handed him over to the superintendent at Regent's Park. In those days (as it happened) there was little under- standing or care at " the Gardens " as to the feeding of an exceptional young animal like my little seal. It is possible to treat cow's milk so as to render it suitable to a young carnivore, much as it is " humanized " for the feeding of human babies, and I was willing to pay for a canine foster-mother were such procurable. I had then to leave London in order to preside over one of the sections of the British Association's meeting at South- port, and intended to take complete charge of my baby seal upon my return. But in less than a week the neglectful guardians at Regent's Park had killed him with stale cow's milk. I believe such a foundling would have a better chance there to-day, but the rearing of young mammals away from their mother is, of course, a difficult and uncertain job. I do not regret having taken the baby seal from Pentargon Cove, for I undoubtedly saved him from a violent death, whilst his mother would soon recover from 40 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST the loss due to my action a loss to which she and her fellow " grey seal-mothers " must be not unfrequently exposed from other causes. I do regret, however, that it did not occur to me until too late that it would have been a wonderful experience to lie quietly on the shore some few yards from the baby seal, as the sun set, and then to see and hear the great seal-mother 7 or 8 feet long swim into the cove, raise her gigantic bulk on the shore, and heave herself across the pebbles to her eager child. To witness the embraces, caresses, and endear- ments of the great mysterious beast would have been a revelation such as a naturalist values beyond measure. And so I hope, with all my heart, that Mr. Lyell will succeed in his good work of protecting the Great Grey Seal CHAPTER V THE GROUSE AND OTHER BIRDS IN August when so many people are either shooting or eating that delectable bird the grouse a few words about him and his kind will be seasonable. " Grouse " is an English word (said to have meant in its original form " speckled "), and by " the " grouse we mean the British red grouse, which, though closely related to the willow grouse, called " rype " (pronounced " reepa ") in Norway a name applied also to the ptarmigan is one of the very few species of birds peculiar to the British Islands. The willow-grouse turns white in winter, and is often called the ptarmigan, which it is not, though closely related to it. The willow-grouse inhabits a sub-arctic zone, which extends from Norway across the whole continent of Europe and Asia, and through North America, from the Aleutian Islands to Newfound- land. The red grouse does not naturally occur beyond the limits of the British Islands. It does not turn white in winter, and the back of the cock bird is darker in colour, as is also the whole plumage of the hen bird, than in the willow-grouse. The red grouse lives on heather-grown moors; the willow-grouse prefers the shrubby growths of berry-bearing plants interspersed with willows, whence its name. No distinction can be discovered in the voice, eggs, build, and anatomical details of the two species. The red grouse and the 42 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST willow-grouse were, at no very distant prehistoric period, one species, but the race which has become isolated in these islands has just the small number of marked differences which I have mentioned, and it breeds true, and therefore we call it a distinct " species." In Scotland, the red grouse is called " muir-fowl," and a century ago was almost invariably spoken of in England as moor- fowl, or moor-game. It is found on moors from Mon- mouthshire northward to the Orkneys, and inhabits similar situations in Wales and Ireland. The red grouse and the willow-grouse belong to a section or " order " of birds which are classified together because they all have many points in common with " the common fowl " or jungle-cock and the pheasants. That order or pedigree-branch was named by Huxley Alectoromorphae, or cock-like birds, perhaps more simply termed Galliformes, Callus being the Latin name for " chanticleer." When there is a question of the groups recognized in the classification of animals, it is well to bear in mind, once for all, that the biggest branches of the animal pedigree are called " phyla " (or sub-kingdoms) ; that these have branches or sub-divisions which are called " classes " (birds are a class of the phylum Vertebrata). Classes divide into " orders " ; these often are subdivided into " sub-orders." Orders comprise each several smaller branches called " families," families branch into " genera," and each " genus " con- tains a number of " species " which have diverged from a common ancestral form, and become more or less stable and unchanging (but not unchangeable) at the present day. The individuals of a species are distin- guishable by certain marks, shape, and colour from the individuals of other species of the genus. They breed true to those points when in natural conditions, and THE GROUSE AND OTHER BIRDS 43 show some differences of habit, locality, and constitution which emphasize their distinction as a separate " species." The order Galliformes of the class Aves or birds is one of some eighteen similar orders of birds. It contains several families, namely, the grouse-birds, the partridges, the francolins (formerly introduced into Italy from Cyprus), the quails, the pheasants, including the common fowl or Gallus, the peacocks, the turkeys, and, lastly, the guinea-fowls. The mound-builders and the South American curassows (very handsome birds to be seen at the Zoological Gardens) are families which have to be separated from the rest as a distinct sub-order. Fifty years ago the pigeons were placed in one order with the galliform birds, which was termed " Rasores," or scratching birds ; but they are now separated under the name Columbiformes. All the galliform birds are specially agreeable to man as food, and the domesticated race of the jungle-fowl for which we have no proper English name, except that of " the " fowl l is second only to the dog in its close association with man. It seems to have been domesti- cated first in Burma, and was introduced into China about 1000 B.C., and through Greece into Europe about 600 B.C. It is not mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures, nor by Homer, nor figured on ancient Egyptian monu- ments. It was called " the Persian bird " by the Greeks, indicating that it came to them from the Far East through Persia. The common or barn-door fowl is assigned to the genus Gallus, of which there are four wild species. It is very closely related to the pheasants (genus Phasianus, with several " local " species) ; indeed, 1 " Chanticleer" is the name given to the cock-bird of this species in the very ancient story of " Renard the Fox." 44 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST so closely that, when pheasants and " fowls " are kept together in confinement they will sometimes interbreed and produce vigorous hybrids. The peacocks are Indian, and with them is associated the Malay Argus-pheasant. They share with the turkeys, which are North American in origin, the habit of " display " by the male birds when "courting" a habit which we see in a less marked form in the strutting, wing-scraping, and cries of the pheasants, chanticleers, and grouse-birds. The various species of partridges are confined to the temperate regions of the Old World, but the word is wrongly applied in America and Australia to other kinds of birds. The guinea-fowls are African, and so are the francolins and quails, the latter migrating to the South of Europe. It is an interesting fact that, when the turkey was first brought from America, about 1550, a confusion grew up in Europe between it and the guinea-fowl. The turkey was given a genus (Meleagris) to itself by Linnaeus, who called it " M. gallopavo," whilst the guinea-fowl was called " Numida meleagris." We know, at present, other " species " of Meleagris besides M. gallopavo, and other species of Numida. Now we revert to the grouse-birds, a family for which the zoologist's name is Tetraonidae. They all have the beautiful crimson arch of bare knobby skin above each eye which gives its chief beauty to our grouse. The family contains several genera and in- cluded species. The largest species is the capercailzie (a Gaelic word), or cock of the wood, called by the French " coque du bois," by the Germans " auerhahn " (auerhuhn for the hen bird), and by the Norwegians " tiur." It is placed in the genus Tetrao (which gives its name to the " family "), and receives the specific name " urogallus." This fine bird was formerly native THE GROUSE AND OTHER BIRDS 45 in England, as well as in Scotland and Ireland, and is found in the pine forests of Europe from Spain to Lapland and Greece. It has been re-established in Scotland since 1838. An allied species is found in Siberia. The black grouse (often called black cock and grey hen) is a second species of the genus Tetrao, namely, T. tectrix. It is often called " Lyrurus tetrix." The French name for it is " coq de bruyere " ; the German is " birkhahn." It is a smaller bird than the capercailzie, but frequently produces hybrids with that species. The beautifully curled tail-feathers are favourite adornments for the hat of mountaineers and hunters in the Tyrol and Switzerland. Though the word " grouse " may have been first applied (as some think) to the black cock, it is now the proper appellation of the red grouse. This bird is placed by zoologists in the genus Lagopus the members of which are easily distinguishable from other Tetraonidae by the fact that their feet and toes are well covered with feathers. " L. scoticus " is the scientific name of the red grouse. Being a purely British bird, it has no foreign designations. " L. saliceti " is the name of the allied willow-grouse, which has an endless variety of names, owing to its great range of distribution. The willow-grouse is often called ptarmigan, and is sold as such to the number of thousands by poulterers in our markets, but it is not the true ptarmigan. Owing to the fact that its plumage is quite white in winter, there is much excuse for the confusion. The name " ptarmigan " is the Gaelic word " tarmachan," and no one has ex- plained how the initial " p " came to be added to it. The bird called in Scotland tarmachan or ptarmigan is a third species of Lagopus. It is much rarer in Scotland than the red grouse, and lives in high, bare 46 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST ground. It is numerous at an elevation far above the growth of trees in Norway, and occurs also in the Pyrenees and the Alps. It turns white in winter (as do all the species of Lagopus except the red grouse), and differs in many features of structure from the red grouse and the willow-grouse. It is called " L. mutus." A fourth species of Lagopus is L. rupestris, of North America, Greenland, Iceland, and Siberia. Spitzbergen has a fifth species, L. hemileucurus, a large form. The sixth and smallest species of Lagopus is the L. leucurus of the Rocky Mountains. There are yet further some excellent grouse-like birds, which are separated to form other genera distinct from Lagopus. Though they do not inhabit the British Islands, some of them are brought occasionally to the London market. The hazel-hen of continental Europe is one of these, and is considered to be the most delicate game-bird that comes to table. It is placed in the genus Bonasa, and receives the specific name " sylvestris." The French call it " gelinotte " (under which name various kinds of cold-storage grouse are often served in London clubs and restaurants), the Germans " hasel-huhn," and the Scandi- navians " hjerpe." It is a purely forest bird. It is re- presented in North America by four other species, of which the best known is Bonasa umbellus, called by the Americans the ruffed grouse or birch-partridge. Another genus of Tetraonidae, or grouse-birds, is called " Canachites," and contains the species known as the Canadian spruce-partridge, Franklin's spruce-partridge, and the Siberian spruce-partridge. Nearly allied to these is a genus Dendragapus, with three North American species. Then we have the sage-cock of the plains of California (Centrocerus urophasianus), three species of sharp-tailed grouse (genus Pediocaetes), and " the prairie THE GROUSE AND OTHER BIRDS 47 hen," of which three species are placed in the genus Tympanuchus. The United States have, undoubtedly, a great variety of grouse-like birds. Nevertheless, a year ago I met in Paris an American from the neighbourhood of Boston who told me that he should have to desert his native land and come to live in Europe, because he could not obtain a regular supply of game-birds for his table in the eastern States. He was eating a Scotch grouse at the time with evident satisfaction. The supply of grouse in this country has been threatened by disease caused by the attempt to make the moors carry more birds than they would do under natural conditions. The number annually shot on British moors is enormous. Predaceous animals have been destroyed in order to increase the number of birds, but this proceeding has resulted in allowing the weakly to survive. The undisturbed stretches of moorland have also of late years been greatly broken into both by roads and building, and by the too abundant visitation of strangers of all kinds. Only a few years ago one moor- owner was able to boast that he had on several occasions killed over 500 head of grouse in a single day on his moor, and that in one season he and his guests had killed 18,231 head of grouse on that same moor! Personally I rejoice when grouse are abundant, but it seems to me possible that the moor above mentioned had been made to carry, so to speak, too heavy a crop. However, there is reason to hope that the balance of Nature is restored after a few years of disease, which kills off the too-abundant bird population. CHAPTER VI THE SAND AND PEBBLES OF THE SEASHORE THE " beach " on our English coast is an accumu- lation of pebbles or of sand, or of both, often accompanied by dead shells and other fragments thrown up by the sea. Very generally it slopes rapidly from above high-water mark to about half-tide limit, and then merges into a more horizontal expanse of fine, compact sand. This last is not " a beach " thrown up by waves, but a sediment or deposit. It forms a flat, often ripple- marked plain (much has been written as to how those ripple-marks are produced), which is exposed at low water, the sea retreating for a quarter or even half a mile or more over it, on some level shores. Sometimes, though rarely, the sea rises and falls against a hard, rocky cliff without forming any beach or exposing any " shore " even at low tide. This occurs on parts of the Cornish coast, where the Atlantic beats against adamantine cliffs, which even at low tide rise sheer from the water. Again, it sometimes happens that the shore is simply formed of a terrace of sloping hard rock, without any " beach." But on the coast of England generally there is a good beach of sand or pebbles, or both, overlying the native rock or clay, and sometimes it is growing every year, so as to extend the land surface seawards and add new acres to the possessions of the landlord. 48 SAND AND PEBBLES OF THE SEASHORE 49 On other parts of the coast the beach " travels," being driven along the underlying solid shore by the prevailing direction of the tidal currents and by the waves. The sea-waves break close to the soft cliffs of clay, sand, and sandstone. These are continually crumbling away owing to the action of land water, which soaks from the surface down to the layers of clay and forms subterranean springs and streams. They undermine the face of the cliff and cause the upper parts to topple. When there is a big, broad, growing beach in front of such a cliff, the breaking down or "toppling" of its face only leads to the formation of a slope (at the " angle of rest "), and things remain but little changed for ages. But if the beach is not being piled up and added to and growing out seawards year by year, and is, on the contrary, a travelling beach, then the sea comes close up to the clifif, and when masses of it topple on to the beach the sea washes them away, and no " slope of repose " is formed. The cliff keeps on toppling as it is undermined by springs of land water, Its natural buttress against further breakage namely, its own fallen material instead of resting against it as a great sloping, protective bank, is washed away by the sea as fast as it falls, and is carried down the coast by the tidal currents. This is the story of " coast erosion " about which there has recently been a Government inquiry. Where the combined action of prevailing winds and sea currents is throwing up and adding to the beach there is no coast erosion. The causes of the sea currents on our coasts are not easy to determine, as they are connected with the general contour of the land and the currents in large tracts of sea, such as the Channel and the North Sea. Coast erosion is a serious thing. Large parts of the coast of Suffolk and Norfolk are being thus washed away. It can be prevented by " holding " the beach 4 50 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST with piles and boarding, but this costs too much to make it worth doing unless the land so preserved has a special value for the erection of houses. At Felixstowe, where I am writing, the sea has swept away most of the flat the " dunes," or " deans " covered with grass, which it had itself built up by a contrary accumulating action before the time of the Romans. On this flat the ancient Roman town was built. Why the sea has reversed its action is very difficult to say. But within my knowledge of this place high- water mark has advanced as much as 300 yards nearer than it was to the old roadway and to old houses. The great town of Dunwich, which in the Middle Ages had eleven churches, strong fortifications, and a flourishing trade, stood on the flat grass-land in front of the cliff on the Suffolk coast. Its site is now under the sea, not far from here. The breaking away of the cliff (on to which part of the town extended) is still going on there. A few years ago I saw a great bricked well lying like a fallen chimney on the shore. It had been exposed by the crumbling of the cliff, and at last fell out of it. Once that well supplied fresh water to the monastery, part of the walls of which are still standing, and were formerly three-quarters of a mile distant from the sea- shore. The prehistoric cliffs to which the sea came before it formed the flats or links which it is now again eating away, are often traceable a mile or two inland. On the other hand, on parts of the Lincolnshire coast the sea has piled up sand and shingle and added valuable land to the extent of hundreds of acres to the property of those whose estates were bounded by the shore line, and is still doing so. Perhaps the action of the north wind in blowing back and piling up sand out of the reach of the tide is influential in producing this increase SAND AND PEBBLES OF THE SEASHORE 51 of shore-lands, which face northwards. Blown sand forms hills 30 feet and more in height on such flat lands as those of the Sandwich and Deal " links," which have been thrown up by the sea since St. Augustine landed at Richborough, then a seaport, now a couple of miles from the sea. On the French coast near Boulogne the sand has been blown inland so as to form stratified deposits on the low hill country as far as 3 or 4 miles from the sea, and the neighbouring port of Ambleteuse, which five hundred years ago had the chief trade with England is now nothing but a vast stratified " dune " of blown sand. The great Napoleon made some attempt to reopen the harbour, but gave it up as a bad job ; the blowing of sand inwards from the enormous tract of flat, sandy shore was too much for his engineers. The " erosion " and the contrary process of the " extension " of the coast by the action of the waves and currents of the sea must be kept apart and dis- tinguished from a process leading to similar but not identical results, namely, the actual " crumpling " or "buckling" of the earth's crust, leading to the rising of the land surface in some parts of the globe relatively to the sea-level, and on the other hand to the sinking of the land beneath the sea in other regions.. This change of the actual level of the land has continually gone on in the past, and is continually going on to-day. What are called " raised beaches " are seen on many parts of the coast. These are lines of ancient beach, consisting of sea-worn pebbles, fragments of shell, etc., forming terraces along the face of the rocks which rise from the present seashore terraces which are now 15, 30, or more feet above the sea-level, although they must at no very distant period have been at the level of the sea. The land has risen and carried them up out of reach of the 52 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST waves. Such a raised beach is seen along the rocks bordering Plymouth Sound, at a height of some i 5 feet (so far as I can, at this moment, remember) above high- water mark. Owing to the fact that the rock is lime- stone, and is dissolved and redeposited by rain water, as a rock of sugar might be, the pebbles and shells of the old beach are all stuck together or " petrified " by re- deposited limestone (carbonate of lime). Lumps of it can be carried away as specimens. Geological deposits of much older date than these comparatively recent raised beaches tell us of the rising of great masses of land. Thus, for instance, marine shells in a deposit not quite so old as our chalk cliffs and downs, are present at a height of 10,000 feet, forming part of the Alps. At one time that very spot was the bottom of the ocean, whilst other tracts of the earth's surface, now sunk hundreds of fathoms below the sea- level, stood out as continents, with hills and valleys well raised above the waters. Direct evidence of the recent sinking of the coast as distinct from its erosion is not familiar to us in England. The evidence of it is naturally obliterated, as the sinking goes on, whereas on a rising coast the evidence is as naturally preserved. But on the shores of the Mediterranean near Naples the evidence of sinking is well preserved, and has been carefully studied and recorded. The ancient Roman road is still sunk beneath the water, though the celebrated temple of Puteoli, which was formerly submerged by the sinking of the land, has reappeared by a subsequent elevation of the same area. This has not brought the site to so high a level as it had when the temple was built, as appears from the fact that the Roman paved roadway close by is still some I 5 feet be-low the surface of the sea. SAND AND PEBBLES OF THE SEASHORE 53 A beach is built up of water-worn pebbles, consisting usually of bits of the rock of the immediate vicinity, which have become rounded and shaped by continually rolling and knocking against one another as the waves of the sea throw them up or drag them down the sloping heap of like pebbles which is accumulated near high- water line. At Dover and such places, under chalk cliffs, the beach consists of chalk pebbles oval in shape, often of 8 or 9 inches in length, with a large number of well-rounded flint pebbles as big as your fist inter- spersed, or outnumbering the chalk pebbles. At Tenby, in South Wales, the beach consists of assorted sizes of limestone pebbles, well-worn bits of the limestone cliffs of the neighbourhood. Large numbers of them are literally " worm-eaten," being bored into, hard and dense as they are, by a little marine worm (known as Polydora), which may be sometimes found alive and at work in these limestone pebbles lying between tide limits, or more easily at other places in similarly placed chalk blocks or pebbles. On a coast bounded by granite cliffs you get a beach of granite pebbles ; where there are cliffs of slate or of sandstone, pebbles of slate or of sandstone. But there are some beaches which, as remarked above, are continually travelling along the coast. That on the English shores of the North Sea, for instance, is always moving southwards, except where it is held by piles and breakwaters, locally called " shies." More- over, the land of the East Coast, especially the Suffolk and Norfolk coast, in the course of its erosion, has given back to the sea old deposits of the glacial and post- glacial period, consisting of gravels and " drift," made up of flint pebbles and fragments of rocks from the more northern regions over which the great European ice-cap of the glacial epoch extended, and from which 54 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST it ground and tore the surface rock and carried large and small masses boulders and incredible millions of tons of broken up fragments and spread them over East Anglia (where they form the so-called "glacial drift "), and over regions still submerged in the North Sea. Consequently the beach on the Suffolk seashore has a specially variegated assortment of pebbles from all sorts of more northerly situated rocks though small flint pebbles, derived directly from glacial drift and by the drift from the chalk land-surface (the chalk itself not now reaching the shore-line of East Anglia), are greatly predominant. It is in the chalk that flint takes its origin, being found there as large irregular nodules and sheets. CHAPTER VII THE CONSTITUENTS OF A SEABEACH I ONCE went down to Aldeburgh, on the Suffolk coast, with a party of friends, which included an American writer, himself as delightful and charming as his stories. Why should I not give his name ? It was Cable, the author of Old Creole Days." We walked through the little town to the sea-front, and came upon the immense beach spreading out for miles towards Orford Ness. " Well, I never ! " said he to me ; "I suppose the hotel people have put those stones there to make a promenade for the visitors. It's a big thing." It took me some time to persuade him that they were brought there by the sea and spread out by it alone. It was his first visit to Europe, but he had seen the seashore on the other side, and there was nothing like this over there, he declared. A similar readiness to ascribe Nature's handiwork to the enterprise of hotel- keepers led a visitor to the Bel Alp, in the Rhone Valley, when he looked down from that high-placed hostelry on to the great Aletsch glacier, with its central " moraine " of huge rock masses and debris, to exclaim, " I see the proprietor has spread a cinder-path along the glacier to prevent us from slipping. It's a convenience, no doubt, but gives a nasty dirty look to the snow." Mr. Cable, when he once realized that the great Aldeburgh beach was a natural production, did what a 55 56 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST true poet and naturalist must do he fell in love with it, and spent hours in filling his pockets with strange- looking pebbles of all kinds until he was brought into the house to dinner by main force, when he spread his collection on the table, and demanded an explanation of " what, whence, and why " in regard to each pebble. Our companions a great lawyer, a military hero, a politician, and two " learned men " regarded him as eccentric, not to say childish. But I entirely sym- pathized with him, and when next day we sailed down to Orford and stood in front of the old Norman fortress, he further established himself in my regard by deeply sighing and exclaiming, " So that is a real English castle ! " whilst several large tears quietly streamed down his undisturbed countenance. To give an idea of what various rocks from far- distant localities may be brought together on an East Coast beach, take that of Felixstowe as an example. What is true of the East Coast is to some extent also true of the South Coast, and, indeed, wherever the sea makes the pebbles of a modern beach from the materials furnished by the breaking up of old deposits, which were in their day brought by ice-flows or torrential currents from remote regions. The most abundant kind of pebbles on the Felixstowe beach are small, rounded, somewhat flat pieces of flint, derived not directly from the chalk which is the "stratum" or "bed" in which flint is originally formed, but from the Red Crag capping the clay cliffs (London clay or early Eocene), and also from surface washings and " gravels " (of later age than the crag) farther north, whence they have travelled south- ward with many other constituents of the beach. All these flints are stained ruddy brown or yellow by iron a process they underwent when lying in the gravels or THE CONSTITUENTS OF A SEABEACH 57 in the crag in which they were deposited as pebbles, broken, washed, and rolled ages ago from the chalk. The iron is in a high state of oxidation, and stains not only flint pebbles but the sands of the Red Crag and later gravels a bright orange-red, or sometimes a less ruddy yellow. The iron comes originally from very ancient igneous rocks in which it is black and usually combined with silica. The chalk flints are always, owing, it seems, to minute quantities of carbon, quite black in the mass, but thin, translucent splinters have a yellowish- brown tint. The flints are free from iron stain when taken direct from the chalk. The commonest pebble next to flint is milky quartz, or opaque white quartz. This is derived from some far northern source, where there are igneous rocks traversed by veins of this substance (perhaps Norway). Quartz, like flint, is pure silica, the oxide of the element silicon. It appears in another form as rock-crystal, and also as chalcedony and agate. Opal also is pure silica, but differs from quartz and its varieties in being non-crystalline or amorphous, and in being less hard and of less specific gravity than quartz. Opal is soluble in alkaline water containing free carbonic acid, such as are many natural waters and the sea ! But quartz is not so. The siliceous " spicules " and skeletons of many microscopic animals and plants are " opal." The gem known as " opal " is a variety owing its beauty to minute fissures in its sub- stance which break up light into the prismatic colours. A great deal rarer than the milky quartz, but well known on the East Coast on account of their beauty, and often sought for to be cut and polished, are the small rolled bits or pebbles of chalcedony or agate, which have been bedded before their appearance on the beach in some of the pre-glacial or post-glacial gravels, $8 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST together with the flints, and in consequence are often stained of a fine red. Such clear red-stained chalcedony is called " carnelian " ; if the banded agate structure shows, it is called agate rather than carnelian. It is wonderful how many beautiful pieces of both carnelian and agate are picked up on the Felixstowe beach, rarely, however, bigger than a hazel nut. The original source of these carnelians and agates is the East of Scotland. At Montrose you may see the igneous rock containing pale, lavender-coloured agate nodules as big as a potato, the breaking and rolling of which by the sea into small bits has furnished our Suffolk carnelians. Quartzite more or less translucent, sandy-looking pebbles, colour- less or yellow : jasper, black or green with red veining : a fine wine-red or purple stone often veined with quartz are all more or less common, and come from northern igneous rocks possibly some from Scandinavia and some from the breaking up of an ancient " breccia " of the Triassic age, which still exists northwards of East Anglia. Other pebbles very common on this shore are those formed in a curious way by the sea-water from the clay cliffs and sea bottom which are here present, and are of that special geologic age and character known as the London clay. The sea at this moment is continually converting the clay of our Suffolk shore into " cement- stone " by a definite chemical process. The clay and many other things submerged in the sea, as Shakespeare knew, " undergo a sea-change." The cement-stone used to be dredged up from the sea bottom and ground to make cement at Harwich. Great rock-like slabs of it pave the shore at low water, and pebbles of it are abundant. The curious thing is that ages ago geo- logical ages, I mean when the sea was throwing up THE CONSTITUENTS OF A SEABEACH 59 here the old shell-banks and sand-banks known nowa- days as "the Red and Coralline Crags," the London clay cliffs and clay sea bottom were in existence just as they are now. But in that period there existed here enormous quantities of bones of whales of kinds now extinct, which had lived a little earlier in the sea of this area, and were deposited in vast quantity as a sort of first layer of beach or shallow water sea-drift. Bones consist largely of phosphate of lime, and are used as manure. In that old crag sea the phosphate of lime was dissolved from the deposit of bones, and as we find occurring in the case of other clays and other bones elsewhere was chemically taken up by the clay the same kind of clay which to-day is being converted into " cement-stone." It was thus, at that remote period, converted into " clay phosphorite," owing to the presence of the immense deposit of whales' bones, and it has been known for sixty years as Suffolk " coprolite," owing to a mistaken notion that it was the petrified dung of extinct animals. It has been dug up by the ton from below the crag all over this part of Suffolk, where it forms, together with bones, teeth, flints, and box-stones, a bed of small nodules, a foot or so thick separating the London clay from the shelly " crag." This bed is called the Suffolk bone-bed or nodule-bed. The phosphorite, or " coprolite," occurs in the form of bits of clay, hardened by phosphate of lime, and of the colour of chocolate, and hundreds of tons of it have been used by manufacturers of the manure known as " superphosphate." Henslow, of Cambridge, Darwin's friend and teacher, was the first to point out its value. Bits of it, as well as box-stones, and fragments of bone, teeth of whales, of sharks, of mastodon, rhinoceros, tapir, and other extinct animals all fallen from the bone-bed in the cliff are found mixed with the pebbles of the Suffolk beach by 60 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST those who He on that beach in the sunshine, and, for want of something better to do, turn over handful after handful of its varied material. And, besides all the stones I have already mentioned, they find amber, washed here by some mysterious currents from the Baltic, wonderful fossil shells out of the crag, the cameo shell, and the great volute, shells which are as friable as the best pastry when dug out of the Red Crag, but here on the shore become hardened by definite chemical action of the sea-water, so as to be as firm as steel. Here, too, the " chiffonier " of the sea- shore finds recent shells, recent bones (slowly dissolving and wearing away), well-rounded bits of glass, jet drifted down from Whitby, Roman coins, bits of Samian ware (!), mediaeval keys, bits of coal, burnt flints (from steamers' furnaces), and box-stones. A very important and interesting thing about " beaches " is the way in which the pebbles of which they consist are assorted in sizes. Suppose that one prepares a trough some two or three yards long and twelve inches deep, and lets it fill with water from a con- stantly running tap, tilting it slightly so that the water will overflow and run away at the end farthest from the tap. Then if one drops into the trough near the tap handful after handful of coarse sand and small stones of varied sizes, they will be carried along by the stream, and the more rapid and voluminous the stream the farther they will be carried. But they will eventually sink to the bottom of the trough, the bigger pieces first, then the medium-sized, then the small, and the smaller in order, as the current carries them along, so that one gets a separation and sorting of the solid particles according to size, a very fine sediment being deposited last of all at the far end of the trough. The waves of THE CONSTITUENTS OF A SEABEACH 61 the sea are continually stirring up and assorting the constituents of the beach in this .way. Usually the largest pebbles are thrown up farthest by the advancing waves, and dropped soonest by the backward suck of the retreating water, so that one generally finds a pre- dominance of big pebbles at the top of the beach. But on the flat shore of firm ripple-marked sand lying lower down than the sloping " beach " and only exposed at quite " low tide," one often finds very big pebbles of eight or nine pounds weight scattered here and there and little rubbed or rounded. They have gradually moved down the sloping beach and are too heavy to be thrown back again by the waves of the shallow sea which flows over the flat shores characteristic of much of our south-eastern and southern coast. On some parts of the coast huge banks, consisting exclusively of enormous pebbles as big as a quartern loaf, are piled up by the waves, forming a great ridge often miles in length, as at the celebrated Chesil pebble bank near Weymouth, and at Westward Ho ! in North Devon. The presence of these specially large pebbles is due to the special character of the rocks which are broken up by the sea to form them, and to the specially powerful wave - compelling winds and tidal currents at the parts of the coast where they are pro- duced. One generally finds a selected accumulation of moderate-sized pebbles lower down the beach as the tide recedes, and then still lower down patches of sand alternating with patches or tracts of quite small pebbles not much bigger than a dried pea. They are always assorted in sizes, but the extent of each tract of a given size of pebble varies greatly on different beaches along the coast, and even from day to day on the same shore. The greater or less violence of the waves, and of the 62 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST currents caused by wind and tide, is the cause of this variation and locaj difference. The pebbles of the " beach " are, of course, always being worn away, rounded and rubbed down by their daily movement upon one another, caused by the waves as the tide mounts and again descends over the shore. Even the biggest stones, excepting those which lie in deeper water beyond the beach, are eventually rubbed down, and become quite small ; but a point is reached when, the weight of the pebbles being very small, they have but little effect in rubbing down each other, and consequently where the pebbles consist of very hard material like flints the smallest ones are not so much rounded, but are angular and irregular in shape. Whilst a perfect gradation in size can be found from the largest flint pebbles some 6 inches or 7 inches long to the smallest, usually not bigger than a split pea (though sometimes a patch of even smaller constituents may be found), there is a real break or gap between " pebbles " and " sand." I am referring now to what is commonly known as " sand " on the southern part of the East Coast, much of the South Coast, and the shores of Holland, Belgium, and France. There are " sands " of softer material (limestone anTl coral sand), but the sands in question are almost entirely siliceous, made up of tiny fragments of flint, of quartz, agate, and hard, igneous rock. They are often called " sharp " sand. The particles forming this sand are sorted out by the action of moving water, and form large tracts between tide-marks looking like brown sugar, for which baby visitors have been known to mistake them, and accord- ingly to swallow small handfuls. The strong wind from the sea blows the sand thus exposed, as it dries, inland out of reach of the tide, to form sand-dunes, and it is THE CONSTITUENTS OF A SEABEACH 63 also deposited, together with still finer particles (those called " mud "), on the shallower parts of the sea bottom. The curious thing about the particles of " sharp " sand is that they are angular, and for the most part without rounded edges. If you examine them under a micro- scope you will see that they do not look like pebbles in fact, they are not pebbles, for they are so small and have so little weight, or, rather, mass, that they do not rub each other to any effect when moved about in water. They look like, and, in fact, are, for the most part broken bits of silica, unworn and sharp-edged splinters and chips, glass-like in their transparency and most of them colourless, a few only iron-stained and yellow. Amongst these are a few rounded, almost spherical pieces, which are no doubt of the nature of minute water-worn pebbles. Although these few minute pebbles exist among the sharp, chiplike particles of "sand," it is clear that we must broadly distinguish " pebbles " of all sizes down to the smallest from the much smaller "sand particles." There is no intermediate quality of material between " sand and the finest " shingle." CHAPTER VIII QUICKSANDS AND FIRE-STONES r I ^HERE are curious facts about sand which can be J. studied on the seashore. There are the " quick- sands," mixtures of sand and water, which sometimes engulf pedestrians and horsemen at low tide, not only at the Mont St. Michel, on the Normandy coast, but at many spots on the English, Welsh, and Scotch coasts. Small and harmless quicksands are often formed where the sand is not firmly " bedded " by the receding sea, and the sea-water does not drain off, but forms a sort of sand-bog. Then one may also study the polishing and eroding effect of dry blown sand, which gives a " sand- glaze " to flints, and in " sand-deserts " often wears away great rocks. The natural polishing of flints and other hard bodies by fine sand carried over them for months and years in succession by a stream of water, is also a matter of great interest, about which archaeologists want further information. A very interesting fact about the ordinary sand of the seashore is that two pints of dry sand and half a pint of water when mixed do not make two pints and a half, but less than that quantity. If you fill a child's pail with dry sand from above the tide-mark, and then pour on to it some water, the mass of sand actually shrinks. The reason is that when the sand is dry there is air between QUICKSANDS AND FIRE-STONES 65 its particles, but when the sand-particles are wetted they adhere closely to each other ; the air is driven out, and the water does not exactly take an equivalent space, but occupies less room than the air did, owing to the close clinging together of the wet particles. If you add a little water to some dry sand under the microscope, you will see the sand-particles move and cling closely to one another. " Capillary attraction " the ascent of liquid in very fine tubes or spaces is a result of the same sort of adhesive action. If you walk on the firm, damp sand exposed at low tide on many parts of the seashore when it is just free from water on the surface, you will see that when you put your foot down the sand becomes suddenly pale for some seven inches or so all round your foot. The reason is that the water has left the pale-looking sand (dry sand looks paler than wet sand), and has gone into the sand under your foot, which is being squeezed by your weight. The water passing into that squeezed sand enables its particles to sit tighter or closer together, and so to yield to the pressure caused by your weight You actually draw water " into " the sand, instead of squeezing water " out " of it, as is usually the case when you squeeze part of a wet substance say a cloth or a sponge. When you lift your foot up, you find that your footmark is covered with water the water you had drawn to that particular spot by squeezing it. It separates as soon as the pressure is removed. Quartz and quartzite pebbles occur on the South as well as the East Coast. They are sometimes called "fire-stones," because they can be made to produce flashes of flame. If you take a couple of these pebbles, each about as big as the bowl of a dessert-spoon (a couple of flint pebbles will serve, but not so well), and holding one in each hand in a dark room, or at night, 5 66 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST scrape one with the other very firmly, you will produce a flash of light of an orange or reddish colour. And at the same time you will notice a very pecular smell, rather agreeable than otherwise, like that of burning vegetable matter. It would seem that the rubbing together of the stones produces a fine powder of some of the siliceous substance of the stone and at the same time a very high temperature, which sets the powder aflame. I had the idea at one time, based on the curious smell given out by the flashing pebbles, that perhaps it was a thin coating of vegetable or other organic matter derived from the sea-water which burns when the stones are thus rubbed together ; but I found on chemi- cally cleaning my pebbles, first with strong acid and then with alkali, that the flame and the smell were produced just as well by these chemically clean stones as by those taken from the beach. The flame produced by the rubbing of the two stones seemed then to be like the sparks obtained by strike-a-lights of flint and steel, or the prehistoric flint and pyrites. Now, however, a new fact demands consideration. The supposition that the powdered silica formed, when one rubs the two pebbles together, is actually " burnt," that is to say, combined with the oxygen of the air by the great heat of the friction, is rendered unlikely by the fact that if you perform the rubbing operation in a basin of water with the stones submerged, the flash is produced as easily as in the air. My attention was drawn to this fact by a letter from the well-known naturalist the Rev. Reginald Gatty. I at once tried the experiment and found the fact to be as my correspondent stated. Not only so, but the smell was produced as well as the flash. With the desire to get further light on the subject, QUICKSANDS AND FIRE-STONES 67 I consulted the great experimental physicist, my friend Sir James Dewar, in his laboratory at the Royal Institution. He told me that the late Professor Tyndall used to exhibit the production of flame by the friction of two pieces of quartz in his lectures on heat, but made use of a very large and rough crystal of quartz (rock- crystal) and rubbed its rough surface with another large crystal. Tyndall's note on the subject in his lecture programme was as follows (Juvenile Lectures on Heat, 1877-78): "When very hard substances are rubbed together light is produced as well as heat." Sir James Dewar kindly showed me the crystals used by Tyndall, the larger was 16 inches long and 4 or 5 inches broad. We repeated the experiment in the darkened lecture room, and obtained splendid flashes. The same smell is produced when rock-crystal is used as when flint or quartz pebbles are rubbed together. All three are the same chemical body, namely, silica (oxide of silicon). We also found that when the crystals were bathed with water or (this is a new fact) with absolute alcohol, the same flashing was produced by the friction of one against the other. Later, with the kind assistance of Mr. Herbert Smith, of the mineral department of the Natural History Museum, I examined, with a spectroscope, the flash given by two quartzite pebbles when rubbed together. No distinctive lines or bands were seen ; only a " continuous " spectrum, showing that the temperature produced was not high enough to volatilize the silicon. I also examined some pebbles of another very hard substance harder than silica (rock-crystal, quartz, and flint). This was what is called " corundum," the massive form of " emery powder " (oxide of aluminium). By grinding two of these corundum pebbles with very great pressure one 68 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST against the other (using much greater pressure than is needful in the case of quartz), I obtained flashes of light. It was not known previously that any pebbles except those of silica would give flashes of light when rubbed together. A smell resembling that given out by rubbed quartz, but fainter, was observed. Those are the facts new to me and to many others about this curious subject. The flashing under water is a very remarkable thing. I cannot say that I am yet satisfied as to the nature of the flash. A simple explanation of the result obtained, when two dry pebbles are rubbed together in the air, is that crushed particles of the quartz or of the corundum are heated by the heavy friction to the glowing point. But this does not accord with the fact that submergence in a liquid does not interfere with the flashing. The rise of temperature would certainly be checked by the liquid. And the curious smell produced is in no way explained. The breaking of crystals is in many instances known to produce a flash of light. Thus a lump of loaf sugar broken in the dark gives a faint flash of blue light, as anyone can see for himself immediately on reading this. White arsenic crystals also, when broken by shaking the liquid in which they have formed, give out flashes of light. Some rare specimens of diamond, when rubbed in the dark with a chamois leather, glow brightly. The well-known mineral called Derbyshire spar, " Blue John," or fluoride of calcium, when heated to a point much below that of a red-hot iron, " crackles " and glows briefly with a greenish light. The crystals of phosphate of lime, called apatite, and a number of other crystals have this property. But there is no record of any peculiar smell accompanying the flashes of light. It is QUICKSANDS AND FIRE-STONES 69 still a matter open to investigation as to whether the flashing of pieces of quartz and rock-crystal when rubbed together with heavy pressure is of the nature of the flashing of the heated crystals of other minerals, or whether there is any chemical action set up by the friction an action which is certainly suggested by the very peculiar smell produced. Since the flashing can be produced under water and other liquids, it should be easy to obtain some evidence as to the chemical nature of the flame whether acid or alkaline, whether capable of acting on this or that reagent dissolved in the water, and whether setting free any gas of one kind or another. Any one of my readers who chooses can produce the wonderful orange-coloured flame by rubbing two quartz or flint pebbles together in the dark, and can have the further gratification of producing with the utmost ease the mysterious and weird phenomenon of a flame under water, and may, perhaps, by further experi- ment, explain satisfactorily this unsolved marvel which has haunted some of us since childhood. CHAPTER IX AMBER AMBER is not unfrequently picked up among the pebbles of the East Coast. I once picked up a piece on the beach at Felixstowe as big as a turkey's egg, thinking it was an ordinary flint-pebble and intend- ing to throw it into the sea, when my attention was arrested by its extraordinary lightness, and I found that I had got hold of an unusually large lump of amber. There is a locality where amber occurs in considerable quantity. It is a long way off namely, the promontory called Samland near Konigsberg on the Prussian shore of the Baltic. There it occurs with fossil wood and leaves in strata of early Tertiary age, deposited a little later than our " London clay." It used to be merely picked up on the shore there until recent times, when " mining " for it was started. From this region (the Baltic coast of Prussia) amber was carried by the earliest traders in prehistoric times to various parts of Europe. Their journeyings can be traced by the discovery of amber beads in connexion with interments and dwelling-places along what are called " amber routes " radiating from the amber coast of Prussia. To reach the East Coast of England the bits of amber would have to be carried by submarine currents. Amber travels faster and farther than ordinary stones, on account of its lightness. What has been held to be amber is found, also embedded in 70 AMBER 71 ancient Tertiary strata, in small quantity in France, in Sicily, in Burma, and in green sand (below the chalk) in the United States. The Sicilian amber (called " Simetite ") was not known to the ancients : it is remark- able for being " fluorescent/' as is also some recently discovered in Southern Mexico. But it is possible that chemically these substances are not quite the same as true amber. Amber is a fossil resin or gum, similar to that exuded by many living trees, such as gum-copal. It has been used as an ornament from prehistoric times onwards, and was greatly valued by the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and by our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, not only for decorative purposes, but as a " charm," it being supposed to possess certain magical properties. Amber (it is generally believed) comes slowly drifting along the sea bottom to the Suffolk shore from the Baltic. Lumps as big as one's fist are sometimes picked up here. The largest pieces on record found on the Baltic shore, or dug out of the mines there, are from 1 2 to 1 8 Ib. in weight, and valued at i ooo. A party sent by the Emperor Nero brought back 13,000 Ib. of amber from the Baltic shores to Rome. The bottom currents of seas and oceans, such as those which possibly bring amber to our shores, are strangely disposed. The Seigneur of Sark some fifty years ago was shipwrecked in his yacht near the island of Guernsey ; he lost, among other things, a well-fastened, strongly-made chest, con- taining silver plate. It was found a year later in deep water off the coast of Norway and restored to him ! In the really deep sea, over 1000 fathoms down, there are well-marked broad currents which may be described as rivers of very cold water (only four degrees or so above freezing-point). They flow along the deep sea bottom and are sharply marked off from the warmer 72 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST waters above and to the side. Their inhabitants are different from those of the warmer water. They are due to the melting of the polar ice, the cold water so formed sinking at once owing to its greater density below the warmer water of the surface currents. These deep currents originate in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions, and the determination of their force and direction, as well as of those of other ocean currents, both deep and superficial, such as the warm " Gulf Stream," which starts from the Gulf of Mexico, and the great equatorial currents, is a matter of constant study and observation, in which surveying ships and skilled observers have been employed. Amber has not only been valued for its beauty of colour yellow, flame-colour, and even deep red and sometimes blue for its transparency, its lightness, and the ease with which it can be carved, but also on account of certain magical properties attributed to it. Pliny, the great Roman naturalist of the first century A.D., states that a necklace of amber beads protects the wearer against secret poisoning, sorcery, and the evil eye. It is first mentioned by Homer, and beads of it were worn by prehistoric man. Six hundred years B.C., a Greek observer (Thales) relates that amber when rubbed has the power of attracting light bodies. That observation is the starting-point of our knowledge of electricity, a name derived from the Greek word for amber, " electron." In Latin, amber is called " succinum." By heating in oil or a sand-bath, amber can be melted, and the softened pieces squeezed together to form larger masses. It can also be artificially stained, and cloudy specimens are rendered transparent by heating in an oil-bath. Amber is the resinous exudation of trees like the AMBER 73 " Copal gum " of East Africa and the " Kauri resin " or "Dammar" of New Zealand. Both of these products are very much like amber in appearance, and can be readily mistaken for it. The trees which produced the amber of the Baltic were conifers or pine trees, and flourished in early Tertiary times (many millions of years- ago). Their leaves, as well as insects of many kinds, which have been studied and named by entomologists, are found preserved in it. There is a very fine collection of these insects in the Natural History Museum in London. It is probable that more than one kind of tree produced the amber-gum, and that its long " fossiliza- tion " has resulted in some changes in its density and its chemical composition. The East African copal is formed by a tree which belongs to the same family as our beans, peas, and laburnum. It is obtained when freshly exuded, but the best kind is dug by the negroes out of the ground, where copal trees formerly grew and have left their remains, so that copal, like amber, is to a large extent fossilized. The same is true of the New Zealand dammar or kauri gum, which is the product of a conifer called " Agathis australis," and is very hard and amber-like in appearance. Chemically amber, copal, and dammar are similar to one another but not identical. Amber, like the other two, has been used for making " varnish," and the early Flemish painters in oils, as well as the makers of Cremona violins, made use of amber varnish. A medicament called "eau de luce" was formerly used, made by dissolving one of the products of the dry distillation of amber (called " oil of amber ") in alcohol. Now, however, amber is used only for two purposes besides decoration namely, for the mouthpieces of pipes and cigar tubes and for burning (for amber, like other 74 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST resins, burns with a black smoke and agreeable odour) as a kind of incense (especially at the tomb of Mahomet at Mecca). These uses are chiefly Oriental, and most European amber now goes to the East. In China they use a fine sort of amber, obtained from the north of Burma. The use of amber as a mouthpiece is con- nected with its supposed virtues in protecting the mouth against poison and infection. It is softer than the teeth, and therefore pleasant to grip with their aid ; but as a cigar or cigarette tube it is disadvantageous, as it does not absorb the oil which is formed by the cooling of the tobacco smoke passing along it, but allows it to condense as an offensive juice. Forty years ago an old lady used to sit in the doorway of her timber-built cottage in the village of Trimley (where there are the churches of two parishes in one churchyard), smoking a short clay pipe and carving bits of amber found on the Suffolk beach into the shape of hearts, crosses, and beads. She would carve and polish the amber you had found yourself whilst you joined her in a friendly pipe. You were sure in those days of the genuine character of the amber, jet, and agate sold as " found on the beach." Nowadays these things, as well as polished agates and "pebbles from the beach," are, I am sorry to say, manufactured in Germany, and sent to many British seaside resorts, like the false coral and celluloid tortoise- shell which, side by side with the genuine articles, are offered by picturesque Levantines to the visitors at hotels on the Riviera, and even in Naples itself. Nevertheless, genuine and really fine specimens of amber picked up on the beach and polished so as to show to full advantage their beautiful colour and " clouding " can still be purchased in the jeweller's shop at Aldeburgh on the AMBER 75 Suffolk coast near the great pebble beach of Orford- ness. There are difficulties about using the word " amber " with scientific precision. The fossil resins which pass under this name in commerce, and are obtained in various localities, including the Prussian mines on the Baltic, are undoubtedly the product of several different kinds of trees, and, from the strictly scientific chemical point of view, they are mixtures in varying proportions of different chemical substances. The merchant is content with a certain hardness (which he tests with a penknife), transparency, and colour, and also attaches great importance to the test of burning a few fragments in a spoon, when, if the material is to pass as "amber," it should give an agreeable perfume. Scientifically speak- ing, " amber " differs from other " resins," including copal, in having a higher melting point, greater hard- ness, slighter solubility in alcohol and in ether, and in containing " succinic acid " as an important con- stituent, which the other resins, even those most like it, do not. True amber thus defined is called " succinite," but several other resins accompany it even as found in its classical locality the Baltic shore of Prussia and, owing to their viscid condition before fossilization, may have become mixed with it. One of these is called " gedanite," and is used for ornamental purposes. It is more brittle than amber, and contains no succinic acid. It is usually clear and transparent, and of a pale wine- yellow colour. It is not possible to be certain about the exact nature of what appears to be a " piece of amber " thrown up on the seashore, without chemical examination. A year or two ago a friend brought to me a dark brownish- 76 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST yellow-coloured piece of what looked like amber, which (so my friend stated) had been picked up on the shore at Aldeburgh. It was as big as three fingers of one's hand, very transparent and fibrous-looking, owing to the presence of fine bubbles in its substance arranged in lines. I found an exactly similar piece from the same locality in the collection of the Natural History Museum. It was labelled " copal," and, I suppose, had been chemi- cally ascertained to be that resin and not " amber," or, to use the correct name, " succinite." How either of these pieces got into the North Sea it is difficult to say. Though the " copal " of commerce is obtained from the West Coast of Africa, it may occur (though I have not heard that it does) associated with true amber in Prussia. A fossilized resin very similar to copal is found in the London clay at Highgate and elsewhere near London, and is called " copalite." It is possible, though not probable, that the bits of amber found on our East Coast beaches are derived from Tertiary beds, now broken up and submerged in the North Sea, and do not travel to us all the way from the Baltic. CHAPTER X SEA-WORMS AND SEA-ANEMONES LET us now leave the beach-pebbles and go down on to the rocks at low tide in order to see some of the living curiosities of the seashore. There are some seaside resorts where, when the tide goes down, nothing is exposed but a vast acreage of smooth sand, and here the naturalist must content himself with such spoils as may be procured by the aid of a shrimping-net and a spade. Wading in the shallow water and using his net, he will catch, not only the true " brown shrimp," but other shrimp-like creatures, known as " Crustacea" a group which includes also the lobsters, hermit-crabs, true crabs, and sand-hoppers, as well as an immense variety of almost microscopic water-fleas. He will also probably catch some of the stiff, queer little " pipe-fish," which are closely related to the little creatures known as " sea-horses." Pipe-fish are very sluggish in movement, almost immobile, whilst the " sea-horse " or hippocampus only to be taken by the dredge amongst corallines in deep water on rocky bottoms (as, for instance, in the Channel Islands) goes so far as to curl his tail, like a South American monkey, round a stem of weed and sit thus upright amidst the vegetation. Even when disturbed he merely swims very slowly and with much dignity in the same upright 77 78 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST position, gently propelled by the undulating vibratory movement of his small dorsal fin. The male in both pipe-fish and sea-horses is provided with a sac-like structure on the ventral surface in which he carries the eggs laid by the female until they are hatched. a. FIG. 4. British Marine Worms or (Jhsetopods. a, Arenicola piscatorum. Lug-worm largely used for bait by sea-fishermen. It burrows in sea-sand and clay as the earth-worm does in soil. Half - the natural size, linear. b, Nephthys margaritacea, actively swimming. It also burrows in the sea- sand. Natural size. c, Eunice sanguinea, a very handsome marine worm (often used for bait) which lives in clefts in the submarine rocks and also swims actively. The numerous filaments on the sides of the ringed body are the gills of a rich blood -colour. The figure is one -third of the natural size, linear. The shrimper will probably catch also some very young fish fry including young flat-fish about 2 inches long. If he explores the exposed surface of sand near the low-tide limit, he will find a variety of indications of burrowing animals hidden beneath. Little coiled masses like the " castings " of earth-worms are very abundant in places, and are produced by the fisherman's sand-worm, SEA-WORMS AND SEA-ANEMONES 79 or " lug-worm " (Fig. 4, a). A vigorous digging to the depth of a foot or two will reveal the worm itself, which is worth bringing home in a jar of sea-water in order to see the beautiful tufts of branched gills on the sides of the body, which expand and contract with the flow of bright red blood showing through their delicate walls. Other sand-worms, from 2 to 6 inches long, will at the same time be turned up, worms which have some hundred or more pairs of vibrating legs, or paddles, arranged down the sides of the body, and swim with a most graceful, serpentine curving of the mobile body (Fig. 4, b). These sea-worms are but little known to most people, although they are amongst the most beautifully coloured and graceful of marine animals. Hundreds of different kinds have been distinguished and described and pictured in their natural colours. Each leg is provided with a bundle of bristles of remarkable shapes, resembling, when seen under a microscope, the serrated spears of South Sea Islanders and mediaeval warriors. These worms usually have (like the common earth-worm) red blood and delicate networks of blood-vessels and gills (Fig. 4, c), whilst the head is often provided with eyes and feelers. They possess a brain and a nerve-cord like our spinal cord, and from the mouth many of them can suddenly protrude an unexpected muscular proboscis armed with sharp, horny jaws, the bite of which is not to be despised. These " bristle-worms," or " chaetopods," as they are termed by zoologists, are well worth bringing home and observing in a shallow basin holding some clean sea-water. At many spots on our coast (e.g. Sandown, in the Isle of Wight, and the Channel Islands) rapid digging in the sand at the lowest tides will result in the capture of sand-eels, a bigger and a smaller kind, from I foot to 8o DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST 6 inches in length. These are eel-shaped, silvery fish, which swim near the shore, but burrow into the soft sand as the tide recedes. They are excellent eating. We used at Saridown to make up a party of young people to dig the smaller " sand-eels," or " sand-launce." The agility and rapid disappearance of the burrowing fish into the sand when one thought one had safely dug them out, rendered the pursuit difficult and exciting. Then a wood fire on the beach, a frying-pan, fat, flour, and salt were brought into operation, and the sand-eels were cooked to perfection and eaten. Some of the marks or small heaps of sand on the flats exposed at low tide are characteristic of certain shell- fish. The "razor-fish" (Fig. 19,0) a very much elongated clam, or mussel, FIG. 5. The shell of the _J . . & .j Heart-urchin (Spatan- wlth astonishing powers of rapid gus purpureus) with burrowing leaves a hole on the its spines rubbed off. sur f ac e like a keyhole, about an inch One -half the actual , rL , , diameter. lon ^ lt Carl be du ^ U P b ^ an energetic spadesman, but a spoonful of common salt poured over the opening of its burrow will cause it suddenly to shoot out on to the surface, when it may be picked up, and the hunter spared any violent exertion. The curious heart-urchin (Fig. 5), as fragile as an egg-shell, and covered with long, closely-set spines like a brush, is often to be found burrowing in the sand, as well as the transparent, pink-coloured worm known as Synapta, in the skin of which are set thousands of minute calcareous anchors hinged to little sculptured plates. These burrowers swallow the sand and extract nutriment from stray organic particles mixed in it. SEA- WORMS AND SEA-ANEMONES 81 The mere sand-flat of the low tide is not a bad hunting ground ; but the rock pools, often exposed when the tide is out, and the fissures in the rocks and the under surfaces of slabs of rock revealed by turning them over are the greatest sources of varied delight to the sea-shore naturalist. It is well t9 take a man with you on to these rocks to carry your collecting bottles and cans, and to turn over for you the larger slabs of loose stone, weighing as much as a couple of hundredweight. The most striking and beautiful objects in these rock pools are the sea-anemones (Fig. 6 and Frontispiece). They present themselves as disk-like flowers from i to 5 inches in diameter, with narrow-pointed petals of every variety of colour, set in a circle around a coloured centre. The petals are really hollow tentacles distended with sea- water, and when anything falls on to them or touches them they contract and draw together towards the centre. The centre has a transverse opening in it which is the mouth, and leads into a large, soft-walled stomach, separ- ated by its own wall from a second spacious cavity lying between that wall and the body wall, and sending a prolongation into each tentacle. The stomach opens freely at its deep end into this second " surrounding " chamber, which is divided by radiating cross walls into smaller partitions, one corresponding to each tentacle. The nourishing results of digestion, and not the food it- self, pass from the stomach into the subdivided or "sep- tate" second chamber. There is thus only one cavity in the animal, separable into a central and a surrounding portion. In this respect in having only one body cavity sea-anemones and the coral-polyps and the jelly-fishes and the tiny freshwater polyp or hydra, and the marine compound branching polyps like it agree with one 6 82 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST another and differ from the vast majority of animals such as worms, sea-urchins, star-fishes, whelks, mussels, crustaceans, insects, spiders and vertebrates (which last include fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals). These all have a second chamber, or body cavity, quite shut off from the digestive cavity and from the direct access of water and food particles. This second distinct chamber is filled with an animal fluid, the lymph, and is called the " Ccelom" (a Greek word meaning a cavity). These higher animals, which possess a ccelom as well as a gut, or digestive cavity, are called " Ccelomata," or " Ccelo- moccela," in consequence ; whilst the sea-anemones, polyps, and jelly-fish form a lower grade of animals devoid of ccelom, but having the one cavity, or gut, continued into all parts of the body. Hence they are called " Ccelentera," or " Enteroccela," words which mean that the cavity of their bodies (Greek ccel) is made by an extension of the gut, or digestive cavity (Greek enterori). The higher grade of animals the Ccelo- moccela very usually have a vascular system, or blood-vessels and blood, as well as a ccelom and lymph, and quite independent of it ; also some kind of kidneys, or renal excretory tubes. Neither of these are possessed by the sea-anemones and their allies the Enteroccela but they have, like higher animals, a nervous system and also large ovaries and spermaries on the walls of their single body cavity, which produce their reproductive germs. These pass to the exterior, usually through the mouth, but sometimes by rupture of the body wall. All " one-cavity " animals, the Enteroccela or Ccelen- tera, produce peculiar coiled-up threads in their skin in great quantity many thousands often upon special warts or knobs. These coiled-up threads lie each in a microscopic sac ; they are very delicate and minute SEA-WORMS AND SEA-ANEMONES 83 and carry a virulent poison, so that they are " stinging " threads. Excitement of the animal, or mere contact, causes the microscopic sac to burst, and the thread to be violently ejected. The sea-anemones, jelly-fish, and polyps feed on fresh living animals, small fish, shrimps, etc., and catch their prey by the use of these poisonous threads. Some jelly-fish have them big enough to act upon the human skin, and bathers are often badly stung by them. The commonest jelly-fish do not sting, but where they occur a few of the stinging sort are likely to occur also. Even some sea-anemones can sting one's hand with these stinging threads. One sea-anemone (known as " Cerianthus "), occasionally taken in British waters, makes for itself a leathery tube by the felting of its stinging threads, and lines its long burrow in the sand below tidal exposure in this way. The sea-anemones are very hardy, and they are wonderfully varied and abundant on our coasts. Some sixty years ago a great naturalist, who loved the sea- shore and its rock-pools enthusiastically, Mr. Philip Henry Gosse, father of Mr. Edmund Gosse, the dis- tinguished man of letters, described our British sea- anemones, and gave beautiful coloured pictures of them. One of these I have taken for the frontispiece of this volume, and some of the outline figures of marine animals in these chapters are borrowed from a marvel- ously complete and valuable little book by him now long out of print entitled " Marine Zoology." His books of high scientific value and his example, made sea- anemones " fashionable." London ladies kept marine aquariums in their drawing-rooms stocked with these beautiful flowers of the sea. They were exhibited in quantity at the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park, and it is by no means a creditable thing to our London 84 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST zoologists that neither these nor other marine creatures are now to be seen there. At a later date public marine aquaria were started with success in many seaside towns, Brighton, Scarborough, Southport, etc. and a very fine one was organized in Westminster and another at the Crystal Palace. It is an interesting and important fact, bearing on the psychology of the British people, that most of these charming exhibitions of strange and beautiful creatures from the depths of the sea were very soon neglected and mismanaged by their proprietors ; the tanks were emptied or filled with river water, ano! the halls in which they were placed were re-arranged for the exhibitions of athletes, acrobats, comic singers, and pretty dancers. These exhibitions are often full of human interest and beauty but I regret the complete disappearance of the fishes and strange submarine animals. I have some hope that before long we may, at any rate in the gardens in the Regent's Park, see really fine marine and fresh- water aquaria established, more beautiful and varied in their contents than those of earlier days. There are four kinds of sea-anemones which are abundant on our coast. They adhere by a disk-like base to the rocks and large stones, and have the power of swelling themselves out with sea-water (as have many soft-bodied creatures of this kind), with all their tentacles expanded. They have, in that condition, the shape of small " Martello " towers, with their adhesive disk below and the mouth-bearing platform above, fringed by tapering fingers ; and they can, on the other hand, shrink to a fifth part of their expanded volume, drawing in and concealing their tentacles, which are in some kinds perforated at the tip. One common on the rocks at Shanklin and other parts of our South Coast, but SEA-WORMS AND SEA-ANEMONES FIG. 6. British Sea- Anemones. a, Sagartia bellis, the daisy anemone, viewed from above when fully expanded. b, Bunodes crassicornis, half expanded ; side view. c, Anthea cereus. The tentacles are pale apple-green in colour, tipped with mauve, and cannot be completely retracted. d, Actinia mesembryanthemum. The disk of tentacles is completely retracted. This is the commonest sea-anemone on our South Coast, and is usually maroon colour, but often is spotted like a strawberry. 86 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST not on the East Coast, has very abundant, long, pale green tentacles, which are tipped with a brilliant peach colour, and it is peculiar in not being able to retract or conceal this beautiful crown of snake-like locks, remind- ing one of the Gorgon Medusa. It is known as Anthea cereus (Fig. 6, c). Many of them are known by the name " Actinia," and the commonest of all (Fig. 6, d) is called " Actinia mesembryanthemum," because of its resemblance to a fleshy-leaved flower of that name which grows on garden rockeries sometimes called the " ice-plant." This one is of a deep maroon colour, rarely more than an inch and a half across the disk. The adhesive disk is often edged with bright blue, and small spherical tentacles, of a bright blue colour, are set at intervals outside the fringe of longer red ones. This anemone lives wonderfully well in a small glass basin or in an aquarium holding a gallon of sea-water, which is kept duly aerated by squirting it daily. One lived in Edinburgh for more than fifty years, in the possession first of Sir John Dalyell, and then of Mr. Peach. She was known as " Granny," and produced many hundreds of young in the course of years. This species is viviparous, the young issuing from the parent's mouth as tiny fully- formed sea-anemones, which immediately fix themselves by their disks to the glass wall of their habitation. Anemones kept thus in small aquaria have to be carefully fed ; bits of the sea mussel (of course, un- cooked) are the best food for them. This and many other kinds are not absolutely stationary, but can very slowly crawl by means of muscular movements of the adhesive disk. There are kinds of sea-anemones known which spend their lives floating in the ocean ; they are thin and flat. Others adhere to the shells of hermit crabs and even to the big claws of some crabs, and profit by the " crumbs " of food let fall by the nippers of their host. SEA-WORMS AND SEA-ANEMONES 87 A very handsome and large sea-anemone is common on the East Coast, and is known as " crassicornis " (its generic name is Bunodes). When distended it measures as much as 4 inches across (Fig. 6, b). I have one at this moment before me, expanded in a bowl of sea- water. The tentacles are pale green or grey, banded with deep red, and the body is blotched with irregular patches of red, green, and orange. It attaches fine pebbles and bits of shell to the surface of the body. CHAPTER XI CORAL-MAKERS AND JELLY-FISH A VERY beautiful kind of sea-anemone (common at Felixstowe) is the Daisy or Sagartia troglodytes, (Fig. 6, a), which has a very long body attached to a rock or stone far below the sandy floor of the pool, on the level of which it expands its thin, long, ray-like tentacles, coloured dark brown and white, and sometimes orange-yellow. As soon as you touch it it disappears into the sand, and is very difficult to dig out. The most beautifully coloured of all sea-anemones are the little Corynactids (half an inch across), which you may find dotted about like jewels, each composed of emerald, ruby, topaz, and -creamy pink and lilac, on the under surface of slabs of rock at very low tide in the Channel Islands. One of the most puzzling facts in natural history is that these lovely little things live in the dark. No eye, even of fish or crab, has ever seen what you see when you turn over that stone. It is a simple demonstration of the truth of the poet Gray's statement, that many a gem of purest ray serene is concealed in the dark, unfathomed depths of ocean ! A splendid anemone is the Weymouth Dianthus (see the frontispiece of this volume), so named because it is dredged up in Weymouth Bay. It is often six inches long, and has its very numerous, small tentacles arranged in lobes, or tufts, around the mouth. It is either of a CORAL-MAKERS AND JELLY-FISH 89 uniform bright salmon-yellow colour or pure white. When kept in an aquarium it fixes itself by its disk on the glass wall, and often, as it slowly moves, allows pieces of the disk to become torn off and remain sticking to the glass. These detached pieces develop tentacles and a mouth, and grow to be small and ultimately full- sized Weymouth anemones. If the disk were spread out and gave rise to little anemones without tearing so that they remained in continuity with the parent we should get a composite or compound animal, made up of many anemones, all connected at the base. This actually happens in a whole group of polyps resembling the sea-anemones. They grow into " stocks," " tree-like " or " encrusting " masses, consisting of hundreds and even thousands of individuals, each with its mouth and tentacles, but with their inner cavities and bases united. These are the " coral polyps," or " coral-insects " of old writers, of so many varied kinds. One further feature of great import- ance in a " coral " is the production of a hard deposit of calcite, or limestone, which is thrown down by the sur- face of the adhesive disk, and is also formed in deep, radiating " pockets," pushed in to the soft animal from the disk. The hard deposit of calcite is continuous throughout the " stock," or " tree," and when the soft sea- anemone-like animals die, the hard, white matter is left, and is called " coral." Very commonly this white coral shows star-like cups on its surface, which correspond to the lower ends or disks of the soft sea-anemone-like creatures which deposited the hard coral. In a less common group (represented commonly on our coast by the so-called " Dead men's fingers " found growing on the overhanging edges of low-tide rocks) the hard coral material does not form cups for the minute sea-anemones 90 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST which secrete it, but takes the form of a supporting central or axial rod (sea-pens), or branched tree (sea- bushes), upon which the fleshy mass of polyps are tightly set. This is the case with the precious red and pink coral of the Mediterranean (which is now being " undersold " actually in the Mediterranean markets by a similar red coral from Japan, usually offered as the genuine article, which it is not !). On the British coast you do not, as a rule, find coral-forming polyps. A small kind, consisting of two or three yellow and orange-red anemone-polyps united and producing a small group of hard calcite cups (Caryophyllia and Balanophyllia) is not uncommon at Plymouth at a few fathoms depth. But you have to go to the Norwegian fiords or else far out to sea where you have 300 fathoms of sea-water in order to get really luxuriant white corals the beautiful Lophohelia (Fig. 3, p. 9), which I used to dredge in the Nord Fiord near Stavanger, as branching, shrub-like masses of a foot cube in area, each white marble cup standing out from the stem, an inch long and two-thirds of an inch across, and the stems giving support to a whole host of clinging growths (among them Rhabdopleura !) and sheltering wonderful deep-water worms and starfish. But these, beautiful as they are, are nothing, so far as mass and dominating vigour of growth are concerned in comparison with the reef-building corals of the warm seas of the tropics. There these lime-secreting con- glomerated sea-anemones separate annually hundreds of tons of solid calcite per square mile of sea bottom from the sea-water, and build up reefs, islands, and huge cliffs of coral rock. They get the calcite as do calcareous seaweeds and shell-making clams, oysters, CORAL-MAKERS AND JELLY-FISH 91 whelks, and microscopic chalk-makers from the sea the water of the sea which always has it ready in solution for their use. And the sea gets it from the rivers and streams which wear away and dissolve the old limestone deposits now raised into mountain chains, as well as by itself dissolving again in due course what living creatures have so carefully separated from it. Sea water or fresh water with a little carbonic acid gas dissolved in it dissolves limestone and chalk it becomes what we call "hard." Neutralize the dissolved carbonic acid (as is done in the well-known Clark's process for softening water), and down falls the dissolved calcite as a fine white sediment. These alternating processes of solution and " precipitation " are always going on in the waters of the earth and sea. The name " jelly-fish " has reference to the colourless, transparent, soft, and jelly-like substance of the bodies of the animals to which it is applied. There are a number of marine animals, besides the common jelly-fish, belong- ing to different classes, which are glass-like in trans- parency and colourless so as to be nearly or quite invisible in clear water, and some, too, occur in fresh waters (larvae of gnats, notably of the plume-horned gnat Corethra). The transparency of these animals serves them in two different ways some are enabled by it to escape from predatory enemies ; others, on the contrary, are enabled to approach their own prey without being observed. The latter was obviously the case with the little fresh-water jelly-fish which appeared in great abundance some years ago in the lily tank in Regent's Park. The water was full of small water-fleas (minute Crustacea), and the little jelly-fish, if removed from the tank and placed in a tall glass jar filled with the tank water, spent its whole time in swimming upwards to the 92 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST surface by the alternate contraction and expansion of its disk-like body, and then dropping gently through the full length of the jar to the bottom, when it would again mount. On the downward journey owing to its transparency it would encounter unsuspecting, jerkily- moving water-fleas, unwarned by any shadow cast by the impending glass-like monster of half an inch in breadth slowly approaching from above ; and as soon as they touched it they were paralysed (by microscopic poison-threads like those of the sea-anemones), and were grasped and swallowed by the mobile transparent proboscis (like that of an elephant, though certainly smaller, and having the mouth opening at its end. instead of a nostril), which hangs from the centre of the disk-like jelly-fish. 1 There are some glass-like transparent creatures, including some small fishes, which live at 500 fathoms depth and a good deal deeper on the sea bottom. We know that the sun's light does not penetrate below 200 fathoms, so that one is led to ask What is the good of being transparent if you live at the bottom of the sea, at a greater depth than this? There is also a very beautiful prawn, which I dredged in Norway in 200 fathoms, which looks like a solid piece of clearest, colourless glass. And then there are some very beauti- ful little stalked creatures (called Clavellina), fixed to the under-side of rocks in the tidal zone, which are absolutely like drops of solid glass an inch long. One cannot easily imagine how colourless transparency can be of " life-saving value " to these varied inhabitants of the dark places of the sea bottom any more than we 1 See " Science from an Easy Chair" (First Series, 1910), p. 60, for a further account and figure of the freshwater jelly-fish. CORAL-MAKERS AND JELLY-FISH 93 can assign any life-saving value to the brilliant, gem- like colouring of some of the sea-anemones which live in the dark on the under-surface of rocks. The most probable view of the matter is that neither the colourless transparency of the one set nor the brilliant colouring of the other has any value ; it just happens to be so, and is not harmful. So, for instance, some crystals are colourless, some blue or green or yellow or red, without any advantage to them ! On the other hand, we know that a large number of the animals which live in the dark unfathomed depths themselves produce light, that is to say, are phosphor- escent, and it seems probable that at great depths, though there is no sunlight, the sea bottom is illuminated we can only vaguely guess to what degree by the strange living lanterns fish, crustaceans, worms, and even micro- scopic creatures which move about in quest of their food, carrying their own searchlight with them. Another sug- gestion is that the eyes of these inhabitants of the dark may be more sensitive than our own, and even be affected by rays invisible to us. This, however, is not probable, since whilst there are among them some with enormous eyes, we find that at the greatest depths (2 to 4 miles) even the fishes have no eyes at all, and at a depth of a mile there are many shrimp-like creatures in which the eyes have been completely transformed into peculiar " feelers," or otherwise aborted. So that we cannot suppose there is a possibility of developing the eye of the dwellers in deep-sea darkness to a degree of sensitiveness greatly beyond that of terrestrial animals. A limit of obscurity is reached at which it is of no use having an eye at all, and eyes cease to have life-saving value, and accordingly are not maintained by natural selection. 94 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST The transparency and colourlessness of marine animals which float near the surface is, on the other hand, obviously useful, and to this group our jelly-fishes belong. Not only do they escape observation by their transparency and general absence of colour, but some actually have a blue transparent colouring which blends with the blue colour of the sea. Such are the gas- holding, bladder-like sac as large as your fist called the " Portuguese man-of-war," and the little sailing Velella, both of which float, and even protrude above the surface, so as to catch the wind. Others are only semi-transparent, and others are marked with strong red, brown, or yellow streaks. Many of the smallest kinds of jelly-fish have eyes which are bright red in colour. The animals to which the name " jelly-fishes " is now more or less strictly applied are (as that fine zoologist Aristotle knew) in their struc- ture closely similar to the sea-anemones, but even simpler. They are called the Medusae by naturalists. Their disk-like bodies are largely formed by a jelly-like material, on the surface of which are stretched delicate transparent skin, nerves, and delicate muscles, whilst in the middle of the disk, on the surface which faces downwards as the creature floats', is the mouth, leading into a relatively small pouched cavity excavated in the jelly, from which a delicate system of canals is given off, and radiates in the jelly of the disk. There is, as in the sea-anemones, only one continuous cavity. The edge of the disk is beset with fine, sensitive tentacles, sometimes many feet FIG. 7. A common British Jelly-fish. Aurelia aurita, usually as large as a breakfast-plate and often larger. CORAL-MAKERS AND JELLY-FISH 95 in length, and the lips of the mouth are often drawn out into a sort of depending trunk, or into four large tapering lobes or lips of jelly, which, with the longer tentacles, are used for seizing prey. The commonest jelly-fish on our coast so common as to be " the " jelly- fish par excellence is often to be seen left on the sands by the receding tide or slowly swimming in quiet, clear water at the mouth of a river in enormous numbers. It is known as " Aurelia " (Fig. 7). It is as big as a cheese-plate, and the four pouches connected with the stomach are coloured pink or purple, and appear in the middle of the circular plate of jelly, like a small Maltese cross. The reproductive particles (germ-cells and sperm- cells) are produced in that coloured region, and escape by the mouth. There is a fringe of fine, very short tentacles round the edge of the disk, and they, as well as the great lobes of the mouth, are provided with innumerable coiled- up stinging hairs or " thread-cells," similar to those of the sea-anemones, which led Aristotle to call both groups " sea-nettles." Eight stalked eyes are set at equal in- tervals around the disk. Usually accompanying the floating crowd of the common and abundant Aurelia are a few specimens of a very unpleasant kind of Medusa of a turbid appear- ance, often called " slime balls " by fishermen, from six inches to a foot in diameter. It is known to naturalists by the name " Cyanaea capillata." The tentacles on the edge of the disk of this kind of jelly- fish are very long and elastic, stretching to several feet, even yards, in length, and are provided with very powerful stinging hairs. The tentacles not infrequently become coiled around the body of a bather ; the stinging hairs are shot out of the little sacs in which they are rolled up, and the result may be very painful to the 9 6 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST person stung in this way and even dangerous. There are two other common large jelly-fish on the English coast, one called " Chrysaora " (Fig. 8), with a wheel-like pattern of brown pigment on the disk, and the other with the mouth lobes very large and bound together like a column. The common Aurelia is remarkable for the fact that the young which hatch from its eggs attach themselves to stones and rocks on the sea bottom, and grow into little white tube-like polyps, about half an inch long, quite unlike their parent, with a crown of small tentacles surrounding the mouth, whilst they are fixed by the opposite end of the body. Then a very curious thing happens. The little polyp becomes nipped at intervals across its length, so that it looks like a pile of saucers a dozen or more. And then the top saucer FIG. 8. A common British swims away as a minute Jelly-fish. jelly-fish, the next follows, Chrysaora hysoscella. usually twice ' , . , as big as the figure. and SO n > SO that > ln the course of an hour or two, the whole pile separates into a number of freely swimming young, each of which gradually grows into a CORAL-MAKERS AND JELLY-FISH 97 full-sized Aurelia. I have only once had the chance of witnessing this beautiful sight, and that was many years ago in a tank at the Zoological Gardens (they have no such tanks now), where the polyp-like young (called " Hydra tuba *') spontaneously put in an appearance, and proceeded to break up into piles of little disks, which separated and swam off as one watched them. The French poet, Catulle Mendes, imagined a world where the flowers flew about freely and the butterflies were fixed to stalks. His fancy is to some degree realized by the swimming away of the young jelly-fish from their stalks. There are a host of very minute jelly-fish, measuring when full grown only half an inch or less in diameter. They originate as buds from small branching polyps, one kind of which is common on oyster- shells, and is called "the herring-bone coralline." The dried skins of these coralline polyps (which are horny) are often to be picked up with masses of seaweed on the seashore after a storm. The little jelly-fish are the ripe individuals of the polyps, and produce eggs and sperm which grow to be polyp-trees. These, again, after growing and branching as polyps, give rise to little jelly-fish here and there on the tree, which in most kinds (though not in all) break off and swim away freely. CHAPTER XII SHRIMPS, CRABS, AND BARNACLES WE have no word in English to indicate the varied crab-and-shrimp-like creatures of salt and fresh waters in the same way as " insect " designates the six- legged, usually winged, terrestrial creatures of many kinds bettles, bees, bugs, two-winged flies, dragon- flies, day-flies, and butterflies. They are all " insects." Naturalists call the aquatic shrimp-and-crab creatures " crustaceans." Perhaps " crab " might be used in a large sense to include them all, together with the true crabs, as the Germans use their word, " krebs." . The shore-crab is the most familiar of all crustaceans, in the living, moving condition. Boiled lobsters, prawns, and shrimps are more generally familiar members of the class, but the " undressed " living crab is better known to every one who has been on the seashore than the live lobster, prawn, and shrimp. Londoners have been heard to express interest in the curious blue variety of lobster caught on the coast, not being aware that the hot bath which he takes before he, too, is " dressed," causes his blue armour to change its colour to a brilliant scarlet. Occasionally a regular ordinary lobster is caught in which this change has occurred during life in the sea and there are some enormous deep-sea prawns of a pound in weight which when living have a splendid crimson colour. A large series of " crustaceans," carefully SHRIMPS, CRABS, AND BARNACLES 99 prepared so as to show their natural colours in life, is exhibited in the Natural History Museum in Cromwell Road. A curious kind of prawn (by name Alpheus ruber), of fair size, is found under " the low-tide rocks " in the Channel Islands, which not only is of a deep crimson colour, but snaps his fingers at you or rather one of his fingers or claws when you try to catch him, mak- ing a loud crack audible at ten yards distance. The common big prawn, if you see him in a large vessel of sea-water with the light shining through him, appears very brilliantly marked with coloured bands and spots reddish-brown, blue, and yellow which are displayed on a transparent, almost colourless surface. Of course, boiling turns him pale red. A common smaller species of prawn when boiled is often sold as "pink shrimps," and lately a deep-sea prawn a third species has come from the Norwegian coast into the London market. There are many kinds which are not abundant enough to become " marketable." Prawns are at once dis- tinguished from the true " brown shrimp " by having the front end of the body drawn out into a sharp-toothed spine, which is absent in the shrimp. Besides the prawns (Palaemon and Pandalus), the shrimp (Crangon), and the common lobster (Homarus), you may see in the London fish shops the large spiny lobster (Palinurus) called "langouste" by the French, and apparently preferred by them as a table delicacy to the common lobster, although it has no claws. It used to be called " craw-fish " or " sea craw-fish " in London ; why, I am un- able to say. The name was certainly bad, as it leads to confusion with the cray-fish, the fresh- water lobster of British and all European rivers (there are many other kinds of fresh- water lobsters in other parts of the world, as well ioo DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST as fresh-water prawns and crabs), whose English name is a curious corruption of the French one, " e*crevisse " (cray- vees, cray-fish). Another lobster of our markets is the little one known as the " Dublin prawn," which is common enough on the Scotch and Norwegian coasts, as well as that of Ireland. Naturalists distinguish it as Nephrops Norvegicus. The great edible crab completes the list of British marketable crustaceans, but in Paris I have eaten, as well as at Barcelona, a very large Mediterranean prawn, three times as big as our biggest Isle of Wight prawns, but by no means so good. It is called " Barcelona prawn " and " Langostino " (" Penaeus " by naturalists). In Madrid I have seen in the fish shops and eaten yet another crustacean a very curious one namely, a long-stalked rock-barnacle of the kind known to naturalists as Pollicipes. That the barnacles ship's barnacles (Fig. 10) and with them the little sea-acorns (Fig. 1 1 ), those terribly hard and sharp little white " pimples " which cover the rocks nearly everywhere just below high-tide mark, and have so cruelly lacerated the hands and shins of all of us who swim and have had to return to a rocky shore in a lively sea should be included with crabs, lobsters, and shrimps as " crustaceans " must appear astonishing to every one who hears it for the first time. The extra- ordinarily ignorant, yet in their own estimation learned, fishermen of the Scottish coast will tell you with solemn assurance that the ubiquitous encrusting sea-acorns are the young of the limpet, whilst the creature living inside the shell of the long-stalked ship's barnacles has for ages been discoursed of by the learned as one of the marvels of the sea nothing more or less than a young bird the young, in fact of a goose the barnacle goose which, since it was thus proved to be a fish in origin, SHRIMPS, CRABS, AND BARNACLES 101 was allowed to be eaten by good Catholics on fast days ! Two hundred years or more ago this story was dis- credited by serious naturalists, but the barnacles and sea- acorns were thought (even by the great Cuvier) to be of the nature of oysters, mussels, and clams (Molluscs), because of their possessing white hard shells in the form of" valves " and plates, which can open and shut like those of mussels. Their true history and nature were shown about eighty years ago by a great discoverer of new things concerning marine creatures, Dr. Vaughan Thompson, who was Army Medical Inspector at Cork, and studied these and other animals found in the waters of Queenstown Harbour. The crab class, or Crustacea, have, like the insects, centipedes, spiders, and scorpions, a body built up of successive rings or segments. The earth-worms (as every one knows) and marine bristle-bearing worms also show this feature in the simplest and most obvious way. The vertebrates, with their series of vertebras or backbone- pieces and the body muscles attached ring-wise to them, show the same condition. The marine worms have a soft skin and a pair of soft paddle-like legs upon each ring of the body, often to the number of a hundred such pairs. But the crab class and the classes called insects, centipedes, arachnids, and millipedes are remark- able for the hard, firm skin, or " cuticle," which is formed on the surface of their bodies and of their legs, which, as in the marine worms, are present a pair to each body- ring or segment often along the whole length of the body as in centipedes. This hard cuticle is impreg- nated with lime in the bigger members of the crab class, such as the lobster. It is not equally thick and hard all over the surface of the lobster, but is separated by narrow bands of thin, soft cuticle into a number of 102 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST harder pieces, thus rendered capable of being bent or " flexed " on one another. Thus the body is jointed into a series of rings, and the legs are also divided each into several joints (as many as seven), which gives them flexibility and so usefulness of various kinds. The various joints are " worked " by powerful muscles, which are fixed internally to the cuticle and pass from one hard ring or segment, whether of body or of leg, to a neighbour- ing ring. Every one knows the structure of a lobster's tail and of its legs, which can be readily examined in illustration of my statement, and the same structure can be seen in the leg of a beetle or a fly. Naturalists term all this series of creatures with hard -jointed cuticle, to which the muscles are attached, including the crab class, the insects, centipedes, spiders, and scorpions, "jointed-leg owners," or Arthropods. It is easy to appreciate this characteristic difference which separates the Arthropods from other animals. The sea-worms differ from them, in that they have soft cuticle, but stiffen and render their paddle-like legs firm by squeezing the liquid of the body into them in the same sort of way as the sea-anemones distend their tentacles with liquid, though in that case the liquid is sea-water taken in by the mouth. The Molluscs also distend their muscular lobe, or " foot " as it is called, by pressing the blood from the rest of the body into it, and so making it swell and become stiff, so that the muscles can work it ; when not distended in that way it is flaccid. The Vertebrates (bony animals) and the star-fishes have again another and peculiar mechanism. Their muscles are attached to hard internal pieces, sometimes cartila- ginous but often calcareous or bony, which are spoken of as " the internal skeleton." There are thus three distinct kinds of mechanism in animals for giving the necessary SHRIMPS, CRABS, AND BARNACLES 103 resisting surfaces, hinged or jointed to one another, and made to " play " one on the other by the alternate contraction and relaxation of the muscles attached to them. The Arthropods differ among themselves in the number of body-rings, the enlargement or dwindling of certain rings, and the fusion of a larger or smaller number of the rings to form a composite head, or a jointless mid- body or hind-body. The successive legs are primarily and essentially like to one another, and each body-ring, with its pair of legs, is but a repetition of its fellows. At the same time, in the different classes included as " Arthropoda " a good deal of difference has been attained in the structure of the legs, and they have in each class a different form and character in successive regions of the body, distinctive of the class, and are sometimes, but not always, absent from many of the hinder rings. All these Arthropods agree in having a leg on each side immediately behind the mouth belonging to a body- ring, which is fused with others to form the head very specially shortened, of great strength and firmness, and shaped so as to be pulled by a powerful muscle attached to it, against its fellow of the opposite side, which is similarly pulled. These two stumpy legs form thus a powerful pair of nippers called " the mandibles." They are jaws, although they were in the ancestors of the Arthropods merely legs. These jaw-legs, or leg-jaws, are characteristic of all the crab class, as well as of the other Arthropods, but no bristle-worm or other animal has them. The jaws of marine worms are of a totally different nature. So are the jaws of snails, whelks, and cuttle-fish. Many of the crab class have not one only, but several, pairs of legs following the mouth converted into jaws. Thus, if you examine a big shore-crab, or ? 104 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST better, an edible crab, and a lobster, and a large prawn you will find that they all have five pairs of legs con- verted into short foliaceous jaws (hence called " foot- jaws"), and overlying the first very strong pair, or mandibles. Following these " foot-jaws " you find in a crab or a lobster the great nipping claws and the four large walking legs the same in proportion and shape in crab, lobster, and prawn, much bigger than the foot-jaws. But the curious thing is that if you set them out and carefully compare them (for they are not simple jointed limbs, but each has two or even three diverging stems carried on a basal joint), you will find a strange and fascinating " likeness in unlikeness," or an agreement of the parts of which they are built, and yet a difference between all of them. The rings of the body to which the jaw-legs and legs are attached are fused into one unjointed piece. The spine in front of the mouth and the support of the eyes and the feelers or " antennae " are fused with that piece. It forms on the back a great shield often called " the head " which overhangs and is bent down over the sides of this region, so as to protect the gills, which you can see by cutting away the overhanging flap. Following on the jaw-legs or foot-jaws and walking- legs, in the three crustaceans we are looking at, comes the jointed tail or hind-body, consisting of seven pieces. The first five rings of the tail have small Y-shaped legs, a pair to each ring. They are called " swimmerets," whilst the sixth has legs of the same shape, but very large and flat. In the middle between these large flat legs is the last ring, which has no legs, but is perforated SHRIMPS, CRABS, AND BARNACLES 105 by the opening of the intestine. You will see if you compare the crab and the lobster (or the prawn, which is very much like the lobster), that the crab has the so-called head (really head and mid-body combined) drawn out from side to side, so as to make it much wider than it is long. And, moreover, the jointed tail or FIG. 9. The larval or young form of Crustacea known as "the Nauplius." This is the "Nauplius" of a kind of Prawn. The three pairs of branched limbs are well seen. Much magnified. hind-body seems at first sight to be absent in the crab But if you turn the crab (a dead one) on his back, you will find that he has a complete tail, on the whole like that of the lobster, but pointed and bent forwards, and closely packed under the fused head and mid-body in a groove, from which you can raise it and turn it back. We have not yet done with the various forms io6 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST assumed by the legs of our three crustaceans for, actually in front of the mouth, there are two pairs of peculiarly altered legs. Originally in crab- ancestors, and at the present day in the very minute young stage of growth called " the Nauplius " (Fig. 9), the mouth was not behind these two front pairs. It has sunk back as it were, gradually moved so as to leave the legs in front of it. As we now see them in the crab, lobster, and prawn, the two pairs of legs in front of the mouth are jointed filamentous things the feelers or antennae very long in prawns and lobsters, short in crabs. In the ancestors of crabs, lobsters, and prawns these feelers were undoubtedly swimming legs. In the " nauplius " stage (Fig. 9) of some prawns, and in many minute crustaceans often called "water-fleas," we find these feelers not acting as mere sensory organs of touch, but relatively strong and large, with powerful muscles, striking the water and making the little creatures bound or jump through it in jerks. It has been discovered that in the growth from the egg of many crustaceans the young hatches out as a " nauplius " with only three pairs of legs. The front two pairs later gradually grow to be the feelers, the third pair become eventually the mandibles or first pair of jaw-legs. These legs all present themselves at first as active, power- ful swimming " oars," beset with peculiar feathery hairs and not in the shape which they later acquire. The kite-shaped nauplius baby-phase, smaller than a small flea, with its three pairs of violently jerking legs, is a very important little beast. It is the existence of this young stage in the growth of barnacles and sea-acorns which has demonstrated that they are crustaceans, that is to say, belong to the crab class. The fixed shell-like barnacles and sea-acorns hatch from their eggs each as a perfect little " nauplius," like that drawn in Fig. 9. They swim about with jerking move- SHRIMPS, CRABS, AND BARNACLES 107 ments caused by the strokes of the two front legs and of the pair which will become the mandibles. Their limbs have the special form and are beset with the feather-like hairs, and the whole creature has the kite- like shape characteristic of the nauplius young of other Crustacea. They are indeed indistinguishable from those young. Whilst it was the Army doctor, Vaughan Thompson, who discovered that barnacles are strangely altered " shrimps," it was Darwin who made one of the most interesting discoveries about them a discovery of which he was always, and rightly, very proud as I will explain in the next chapter. CHAPTER XIII BARNACLES AND OTHER CRUSTACEANS THE ship's barnacle looks at first, when you see one of a group of them hanging from a piece of floating timber, like a little smooth, white bivalve shell, as big as your thumb-nail, at the end of a thickish, worm-like stalk, from one to ten inches long (Fig. 10). But you will soon see that there are not only two valves to the white shell, but three smaller ones as well as the two principal ones. This does not separate them alto- gether from the bivalve-shelled molluscs (mussels, clams, oysters), for the bivalve molluscs, which bore in stone and clay, have small extra shelly plates, besides the two chief ones, whilst the Teredo, or ship's worm a true bivalve mollusc has an enormously long, worm-like body which favours a comparison with it of the long- stalked barnacle. If a group of barnacles is floating attached to a piece of timber undisturbed in a tank of sea-water you will see the little shells gape, and from between them a bunch of curved, many-jointed feelers will issue and make a succession of grasping or clawing movements, as though trying to draw something into the shell, which, in fact, is what they are doing namely, industriously raking the water on the chance of bringing some particle of food to the mouth which lies within the shell (Fig. 10). 108 BARNACLES AND OTHER CRUSTACEANS 109 SC. t. FIG. io. The Common Ship's Barnacle, Lepas anatifera, natural size. The name "Anatifera," the ' ' goose - bearer, ' ' was given to this species by Linnaeus in reference to the legend of its giving birth to young geese. St., stalk. >., cirri, or double hairy legs. pe., opening of the semi- nal duct. sc., scutum; /, tergum, the two plates or shells of the left side ; c, the middle piece or shell called the "carina." I to DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST It is not every one who has the chance of seeing living ship's barnacles (Lepas), but anyone can pick up a stone or bit of rock on the seashore with live sea- acorns or acorn-barnacles (Balanus) adherent to it. Each is like a little truncated volcano (Fig. 11), the sides and base of which correspond to the carina of the ship's barnacle, enlarged and grown into a cone-like wall. The acorn-barnacle has no stalk, but adheres by its broad base to the stone. Just within the shelly crater are four small hinged plates or valves in pairs, identical with the paired shelly bits of the ship's barnacle. When you first see your specimen, the valves are tightly closed. After a few minutes in a glass of sea- water they open right and left, and up jumps jack-in-the-box-wise a tuft of FIG. ii. A large bowing and scraping feelers or tentacles, British Sea-acorn, like those of the ship's barnacle. If B irT S r r cf - U *' disturbed, they shoot inwards, and the allied to the Ship s 7 Barnacle. /, the valves close on them like a spring trap- feather - like legs door. issuing from the shell. Drawn of , T . . c the natural size. Now > these clawing, feathery httle plumes are found, when we examine them with a hand-glass, to be six pairs in number, and each of them is Y-shaped, like the swimmerets of a lobster. The arms of the Y are built up of many little joints and covered with coarse hairs. As a result of the study of the young condition of the ship's barnacle and the sea-acorn, we find that these six pairs of Y-shaped plumes are six pairs of legs corresponding to those of the mid-body (some of the walking legs and some of the foot-jaws) of the lobster, and that the shelly hinged plates of the barnacles correspond to the over- hanging sides of the " head " of the lobster and prawn, BARNACLES AND OTHER CRUSTACEANS in which one can imagine to be hinged along a line running down the back so as to open like the covers of a book. There are very common little, free-swimming "water- fleas " (minute crustaceans) of many hundreds of kinds which have hinged shells of this description when in the full-grown condition, and it is found that the young barnacles and sea-acorns pass through a free-swimming phase of growth (the Cyprid stage), in which they greatly resemble these " water-fleas." In fact, it is quite easy to hatch the young from the eggs of either ship's barnacles or acorn-barnacles at the right season of the year. They commence life as do so many Crustacea in the " nauplius state," with three pairs of jerking limbs (Fig. 9). As they grow the overhanging pair of shells, delicate and transparent, appear ; the three pairs of nauplius legs lose their swimming power ; the most anterior (always called antennules in all crustaceans) become elongated and provided each with an adhesive sucker, on the face of which a large cement gland opens, secreting abundant adhesive cement; the second pair (antennae) shrivel and disappear altogether; the third pair lose their long blades for striking the water and remain as simple, but strong, stumps the mandibles ! Two new pairs of little jaw-feet appear behind these, and farther back on the now enlarged body (the whole creature is not bigger than a small canary seed !) six pairs of Y-shaped legs appear and strike the water rhythmically, so that the little creature swims with some sobriety. The region to which these legs are attached is marked with rings or segments, and behind it follows a small, limbless, hind body of four segments, or joints, ending with two little hairy prongs like a pitchfork. The right and left movable, shell-like fold, or down- growth, of the sides of the body encloses the whole 112 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST creature except the protruding antennules with their suckers. In this condition it swims about for a time, and then, once for all, fixes itself by means of the suckers and their abundant cement, on to rock, stone, or floating wood and there remains for the rest of its life (Fig. 12). It v * cir. fn.b. ci. a'. FIG. 12. Two stages in the growth of the Common Barnacle from the Nauplius stage. Diagrammatic. cir. t the double legs or cirri; m, mouth; o, the single eye; d, the digestive canal. a 1 , one of the antennules or " feelers " (that of the right side of the head) provided with a sucking disk by means of which the young animal becomes fixed. increases enormously in size, the delicate transparent shell develops into hard calcareous plates, opening and shutting on the hinge-line of the back. In the stalked kinds a peculiar elongated growth of an inch or several inches in length takes place between the mouth and the fixed suckers of the antennules (Figs. I o and 12); in the short, so-called, "acorn" kinds, this stalk does not form, but a separate part of the shell grows into a ring-like protective BARNACLES AND OTHER CRUSTACEANS 113 wall or cone. The creature is thus actually fastened by its head " upside down, with its legs sticking up " not in the air, but in the water. Those six pairs of Y-shaped legs, though no longer enabling the barnacle to swim, increase in relative size, and keep up their active move- ments. It is they which emerge like a plume when the valves of the shell open and carry on the rhythmic bowing and scraping movement described above. The barnacles have, in fact, undergone a transforma- tion which may be compared to that experienced by a man who should begin life as an active boy running about as others do, but be compelled suddenly by some strange spell or Arabian djin to become glued by the top of his head to the pavement, and to spend his time in kicking his food into his mouth with his legs. Such is the fate of the barnacles, and it is as strange and exceptional amongst crustaceans as it would be amongst men. Indeed, to " earn a living " human acrobats will submit to something very much like it. It is this change from the life of a free-living shrimp to that of a living lump, adherent by its head to rocks or floating logs, that Vaughan Thompson in 1830 discovered to be the story of every barnacle, and so showed that they were really good crustaceans gone wrong, and not molluscs. It is a curious fact that the young ascidian or sea-squirt which swims freely and has the shape of a tadpole, also when very young fixes itself by the top of its head to a rock or piece of seaweed, and remains immovable for the rest of its life. Though agreeing in their strange fixation by the head, the barnacle and the ascidian are very different kinds of animals. (For some account of the Ascidian the reader may consult the chapter " Tadpoles of the Sea " in " Science from an Easy Chair," Second Series. Methuen, 1912.) 8 H4 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST The name " Cirripedes " is commonly used for the order or group formed by the barnacles in allusion to the plume-like appearance of their " raking " legs. Stalked barnacles often are found in the ocean attached to float- ing pumice-stone, and one species has been discovered attached to the web of the foot of a sea-bird. They, like many other creatures, benefit by being carried far and wide by floating objects. Whales have very large and solid acorn-barnacles peculiar to them, fixed deeply in their skin. Others attach themselves to marine turtles. With few exceptions the crustaceans are of separate sexes, male and female. But in nearly all classes of animals we find some kinds, even whole orders, in which the ovaries and spermaries are present in one and the same individual. " Monoecious " or " one-housed " that is to say, possessing one house or individual for both ovaries and spermaries is the proper word for this condition, but a usual term for it is "hermaphrodite." " Dioecious " is the term applied to animals or plants in which there are two kinds of individuals one to carry the spermaries, the male, and the other to carry the ovaries, the female. It is probable that the monoecious condition has preceded the dioecious in all but unicellular animals. In vertebrate animals as high as the frogs and the toads we find rudimentary ovaries in the male, and in individual cases both ovaries and spermaries are well developed. Such a condition is not rare as an individual abnormality in fishes. In some common species of sea- perch (Serranus) and others it is not an exception but the rule. Many groups of molluscs are monoecious, and it is not in any way astonishing to find a group of crus- taceans which are so. The Cirripedes or barnacles are BARNACLES AND OTHER CRUSTACEANS 115 an example. It is probable that the presence of ovaries and spermaries in the same individual the monoecious condition is an advantage to immovable fixed animals. During the voyage of the " Beagle," and making use on his return of the collections then obtained, Darwin carried out a very thorough study of the Cirripedes of all kinds from all parts of the world. He worked out their anatomy minutely, classified the 300 different kinds then known, and described many new kinds. The stalked barnacles often occur in groups, the individuals being of different ages and sizes, the small young ones sometimes fixing themselves by their sucker-bearing heads to the stalks of their well-grown relatives. In all the varied kinds studied by Darwin he found that the full-grown individuals were monoecious that is, of com- bined sex as was known to be the case in those studied before his day. But Darwin made the remarkable discovery that in two kinds of stalked barnacles (not the common ship's barnacles), comprising several species, " dwarf males " were present perched upon the edge of the shell of the large monoecious (bi-sexual) individuals. These dwarf males were from one-tenth to one-twentieth the length of the large normal monoecious individuals, but usually possessed the characteristic details of the shell-valves and other features of the latter. This existence of a sort of supernumerary diminutive kind of male as an accompaniment to a race of normal monoecious individuals was quite a new thing when Darwin discovered it. That all the males in some dioecious animals are minute as compared with the females was known, and has been established in the case of some parasitic crustaceans, in some of the wheel-animal- cules, and in the most exaggerated degree in the curious worms, Bonellia and Hamingia (p. 11). But the exist- n6 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST ence of " complemental males," as Darwin called them, existing apparently in order to fertilize the eggs should they escape fertilization by the ordinary monoecious individuals, was a new thing. And it was doubted and disputed when Darwin described his observations fifty- six years ago. They were, in fact, by many regarded as a distinct species parasitic upon the larger barnacles on which they were found until Darwin's conclusion as to their nature was confirmed by the report of Dr. Hoek, on the barnacles brought home by the " Challenger " expedition. It is an interesting fact that recent studies have shown that in some of the barnacles with dwarf males (species of Scalpellum) the large individuals are no longer monoecious, but have become purely females, whilst in some other species dwarf males have been discovered which have rudimentary ovaries. Thus we get gradations leading from one extreme case to the other. Darwin always felt confidence in his original observations on this matter, and was proportionately delighted when, after thirty years, his early work was proved to be sound. In the Natural History Museum at the Darwin centenary in 1909, a temporary exhibition of specimens, note-books, and letters associated with Darwin's work, was brought together. His original speci- mens and drawings of Cirripedes and of the wonderful little " complemental males " of the barnacles were placed on view. CHAPTER XIV THE HISTORY OF THE BARNACLE AND THE GOOSE THE curious belief, widely spread in former ages that the creatures (described in the last chapter) called " barnacles " or " ship's barnacles " often found attached in groups to pieces of floating timber in the sea as well as fixed to the bottoms of wooden ships are the young of a particular kind of goose called " the barnacle goose," which is supposed to hatch out of the white shell of the long-stalked barnacle, is a very remarkable example of the persistence of a tradition which is entirely fanciful. It was current in Western Europe for six or seven centuries, and was discussed, refuted, and again attested by eminent authorities even as late as the foundation of the Royal Society the first president of which, Sir Robert Moray, read a paper at one of the earliest meetings of the society in 1661, in which he described the bird-like creature which he had observed within the shell of the common ship's barnacle, and favoured the belief that a bird was really in this way produced by a metamorphosis of the barnacle. The story was ridiculed and rejected by no less a philosopher than Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century, and was also discredited by the learned Aristotelian Albertus Magnus at about the same time. No trace of n8 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST it is to be found in Aristotle or Herodotus or any classical author, nor in the " Physiologus." The legend seems to have originated in the East, for the earliest written statement which we have concerning it is by a certain Father Damien, in the eleventh century, who simply declares : " Birds can be produced by trees, as happens in the island of Thilon in India." We have also a reference to the same marvel in an ancient Oriental book (the " Zohar," the principal book of the Kaballah), as follows: "The Rabbi Abba saw a tree from the fruits of which birds were hatched." The earliest written statements of the legend are, it appears, to the effect that there is a tree which produces fruits from which birds are hatched. The belief in the story seems to have died out at the end of the seventeenth century, when the structure of the barnacle lying within its shell was examined without prejudice, and it was seen to have only the most remote resemblance to a bird. The plumose legs or " cirrhi " of the barnacle (Fig. 10) have a superficial resemblance to a young feather or possibly to the jointed toes of a young bird, and there the possibilities of comparison end. The notion that a particular kind of black goose (a " brent "), which occurs on the marshy coast of Britain in great numbers, is the goose, the bird, produced by the barnacle was favoured by the fact that this goose does not breed in Britain, and yet suddenly appears in large flocks, in districts where barnacles attached to rotting timber are often drifted on to the shore. It was accord- ingly assumed by learned monks who already knew the traveller's tale, that in distant lands birds are produced by the transformation of barnacles that this goose is the actual bird which is bred from the barnacles, and it was accordingly called " the barnacle goose." I think HISTORY OF THE BARNACLE AND GOOSE 119 that this identification was due to the exercise of a little authority on the part of the clergy in both France and Britain, who were thus enabled to claim the abundant (C barnacle goose " as a fish in its nature and origin rather than a fowl, and so to use it as food on the fast- days of the Church. Pope Innocent III (to whom the matter was referred) considered it necessary in 1215 to prohibit the eating of " barnacle geese " in Lent, since although he admitted that they are not generated in the ordinary way, he yet maintained (very reasonably) that they live and feed like ducks, and cannot be regarded as differing in nature from other birds. Thus we see that in early and even later days a good deal hung on the truth of this story of the generation of barnacle geese. The story was popularly discussed by the devout and by sceptics, and appears to have been known in France as " 1'histoire du canard." At last in the seventeenth century it was finally dis- credited, owing to the account given by some Dutch explorers of the eggs and young of the barnacle goose like those of any other goose and its breeding-place in the far north on the coast of Greenland. The discredited and hoary legend now became the type and exemplar of a marvellous story which is destitute of foundation, and so the term " un canard " (short for histoire d'un canard), commonly applied in French to such stories, receives its explanation. Our own term for such stories, in use as long since as 1640, namely, "a cock-and-bull story," has not been traced to its historical source. 1 That the story of the goose or duck and the 1 Probably it means " a silly story told by a cock to a bull ! " as suggested by the French word coq-ct-Pdne, which means a story told or fit to be told by a cock to an ass ! 120 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST transformed barnacle was a popular one in Shakespear's time, whether believed or disbelieved, appears from his reference to barnacles in " The Tempest." Caliban says to Stephano and Trinculo, when they have all three been plagued by Prospero's magic, and plunged by Ariel into " the filthy mantled pool " near at hand, " dancing up to their chins " : " We shall lose our time and all be turned to barnacles, or to apes with foreheads villainous low." Probably enough, this is an allusion to the supposed Protean nature of barnacles. They are not alluded to elsewhere in Shakespear. One of the most precise accounts of the generation of geese by barnacles is that of the mediaeval historian Giraldus Cambrensis, who visited Ireland and wrote an account of what he saw in the time of Henry II, at the end of the twelfth century. He says : " There are in this place many birds which are called Bernacae; Nature produces them, against Nature, in a most extraordinary way. They are like marsh-geese, but somewhat smaller. They are produced from fir timber tossed along the sea, and are at first like gum. After- wards they hang down by their beaks as if they were a seaweed attached to the timber, and are surrounded by shells in order to grow more freely. Having thus in process of time been clothed with a strong coat of feathers, they either fall into the water or fly freely away into the air." " I have frequently seen," he proceeds, "with my own eyes, more than a thousand of these small bodies of birds, hanging down on the seashore from a piece of timber, enclosed in their shells and ready formed. They do not breed and lay eggs like other birds ; nor do they ever hatch any eggs nor build nests anywhere. Hence bishops and clergymen in some parts of Ireland do not scruple to dine off these birds at the HISTORY OF THE BARNACLE AND GOOSE 121 time of fasting, because they are not flesh nor born of flesh!" It is noteworthy that Giraldus does not state in accordance with the tradition as reported by earlier writers that there is a tree the buds of which become transformed into the geese, but says merely that the " small bodies of birds," clearly indicating by his description groups of ship's barnacles, are " produced from fir timber tossed along the sea." It is also note- worthy that he calls the geese themselves " Bernacae," which is the Celtic name for a shell-fish. Later the belief seems to have reverted to the older tradition, or probably enough the complete story, includ- ing the existence of the bird-producing tree, existed in its original form in " seats of learning " in other parts of the British Islands outside Ireland, and also in Paris and other places in Western Europe. For we find that in 1435 the learned Sylvius, who afterwards became Pope Pius II, visited King James of Scotland in order, among other things, to see the wonderful tree which he had heard of as growing in Scotland from the fruit of which geese are born. He complains that " miracles will always flee further and further," for when he had now arrived in Scotland and asked to see the tree, he was told that it did not grow there, but farther north, in the Orkneys. And so he did not see the tree. In 1597, John Gerard, in the third book of his " Herbal, or History of Plants," writes as follows : " There are found in the north parts of Scotland and the Islands adjacent called Orchades, certaine trees whereon do grow certaine shell-fishes of a white colour tending to russett, wherein are contained little creatures which shels in 122 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST time of maturity doe open and out of them grow those little living things which, falling into the water, doe become foules whom we call Barnacles, in the north of England Brent Geese, and in Lancashire Tree Geese." Gerard is here either adopting or suggesting an identi- fication of the tradition of the tree which produces birds from its buds, with the floating timber bearing ship's barnacles, which were supposed to give birth to the brent geese. He does not say that he has seen, or knows persons who have seen, the barnacles attached to the branches of living trees. Nevertheless, he gives a picture of them so attached (Fig. 13). It has been suggested, in later times, that such a fixation of barnacles to the branches of living trees might occur in some of the sea-water lochs of the west of Scotland, just as oysters become attached to the mangrove trees in the West Indies, and it has further been suggested that willows might thus droop their branches into the sea- water, and that the catkins on the willow-shoots might be taken for an early stage of growth of the barnacles ; but I have not come across any record of such fixation of barnacles on living shrubs or branches of trees, and I am inclined to think that Gerard's story of what occurs in the distant Orkneys is merely an attempt to substantiate the bird-producing tree of the Oriental story, by quietly assuming that the sea-borne timber covered with barnacles existed somewhere as living trees and exhibited this same property of budding forth barnacles which on opening liber- ated each a minute gosling. Gerard continues as follows : " But what our eyes have seen and hands have handled we shall declare." There is, he tells us, a small island in Lancashire called the Pile of Foulders, and there rotten trees and the broken timbers of derelict ships are thrown up by the sea. On them forms " a certain spume or froth which in time breeds into certaine shells." He HISTORY OF THE BARNACLE AND GOOSE 123 FIG. 13. The picture of the "Goose Tree," copied from the first edition of Gerard's " Herbal." The fruit-like oval bodies are "barnacles" (Lepas) fancifully represented as growing like buds or fruit on a little tree. Some of the young geese are drawn as in the act of escaping from the barnacle-shells, and others are represented swimming in the water. 124 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST then gives a description of these shells and the fish contained therein, which is a correct enough account of the common ship's barnacle. He proceeds, however, to an assertion which is not of something which he saw or handled, namely, that the animal within the shell, though like the fish of an oyster, gradually grows to a bird and comes forth hanging to the shell by its bill. Finally, he says, it escapes to maturity. At the end of his chapter on this subject, Gerard says : " I dare not absolutely avouch every circumstance of the first part of this history concerning the tree which beareth those buds aforesaide, but will leave it to a further consideration." Gerard's " Herbal " was reprinted forty years later (in 1636) and edited by Johnson, a member of the Society of Apothecaries. He writes with contempt of Gerard's credulity as to the story of the barnacle and the goose, and states that certain " Hollanders " in seeking a north- east passage to China had recently come across some islands in the Arctic Sea which were the breeding-place of the so-called barnacle goose, and had taken and eaten sixty of their eggs, besides young and old birds. Probably there were always lovers of the marvellous and the occult who favoured and would favour to-day the tradition of the conversion of one animal into another and such wonders ; and there were also both in the days of ancient Greece and Rome, and even in the darkest of the Middle Ages, men with a sceptical and inquiring spirit, who accepted no traditional testimony, but demanded, as the basis of their admitting something unlikely as nevertheless true, the trial of experiment and the examination of specimens. What has happened since Gerard's time and the incorporation of the Royal Society in 1662, is that the sceptical men have got HISTORY OF THE BARNACLE AND GOOSE 125 the upper hand, though not without much opposition In this country, owing to the defective education ad- ministered in our public schools and older universities, there is still quite a large number of well-to-do people ready to believe in any " occult " imposture or fantasy that may be skilfully brought to their notice. On the other hand, we must bear in mind when we consider these strange beliefs held by really learned and intelligent men in the past, that the investigation of nature had not advanced very far in their time. It was not held, as it is to-day, as an established fact that living things are generated only by slips or cuttings of a parent or from eggs or germs which are special detached particles of the parent. It was held to be a matter of common observation and certainty that all sorts of living things are " spontaneously generated " by slime, by sea foam, by mud, and by decomposing dead bodies of animals and trees. It was also held, in consequence of a blind belief in, and often a complete misunderstanding of, the legends and fairy tales of the ancients and of the preposterous " Bestiaries " and books on magic which were the fashion in mediaeval times, that it is quite a usual and natural thing for one animal or plant to change into another. Hence there was nothing very surprising (though worthy of record) in a barnacle changing into a young goose, or in the buds of a tree becoming in some conditions changed into barnacles ! So, too, the notion that rotting timber can " generate " barnacles was not, to our forefathers, at all out of the way or preposterous. Sir Thomas Browne in 1646 was unable to make up his mind on this matter, and believed in the spontaneous generation of mice by wheat, to which he briefly alludes in his curious book called 126 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST " Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or an Enquiry into Vulgar and Common Errors." The account of the creation given by the poet Milton was based upon the belief in the daily occurrence of such spontaneous generation of living things of high complexity of structure and large size, from slime and mud. The process of creation of living things conceived by him was but a general and initial exhibition of an activity of earth and sea which in his belief was still in daily operation in remote and undisturbed localities. In 1668 the Italian naturalist, Redi, demonstrated that putrefying flesh does not " spontaneously breed " maggots. He showed that if a piece of flesh is protected by a wire network cover from the access of flies, no maggots appear in it, and that the flies attracted by the smell of the meat lay their eggs on the wire network, unable to reach the meat, whilst if the wire cover is removed they lay their eggs on the meat, and from them the maggots are hatched. It took a long time for this demonstration by Redi to affect popular belief, and there are still country folk who believe in the spontaneous generation of maggots. 1 But few, if any, persons of ordinary intelligence or education now believe that these sudden productions of living things, without regular and known parentage, take place. The spontaneous generation of large, tangible creatures having ceased to be an article of general belief, the conviction nevertheless persisted for some time that at any rate minute microscopic living things were generated without parentage. This theory was more difficult to test on account of the need for employing 1 See the chapter, " Primitive Beliefs about Fatherless Progeny," in " Science from an Easy Chair," Second Series. HISTORY OF THE BARNACLE AND GOOSE 127 the microscope in the inquiry, which was not brought to a high state of efficiency until the last century. By experiments similar to those of Redi, it was shown in the first half of last century by Theodor Schwann that even the minute bacteria do not appear in putrescible material when those already in it are killed by boiling that material, and when the subsequent access to it of other bacteria is prevented by closing all possible entrance of air-borne particles, or insect carriers of germs. It took another fifty years thoroughly to establish by observation and experiment the truth of Schwann's refutation of the supposed " spontaneous generation " of the minutest forms of life. As an example of the strange incapacity for making correct observation and the failure to record correctly things observed which are frequently exhibited by the most highly placed " men of education," as well as by uneducated peasants and fisher folk, we have the short paper entitled, " A Relation concerning Barnacles," by Sir Robert Moray the first president of the Royal Society of London (from 1 66 1 until its incorporation in 1662) a very distinguished man, and an intimate friend of King Charles II. This paper was read to the society in 1 66 1 and published in 1677 in vol. xii. of the " Philo- sophical Transactions." Sir Robert relates how he found on the coast a quantity of dead barnacles attached to a piece of timber, and that in each barnacle's shell was a bird. He writes : " This bird in every shell that I opened, as well the least as the biggest, I found so curiously and completely formed that there appeared nothing wanting, as to the external parts, for making up a perfect sea-fowl ; every little part appearing so dis- tinctly that the whole looked like a large bird seen through a concave or diminishing glass, colour and 128 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST feature being everywhere so clear and near. The little bill like that of a goose, the eyes marked, the head, neck, breast, wings, tail and feet formed, the feathers everywhere perfectly shaped and blackish coloured, and the feet like those of other waterfowl to my best remem- brance. All being dead and dry, I did not look after the inward parts of them." If the reader will now look at Fig. 1 5, C, which represents the soft parts of a barnacle when the shells of one side are removed, he will see how far Sir Robert Moray must have been the victim as so many people naturally are under such circumstances of imagination and defective memory when he wrote this account. I have put into italics in the above quotation from his " Relation " his confession that he is writing, not with his specimens before him, but from remembrance of them. Moreover, he tells us, with admirable candour, that the specimens were dead and dry when he examined them ! One could not desire a better justification for the motto adopted by the Royal Society, " Nullius in verba," and for the procedure upon which in its early days the Society insisted namely, that at its meetings the members should " bring in " a specimen or an experiment, and not occupy time by mere relations and reports of marvels. It is necessary even at the present day to insist on such demonstration by those who urge us to accept as true their relations of mysterious experiences with ghosts, and their " conviction " that they have con versed with " discarnate intelligences." CHAPTER XV MORE AS TO THE BARNACLE AND THE GOOSE IT is clear that there was a widespread tradition known to the learned in the early centuries of the Christian era, according to which there existed in some distant Eastern land a tree which bore buds or fruits which became converted into birds. Connected with this, and perhaps really a part of it, there existed a tradition that marine " barnacles " gave birth to geese from within their shells, or are in some way converted into geese. The two stories were in some localities and narrations combined, though in others they were distinct. On the coast of Ireland the early missionaries of the Church (learned men acquainted with the traditions of their time) identified the migratory brent goose with the bird said to be produced by the barnacle ; and else- where, on the Scottish coast, the barnacles were (it was reported) found growing on trees. There is no such resemblance between barnacles and brent geese as to have suggested to the Irish monks the regular and natural conversion of one into the other. It seems most probable that the learned churchmen knew the traditional story already before arriving in Ireland, and applied it to the barnacles and the geese which they discovered around them. Eventually the word " barnacle " without qualification was applied to the geese, as we see in 9 130 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST Gerard's account given in the last chapter. Is there, it may be asked, anything further known as to such a tradition, and the place and manner of its origin ? In the absence of such knowledge, an ingenious attempt was made by my old friend, Professor Max Miiller, to account for the tradition by the similarity of the names, which he erroneously supposed had been given indepen- dently to the barnacle and to the " Hibernian " goose. I will refer to this below, but now I will proceed to give the most probable solution of the mystery as to the tradition of the tree, the goose, and the barnacle. Its discovery is not more than twenty years old, and is due to M. Frederic Houssay, a distinguished French zoologist of the Iicole Normale, who published it in the " Revue Arche'ologique " in 1895. It has not hitherto been brought to the notice of English readers, and I shall therefore give a full account of it. The solution is as follows : The Mykenaean popula- tion of the islands of Cyprus and Crete, in the period 800 to 1000 years before Christ, were great makers of pottery, and painted large earthernware basins and vases with a variety of decorative representations of marine life, of fishes, butterflies, birds, and trees. Some of these are to be seen in the British Museum at Bloomsbury, where I examined them a few years ago. Others have been figured by the well-known archaeologists, MM. Perrot and Chipiez, in the sixth volume of their work, " L'Ossuaire de Crete." M. Perrot consulted M. Houssay, in his capacity of zoologist, in regard to these Mykenaean drawings, which bear, as M. Houssay states, the evidence of having been designed after nature by one who knew the things in life, although they are not slavishly " copied " from nature. These early Mykenaean painters on pottery were members of a community who worshipped MORE AS TO THE BARNACLE AND GOOSE .131 the great mother " Nature " as Astarte or Aphrodite risen from the foam of the sea. Being sailors and fishermen, marine life was even more familiar to them than that of the land, and they placed little models of C. FIG. 14. Fanciful designs by Mykensean artists, showing change of the cuttle- fish (octopus or " poulpe ") into a bull's head and other shapes. a, Octopus drawn on a goblet from Crete, the arms reduced to two, the eyes detached, b and c, Bull's head variations of the octopus, from designs found at Koban in the Caucasus. d, Spiral treatment of the arms of the octopus (a pose actually seen in living specimens). e, f, Human faces painted on Cretan jars across the whole width of the neck, the design being derived from the octopus with detached eyes as in Fig. a. Such designs survive long after their origin is forgotten, as (according to M. Houssay) the legend of the barnacle and the goose survived two thousand years after the Mykensean drawings assimilating one to the other had been forgotten. sea animals as votive offerings in the temples of the great mother, and also honoured her in decorating their pottery with marine creatures. The little fish, Hippo- campus, called the sea-horse, the sea-urchin, the octopus, the argonaut and its floating cradle, the sea-anemone, 132 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST and the butterfly-like Pteropod, were subjects used by these artists for which they found terrestrial counterparts. The sea-horse was convertible decoratively into a true horse, with intermediate phases imagined by the artists ; the sea-urchin into a hedgehog, the sea-anemone into a flower, and the Pteropod into a true butterfly. These artists loved to exercise a little fancy and ingenuity. By gradual reduction in the number and size of out- standing parts a common rule in the artistic " schematiz- ing " or " conventional simplification " of natural form they converted the octopus and the argonaut, with their eight arms, into a bull's head with a pair of spiral horns (Fig. 14). In the same spirit it seems that they observed and drew the barnacle floating on timber or thrown up after a storm on their shores. They detected a resemblance in the marking of its shells to the plumage of a goose, whilst in the curvature of its stalk they saw a resemblance to the long neck of the bird. The barnacle's jointed plumose legs or cirri and other details suggested points of agreement with the feathers of the bird. They brought the barnacle and the goose together, not guided thereto by any pre-existing legend, but by a simple and not uncommon artistic desire to follow up a superficial suggestion of similarity and to conceive of intermediate connecting forms. Some of their fanciful drawings with this purpose are shown in Figs. 15, 16, and 17. These (excepting the drawing of the barnacle lying within its opened shell) are copied from M. Houssay's paper on the subject, and were taken from the work of M. Perrot on Cretan pottery. The intention of the artist fantastically to insist on intermediate phases between goose and barnacle is placed beyond doubt by certain details. For instance, in Fig. 1 6, the little jointed processes on the back MORE AS TO THE BARNACLE AND GOOSE 133 B F IG . i$. The Goose and the Barnacle. A, Drawing of a Ship's Barnacle attached to a piece of timber by its " peduncle" or stalk, which re- presents the neck of a goose, if we regard the shell - covered region as the goose's body. From a sketch by M. Fred- eric Houssay pub- lished in the "Revue Arch^ologique," January 1895. B, Copy of a drawing on an ancient Myken sean pot found ir Crete, and figured by M. Perrot in his "OssuairedeCrete," vol. vi. p. 936. It is a fantastic blend of the goose and the barnacle. The bar- nacle's stalk is given a beak and an eye ; the body of the bird corresponds, to the shells of the barnacle both in shape and marking. There are no wings or legs, but the curious single limb which I have marked ' pe ' is obviously the same thing as that marked ' pe ' in figure C, which represents the barnacle when cut open so as to show the structures within the shell. ' pe ' is the rod-like body at the end of which the seminal duct opens. It is seen in the drawing of the expanded barnacle (Fig. 10), lying between the two groups of six forked and jointed legs or " cirri." C, A correct modern drawing of a ship's barnacle, with the shells of one side removed so as to show the six double legs of one side, the seminal rod (pe), and the internal organs. This is what Sir Robert Moray and his mediaeval predecessors saw on opening the barnacle's shell and described as " a young bird complete in every detail." 134 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST of the goose marked a, correspond in position to the cirri or legs of the barnacle. They are reduced in number to two, and simplified in form so as to pass for the tips of the wings of the goose. The goose's own feet are represented in their natural position. The most extraordinary piece of resemblance in detail is that given in Fig. 15, B, which is a copy of a very much " barnaculized " goose from one of these ancient dishes. What does the Mykenaean artist mean to d FIG. 16. Copy of a series of modified geese painted on an early Mykensean pot, figured by M. Perrot. Each has two jointed appendages on the back (a) which suggest the wing feathers of the bird or two of the jointed legs (cirri) of the barnacle, which issue in life from this part of the barnacle's shell. The legs of the geese are very small and absent in the fifth (d). The markings on the body differ in each bird, but recall the shell of the barnacle divided into several valves marked with parallel stria- tions. They may also pass for the plumage of the bird. represent by the strange single leg-like limb marked pe? When we carefully examine the barnacle's soft body concealed by its shell, it becomes obvious that this leg-like thing corresponds to the single stalk-like body, ending in a bunch of a few hairs which is marked pe in Fig. 15, C. This last-named figure is a careful modern representation of the soft living barnacle, as seen when the shells of one side are removed. The cylindrical body pe of Fig. 15, C, which is drawn by the Mykensean artist on an exaggerated scale in Fig. 15, B, is the external opening of the seminal MORE AS TO THE BARNACLE AND GOOSE 135 duct of the barnacle. It is remarkable that the Mykenaean pottery-painter had observed the soft " fish " of the barnacle so minutely as to select this unpaired and very peculiar-looking structure, and represent it of exaggerated size attached in its proper position on the barnacle-like body of a goose. This very striking transference of a peculiar and characteristic organ of the barnacle to the body of the goose by the artist seems not to have been noticed by M. Houssay. M. Houssay further points out the existence on some of the Mykenasan pottery of drawings (see " L'Ossuaire de Crete," by MM. Perrot and Chipiez) of leaves attached to tree-like stems. These leaves (Fig. 18, a, b, c) exhibit FIG. 17. the same markings (" venation ") which we see on the bodies of the geese in Fig. 1 6, especially the middle one of the five. The leaves (or fruits ?) copied by M. Houssay from the Mykenaean pottery are attached in a series to a stem but no one, at present, has suggested what plant it is which is represented. The corners of the leaf or fruit to the right and left of its stalk are thrown into a spiral and the half leaf or half fruit represented in Fig. 18, b, leads us on to that drawn in Fig. 1 8, c, in which the spiral corner is slightly modified in curvature so as to resemble the head and neck of the goose as drawn in Fig. 16. Though Fig. 1 8, c, is as yet devoid of legs or wing feathers (compare right-hand goose in Fig. 1 6), the black Two draw- ings on pottery of modified geese, from Perrot's " Ossuaire de Crete." The three lines above the back of the upper figure probably represent the legs or cirri of the barnacle, which are represented by two jointed append- ages in the geese shown in Fig. 16. 136 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST FIG. 1 8. Leaves from the tree, drawn on a Mykensean pot which, according to M. Perrot, are fancifully designed so as to assume step by step (a, b, c) the form of a goose. This ap- pears either to represent the tree which, accord- ing to legend, produced birds as buds on its branches, or to be a fanciful design which gave rise to that legend. The artist's intention of making the leaf gradu- ally pass into the sem- blance of a goose, is strongly emphasized by the purely fanciful " venation " of the leaf which agrees with the equally fanciful or- nament of the bodies of the geese in Fig. 16, especially the middle one of the series. band along the belly with the band of vertical markings above it agrees closely with the design on the body of the middle goose of the series drawn in Fig. 16. As these are associated in the decoration of the Mykenaean artists, it is fairly evident that the intention has been to mani- pulate the drawing of the leaf or fruit so as to make it resemble the drawing of the goose, whilst that in its turn is modified so as to empha- size or idealize its points of resem- blance to a barnacle. It is true enough that the drawings from Mykenaean pots here submitted cannot be considered as a complete demonstration that the legend of the tree-goose originated with these drawings. But it must be remem- bered that we have only a small number of examples of this pottery surviving from a thousand years B.C. It is probable that the fanciful de- corative design of a master artist was copied and used in the painting of hundreds of pots by mere workmen or inferior craftsmen, and that more complete and impressive designs showing the fanciful transformation of leaf or fruit to goose, and of goose to barnacle, existed both before and after the making of the particular pots and jars which have come MORE AS TO THE BARNACLE AND GOOSE 137 down to us. The supposition made by M. Houssay (which I entirely support) is that some later Levantine people to whom these decorated pots or copies of their decorations became known either in the regular way of trade or as sailors' " curios " were led to attempt an explanation of the significance of the pictures drawn upon them, and in accordance with a well-known and rooted tendency interpreted the fancies of the artist as careful representations of astonishing fact. The existence of a tree which produces buds which become birds, and of a barnacle which becomes trans- formed into a goose is the matter-of-fact interpreta- tion of the few pictures of these animals which have come down to us, modern men, painted on the few pots of that remote Mykenaean industry now in our museums. It is not at all unlikely that in the vast period of time between 1000 B.C. and 1000 A.D., the more striking of these designs had been copied and familiarized in some part of the ancient world. It is true that we do not at present know in what part : we have not yet come across these designs of later date than 800 B.C. The absence of the story of the tree-goose from Greek and Roman lore is striking. Neither Aristotle nor Herodotus knew of it, although it has been erroneously stated that they refer to it. Yet the source of it was there in the Greek isles almost under their noses (if one may speak of the noses of such splendid and worshipful men of old) in the artistic work otherwise not unknown to the Greeks of a civilization which preceded their own by hundreds of years. There is other and ample evidence as for instance that of the representation of the " fly- ing gallop " (see " Science from an Easy Chair," Second Series, pp. 57 and 63), showing that Mykenaean art had little or no direct effect on the Hellenes, although the reputation of the skill of the old race in metal work 138 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST came through many generations to them. Mykenaean art seems to have migrated with Mykenaean settlers to the remote region of the Caucasus. In the necropolis of Koban and other remote settlements, Mykenaean designs in bronze and gold including the horse in flying gallop and octopods transformed to bull's heads have been found and pictured (Ernest Chantre, "Recherches anthropologiques dans le Caucase," 4 vols. : Paris, 1886). They are believed to date from 500 B.C. It is possible that in such remote regions or in some of the Greek islands the pictures of the tree-goose and the barnacle may have survived until the new dispensation that is, until the days of the Byzantine Empire. Once we can trace either the pictures or the legend up to that point, there is no difficulty about admitting the radiation of the wonderful story from that centre to the Jews of the Kabbalah, to Arabic writers, and so to the learned men of the Christian Church and the seats of learning throughout Europe and a great part of Asia. Of the history of the legend during two thousand years we have no actual knowledge. It remains for investiga- tion. But undoubtedly these Mykenaean pottery paint- ings remove the origin of the story to a period two thousand years older than that of the Irish monks. One additional fact I may mention as to the exist- ence of the goose and barnacle legend in the East. I am informed that in Java there is, according to " native " story, a shell-fish the animal of which becomes trans- formed into a bird said to be a kind of snipe and flies from the shell. I have been shown the shell by a Dutch lady who has lived in Java. It is a large fresh- water mussel, one of the Unionidae. I have failed to obtain, after inquiry, any further information as to the MORE AS TO THE BARNACLE AND GOOSE 139 prevalence or origin of this story in Java, and hope that some one who reads this page may be able to help me. Before leaving the story of the goose and the barnacle, the explanation of the myth given by Prof. Max Miiller in his lectures on the science of language nearly fifty years ago, should be cited. It is an excellent example of the misuse of hypothesis in investigation, and the attempt to explain something which we cannot get at and examine by making a supposition which it is even more difficult to examine and test. Max Miiller made use of the observation a perfectly true and interesting one that a whole people or folk will be led to a wrong conclusion, or to a belief in some strange and marvellous occurrence, by the misunder- standing of a single word, attributing to that word a sense which now fits the sound, but one quite different from that with which the word was originally used in the tradition or history concerned. Words are, in fact, mis- interpreted after a lapse of time, or when imported from distant lands, just as we have seen that pictures and sculpture often have been. For instance, Richard Whittington, who was Lord Mayor of London in 1398 and other later years, did business in French goods, which was spoken of in the city as " achat," and pronounced " akat." Hence in later centuries, when the prevalence of Norman French was forgotten, it was stated (in a play produced in 1605) that Whittington owed his fortune to " a cat," and the story of the wonderful cat and its deeds was built up " line upon line " or " lie upon lie." Max Miiller suggested that the story of the barnacle and the goose could be similarly explained. The brant or brent goose which frequents the Irish shore was, he supposes, called " berniculus " by the Latin-speaking clergy as a diminutive of Hibernicus, meaning " Irish." There is 140 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST absolutely no evidence to support this. Max Muller supposes that Hibernicus became " Hiberniculus," and then dropping the first syllable became " Berniculus," and that this word was applied to the " Irish goose." It might have been, but there is nothing to show that it was. Meanwhile the ship's barnacle and other sea-shells were called in the Celtic tongue " barnagh," " berniche," or " bernak," and the hermit-crab is still called on the Breton coast, " Bernard Thermite," a modification of " bernak Thermite." There is no doubt that the word " barnacle " as applied to the stalked shell -fish grow- ing on ships' bottoms is a diminutive of the Celtic word " bernak," or " barnak." It became in Latin " barnacus," and then the diminutive " barnaculus," and so " barnacle " was used for the little stalked shell- fish encrusting old timber. According to Max Muller, later generations thus found the two animals, goose and shell-fish, called by the same name, " bernikle," or "barnacle." "Why?" they would ask: and then (he supposes) they would compare the two and detect points of resemblance, until at last a very devout and astute monk had the happy thought of declaring that the Hibernian goose was called " berniculus," or " barnak- goose," because it did not breed from eggs as other birds do, but is hatched out of the shell of the shell-fish, also very naturally and rightly called " berniculus," or barnak, as any one may see by carefully examining the fish contained in the shell of the barnacle or little stalked " barnak," which has the complete form of a bird. Since, however, it is not a bird, but a fish in nature and origin, this holy man declared that the " berniculus," or " bar- nacle-goose," may be eaten on fast days. Max Miiller's explanation of the origin of the story is too adventurous in its unsupported assumption that the particular goose associated with the story was peculiarly Irish, or that, MORE AS TO THE BARNACLE AND GOOSE 141 in fact, any kind of goose was so. He also put aside the evidence of Father Damien (earlier than the Irish story of Giraldus) referring the goose-tree to an island in the Indies, and the report cited in the Oriental book the " Zohar." However plausible Max Muller's theory may have appeared, it absolutely crumbles and disappears in the presence of the Mykenaean pictures of "barnaculized" geese, and trees budding birds two thousand years older than the Irish record, and nearly three thousand years earlier than the essay of the charm- ing and persuasive professor. CHAPTER XVI SEA-SHELLS ON THE SEASHORE ANY hard coat or covering enclosing a softer material is called a " shell " thus we speak of an egg-shell, a nut-shell, a bomb-shell, and the shell of a lobster. But there is a special and restricted use of the word to in- dicate as " true " and " real " shells the beautiful cover- ings made for their protection by the soft, mobile animals called Molluscs. These animals expand and contract first this and then that region of the body by squeezing the blood within it (by means of the soft muscular coat of the sac-like body) into one part or another in turn. There is not enough blood to distend the whole animal, and accordingly one part is swollen out and protrudes from the shell, whilst another shrinks as the blood is propelled here or there by the compressing muscular coat. These creatures are the Molluscs, a name which has come into general use (and has even served as the title for a stage-play), as well as being the zoologist's title for the great division of animals which they constitute. They are sometimes called " shell-fish," but this is no good as a distinctive name since it is applied in the fish-trade to lobsters, crabs, and shrimps as well as to Molluscs. Lobsters, crabs, and shrimps are Crustacea, and totally different in their architecture and their mechanism from Molluscs. Familiar examples of Molluscs are the oyster, the mussel, the various 143 SEA-SHELLS ON THE SEASHORE 143 "clams," and, again, the snails, periwinkles, whelks, and limpets. It is the shells of these animals which are " true " shells in the sense in which the word is used by " collectors " of shells, and in the sense in which we speak of " the shells of the seashore." These shells are usually very hard, solid things, made up of layers of lime-salts and horny matter mixed, and they remain for a long time undestroyed, washed about by the currents of the sea, and thrown up on to the beach, after the soft, oozy creature which formed them chemically secreted them on its soft skin has decomposed and disappeared. They are readily distinguished into two sorts (i) those which are formed in pairs, or " bivalves," each member of the pair being called a "valve"; and (2) those which are single, or " univalves," often spirally twisted, as are those of snails and whelks, but sometimes cap-like or basin-like, as are the shells of the limpets. There is not so great a difference between bivalve and univalve shells as there seems to be at first sight. For if you examine the pair of shells of a mussel or a clam when they are quite fresh, you will find that the valves are joined together by a horny, elastic substance, and are, in fact, only one horny shell, or covering, which is made hard by lime deposited on the right and on the left, as two plates or valves, but is left soft and uncalcified along a line where these two valves meet, so as to allow them to move and gape, as it were, on an elastic hinge. It is the fact that the two valves of the shell of the bivalve, lying right and left on its body, correspond to the single shell of the snail or limpet, which differs from the bivalve- shell in not being divided along the back by a soft part into right and left pieces. That there is this real agree- ment between bivalve and univalve molluscs is quite evident when we examine the soft animal which forms the shell and is protected by it. 144 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST Though " shells " are often numerous on parts of the seashore, some beaches (as, for instance, at Fal mouth, at the mouth of the Eden of St. Andrews, and at Herm in the Channel Islands) being so placed in regard to the currents and waves of the sea that great quantities of shells of dozens of species are thrown up, and even c. d. FIG. 19. Some British Marine Bivalve Molluscs. a, The smaller Piddock, Pholas parva, which bores into chalk, clay, and hard rock. Natural size. b, The Razor- shell, Solen siliqua. The muscular foot is seen protruding from the shell. One-third the natural size, linear. c, Venus verrucosa. Natural size. d, Cardium echinatum. Two-thirds the natural size, linear. e, Pinna pectinata, the "cappy longy." One-fifth of the natural size, linear. " make up " the beach, yet there are not so very many Molluscs which live commonly on the shore between tide- marks. The shells which are accumulated as shell- beaches have come from animals which lived in quantity at depths of ten or twenty fathoms, whence they can be brought up alive by the dredge. There are, however, certain bivalves and certain univalves which are com- monly to be found in the living state between tide-marks. SEA-SHELLS ON THE SEASHORE 145 You will not find the oyster there on our own coast, but in Australia they have picnic parties where every guest provides himself with a hammer and a bottle of vinegar and a pepper-pot, and at low tide proceeds to chip the oysters off the rocks on which they grow tightly fixed, and to eat them " right away " before they have time to lose their good temper and sweetness ! In Jamaica they show you oysters apparently growing on trees high up in the air, but they are dead, having attached themselves to the branches of a young tree which dipped into the water. Once fixed there, they were unable to move as the tree grew and carried them up with its branches above the sea-level. The only bivalve at all common and visible to the eye between tide-marks is the common or edible sea- mussel, which is attached in purple clusters to the rocks (as in North Cornwall), or forms a wide-spreading pave- ment, called a " scalp," of as much as an acre in extent, on which thousands of mussels lie side by side. But by digging in the sand and mud between tides there are other living bivalves to be found, which burrow more or less deeply. The razor-shell (Fig. 19, b) is one of these (see p. 80). Often (as at Teignmouth and Barmouth) we find " cockles " buried in the sand, and those delicate, smooth bivalves not an inch long, white outside and purple within, which are made into soup at Naples and are called " vongoli," but have no English name. Other " clams " (Tapes, which is eaten in France, even in Paris, and Mya, and Scrobicularia which lives in black mud) may be dug up, but they are devoid of English names because we do not eat them ; hence I have to speak of them by their Latin scientific names. As to univalves, there are three which are found almost everywhere on our coasts where there are rocks, namely, the periwinkles 10 146 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST (one species of which actually lives above high tide- mark), the limpet, and the dog-whelk. A small species of top-shell or trochus is also very common, and so is the chiton, or armadillo-shell, which, though really the most primitive and nearest representative of the ancestors of all univalve molluscs, yet has its own shell of a very peculiar character (sometimes with very minute eyes true eyes dotted about on it), and always divided trans- versely to its length (not right and left) into eight separate pieces, which, indeed, seem to be really separate, in- dependent little shells, corresponding to eight segments like the segments of a shrimp or an earth-worm. Let us now compare the soft animal of one of the bivalves say the common cockle with the soft animal to which a univalve shell belongs say the limpet. They can be kept alive and watched in a finger-glass of sea- water, and can be removed from their shells and examined more closely by killing them by dipping them for half a minute into very hot (not boiling) water. Both these molluscs like all others adhere tightly at one place to the shell. They cannot be removed from it alive, and make a new shell or creep back into the old one, as can some worms (e.g. the serpula) and other creatures which form a hard shell to live in. Certain muscles of the soft mollusc are so closely fixed to the shell that they must be torn in order to separate it. These muscles draw the two valves of the bivalve together, and shut it tight. You can verify this whenever the oyster- man " opens " an oyster for you. When at rest the shells gape, being kept open by the horny, elastic hinge-piece. Some bivalves (for instance, the common scallop, or pilgrim's shell, which can often be dredged in shallow water, and of which a large kind is sold in the London fish shops) actually swim in the sea-water by aid of this mechanism, SEA-SHELLS ON THE SEASHORE 147 the shells opening by elasticity and being closed by the muscle joining one to the other, at rapid intervals, flapping like the wings of a butterfly. In the univalves the attachment of the muscle to the shell gives a fixed point for all the movements of the animal. The limpet has a well-marked head and neck a pair of sensitive tentacles, and a small pair of dark- coloured eyes. The mouth is at the end of a sort of short snout. Just within the mouth, and capable of being pushed forwards to the level of the lips, is a most extraordinary rasp. It consists of a long ribbon, beset with fine horny teeth very sharp and complicated in pattern. The ribbon extends far back into the body, and is worn away by constant use at the orifice of the mouth. It grows forward, like one of our finger-nails, as it wears out, and a new, unworn portion takes the place of that worn away. It is constantly in use to rasp and bring into the mouth the particles of the seaweed on which the limpet feeds. It is easy to remove this rasping ribbon with a needle or pen-knife, and examine it with a microscope. Every one of the hundreds of kinds of univalve molluscs has this ribbon-rasp, and its teeth are of different patterns in the various kinds. It is worked by very powerful little muscles, backwards and forwards, and is strong enough in the whelks to bore a round hole into other shells (for instance, that of the oyster), when the whelk proceeds to eat the soft animal, whose protecting shell has been thus penetrated. Some of the large marine snails produce a poisonous secretion from the mouth, which renders their attack with the ribbon-rasp all the more deadly to other marine creatures. The cuttle-fishes and octopods, which are molluscs too, possess, like the univalve limpets, snails, and whelks, this terrible ribbon-rasp in the mouth. It is an indication of 148 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST a common parentage or ancestral relationship in the forms which possess it. The cockle (Fig. 19, d), to which we now turn, has not got a ribbon-rasp, nor anything of the kind. It has a mouth with four flapper-like lips, but no projecting head, no eyes, no biting mechanism, nor have any of the bivalves, excepting a few which like the scallop have a series of eyes on the edge of the soft mantle or flap which lines the shell. This constitutes a greater difference between bivalves and the univalves than does the shape of the shell. They are a very quiescent, peaceful lot, feeding on microscopic floating plants (diatoms and such), which are drawn to the mouth by currents of water set going by millions of vibrating hairs arranged on four soft plates hanging under the protecting arch of the shell, and called in the oyster in which bivalve most people know them the " beard." The limpet adheres to rocks by a great disk-like mass of muscle, which is called " the foot." It is really the whole ventral surface, and it can loosen its hold, and, by curious ripples of contraction, cause the animal to creep or glide over the rock. At low tide the limpet is exposed to the air, and remains motionless, but when the tide is up it makes a small excursion in search of food, never going more than a foot or two from the spot which it has chosen, and returning to it, so that in the course of time it actually wears away a sort of cup or depression at this spot if the rock is not of exceptional hardness. The word " foot " is applied to the ventral disk-like surface of the limpet, because in many univalves this region becomes drawn out, and is connected by a com- paratively narrow and nipped-in stalk or pillar with the rest of the animal. This occurs in the univalves which SEA-SHELLS ON THE SEASHORE 149 have large spiral shells, into which the whole of the soft animal can be deeply withdrawn, which is not the case with the limpet. You may find on the shore at Torquay a sea-snail (Natica), in which the animal is quite invisible, drawn far up into the shell. Place this in sea-water and watch it. Soft semi-transparent lobes begin to issue from the mouth of the shell, part of the soft distensible foot appears swelling out and growing bigger and bigger, and soft folds spread out from the mouth of the shell, and gently creep over it, and completely envelop it; the foot begins to grip the bottom of the vessel, and the animal " crawls." At last, swelling out from the other folds of soft but tense " molluscan " substance, the head and its tentacles emerge. Touch the animal and it shrinks rapidly, disappearing into the shell. It used to be thought (about twenty-five years ago) that the molluscs expand their bodies in this manner by taking water, through definite apertures provided with valves, into their blood, and that, having thus swelled themselves out, they could shrink and reduce themselves by pouring out again the in-taken water. The behaviour of some other marine animals, namely the sea-anemones, which really do act in this way, made this explanation of the swelling and shrinking of molluscs seem probable. It was also known that the star-fishes and sea-urchins actually do take in the sea- water into a system of vessels connected with their wonderful sucker-bearing tentacles. But it turned out on close examination that the molluscs do not take in or shed out water in this way. A hole, which was thought to let in water into the blood of sea- snails, was shown to be only the opening of a great slime- gland. In the case of some bivalves which have red- blood corpuscles, I showed that the blood is never made ISO DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST paler, nor are the red corpuscles shed during the great distensions and contractions of the body. Measurements were made to determine the removal of water from a glass jar by an expanding sea-snail, and it was found that none is removed or taken up ; in fact, the whole of what is very often an astonishingly large and bulky distension of the foot, or of lobes of the body, and the subsequent rapid shrinking of the same parts, depend entirely on the blood being injected from the rest of the body into the swelling part, and squeezed from it into the depleted region when the swollen part shrinks again. The firm, opaque shell hides from view the change of shape of the concealed body, and we see only the dis- tended foot or other lobes which project from the shell. The cockle has a " foot " of a very curious scythe-like shape, usually carried bent up between the two valves of the shell. Those who rightly like to confirm statements about unfamiliar animals can do so by buying a cockle or two at the fishmonger's. Some bivalves (the Noah's- ark-shell, called " Area," and a few others) have a great flat foot, like that of the univalves, and crawl about on it. But in most bivalves it- is curiously elongated and modified, for the purpose of burrowing into sand by vigorous strokes, and in some it is suppressed altogether, as in the oyster. The cockle is remarkable for the fact that when placed on a board or a rock it will give such a vigorous kick with its bent foot as to throw itself up a yard or so into the air. A naturalist (Stutchbury) dredging in Port Jackson, Australia, many years ago was overjoyed at discovering in his net three specimens of a very peculiar kind of cockle (Trigonia), which was till then only known in the fossil state from the oolite strata of Europe. He placed the three novelties on the seat of SEA-SHELLS ON THE SEASHORE 151 his boat, and was looking at other things when he heard a click-like sound, then another. He turned his head and saw that two of his newly-discovered " living fossils " had jumped overboard, and had the pleasure of seeing the third perform the same feat 1 CHAPTER XVII SAND-HOPPERS WHEREVER there is a sandy seashore with here and there masses of dead seaweed and coral- lines thrown up by the waves, you will find sand-hoppers feeding on the debris. They are crustaceans, like crabs, shrimps, and barnacles, but in general aspect resemble enormous fleas. I hope that this comparison will not enable any reader at once to picture the less familiar by the more familiar. A good-sized sand-hopper is about half an inch long, and jumps not by means of a specially large pair of legs as the flea does, but by the stroke of the hind body, the jointed rings of which are carried curled downwards and ready to give a sudden blow. The sand-hopper (Fig. 20, a) has some of the rings or segments of the mid-body distinct, and not fused with those of the head or overhung by a great shield as in the lobster, crab, and shrimp. His walking legs and jaw-legs are also not quite of the same shape, though similar to those of a lobster, and his two little black eyes are not mounted on stalks, but are flush with the surface of the head. There are two quite distinct kinds of sand-hopper which live in crowds together on our sandy shores. They are not very different, but still are distinguished by naturalists from one another; one is called Talitrus (Fig. 20, a), the other Orchestia (Fig. 20, b). They are very similar in appearance and structure to a 152 SAND-HOPPERS 153 fresh-water creature common in weedy streams, which has no English name (except the general one of " fresh- water shrimp "), and is called by naturalists Gammarus. In the open sea there are many hundreds of kinds of small crustaceans resembling the sand-hoppers in their compressed (not flattened) shape of body and in the details of their legs and the grouping of the joints of the body. Many of the smallest crusta- ceans which swarm in the surface waters of the sea and form part of that float- ing population, mostly of small v transparent or iridescent and blue creatures, which we call the " plankton," or " surface - float- ing " population, and may be gathered by towing a very fine net behind a boat on a quiet day, can produce flashes of light which are vivid enough when seen at night. They contribute, to- gether with jelly-fish and the teeming millions of minute bladder-like Noctiluca, and other unicellular animalcules, to produce that wonderful display seen from time to time on our coasts, and called " the phosphorescence of the sea." These minute crustaceans produce flashes of light by suddenly squeezing from pits or glands in the skin a secretion which is chemically acted on (probably FIG. 20. a, Talitrus locusta, b, Orchestia littorea, the two common kinds of " sand-hopper." Of the natural size, c, A kind of small lobster which burrows in the sand, Callianassa subterranea. About two-thirds the natural size, linear. 154 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST oxidized) by the sea-water, the chemical action setting up light-vibrations, but not the usual excess of heat- vibrations to which we are accustomed when light accompanies ordinary " burning " or " combustion." Other crustaceans of several kinds, of an inch and more in length transparent, delicate creatures, re- sembling small prawns in appearance also produce light. Some of them are known by names referring to this fact, such as Lucifer (light-bearer) and Nyctiphanes Siiigle median series of four. Three paired. FIG. 21. A Phosphorescent Shrimp (Euphausia pellucida). The median lamp-like phosphorescent organs are numbered 3 to 6. The right side lanterns of two thoracic pairs are numbered I and 2, whilst there is another pair on the outer edge of the stalked eye, making ten lanterns in all. g, points to the hindermost gill. Magnified five diameters. (night-shiner). They possess special lantern-like knobs scattered about on the body, which have transparent lenses, and resemble small bull's-eye lanterns. Some have a median row of four lanterns at the hinder part of the body and three paired lanterns farther forward (Fig. 2 1 ), but one kind has as many as 150 dotted about. These lanterns were only a few years ago thought to be eyes, and their elaborate microscopic structure was described as that of an eye. Of course, this was due to the fact that dead preserved specimens were studied, and not the living animal. Some twenty years ago I SAND-HOPPERS I 5 5 witnessed a most impressive exhibition of these phos- phorescent shrimps at the house of my friend Sir John Murray, of the " Challenger," at Millport, on the Clyde. He had obtained them (the kind called Nyctiphanes) in great quantities at a depth of ninety fathoms in the great Scotch fiord, and amongst other curious facts about them had shown that they enter Loch Fyne in vast numbers, and are the special nourishment of the celebrated Loch Fyne herrings. It had been noticed that the intestine of the plump, well-fed herrings is full of a deep-black substance, and Sir John Murray showed that this was the black, indigestible pigment of the eyes of the hundreds of phosphorescent shrimps swallowed by these favoured fish, which owe their fine quality to their special opportunity for feeding in the depths of the loch on the exceptionally abundant and nutritious light- producing crustaceans ! At night my friend showed me a large glass vessel holding four or five gallons, in which were a hundred or so of the phosphorescent shrimps swimming around. We turned out the lamps of the room, and all was dark. Then a gentle tap was given to the jar, and each little crustacean lit up, as though by order, its row of minute lamps on each side of its body, swimming along meanwhile, and .reminding one of a passenger steamer, as seen from the shore, as it glides along at night with its lights showing through a row of cabin windows. The shrimps' lights shone steadily for a minute or so, then ceased, and had to be lit up again by again signalling their owners by knocking on the glass. These little lamps, with their bull's-eye lenses, are far more elaborate struc- tures than the glands which in other cases cause a flash by discharging a luminous secretion into the water. They are even more elaborate than the internal per- manent phosphorescent structure of the glow-worm (an insect, not a crustacean), which has no condensing lens. 156 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST I have mentioned these phosphorescent organs of small and smallest crustaceans because not many years ago a French naturalist, my friend Professor Giard, found that many of the sand-hoppers on the great sandy shore near Boulogne are phosphorescent. A year or two later I found them myself on the shore above tide- mark at Ouistreham (Westerham), near Caen, where they had actually been mistaken for glow-worms ! It was easy at night to pick up a dozen phosphorescent sand-hoppers during a stroll of five or ten minutes on the sands. Yet I have never seen them nor heard of their being seen on the English coast, and one of the results which I hope for in mentioning them here is that some of my readers will discover them on British sands and let me know. The remarkable fact about the luminous sand-hoppers is that they have no apparatus for producing light, and, as a matter of fact, do not pro- duce it ! Their luminosity is a disease, and is due (as was shown by that much-beloved teacher and dis- coverer the late Professor Giard) to the infection of their blood by a bacillus. Hence it is only here and there that you see the brilliant greenish ball of light on the sand due to a phosphorescent sand-hopper. And when you pick it up you find that the poor little thing is quite feeble and unable to hop. Examine its blood under the microscope and you find it teeming with excessively minute parasitic rods like those which cause the phos- phorescence of dead fish, of stale bones, and occasionally of butcher's meat. Similar bacilli may be obtained by cultivation from any sea-water, and in such abundance that a room can be lit up by a bottleful of the cultiva- tion. Perhaps all the light-producing bacteria or bacilli are only varieties oi one species perhaps they are dis- tinct species. Whether a species or a variety, that which gets into the blood of the sand-hopper and SAND-HOPPERS 157 gives it the luminosity of a glow-worm, inevitably and rapidly causes its death a severe price to pay for brief nocturnal effulgence. Some of the germs can be re- moved on a needle's point from the dead sand-hopper and introduced by the most delicate puncture into a healthy sand-hopper or into a young crab, with the result that they too become illuminated, the bacillus multiplying within them. Being thus morbidly il- luminated and having astonished the crustacean, not to say the human world, by their alarming brilliance, they quickly perish : a little history which may be read as a parable. The sand-hoppers give the disease to one another. It is, of course, a merely non-significant thing that the bacillus happens to set up light vibrations. Its chemical activity is concerned with its nourish- ment and growth, and in the course of these processes it not only produces light but poisonous by-products which kill its host. Some day we may get an " immune " race of sand-hoppers who will acquire the illuminating bacillus and defy its poison. Then we shall have a permanent and happy breed of brilliant sand-hoppers illuminating the dark places of the seashore. It is conceivable that some of the disease-producing bacilli (bacteria, cocci, etc.) which multiply in man's blood and tissues should also produce light vibrations, and if one could be found that would render the blood luminous, whilst not producing much pain or malaise, no doubt some excuse would be found for its use as a fashionable toilet novelty. Cases are on record of luminosity of the surface of the body and its secretions being developed during serious illness by human beings, especially in acute phthisis ; but these ancient records need confirmation. 158 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST Luminous bacilli or bacteria only give out light when free oxygen is in the water or liquid inhabited by them. A chemical combination of the oxygen with substances in the bacteria is the necessary condition of their evolution of light. When frozen, these bacteria cease to be lumi- nous the chemical combination cannot take place when the substance of the bacterium is frozen solid and main- tained in that condition ; the liquid condition is a necessary condition for these changes. These luminous bacteria have been used recently by Sir James Dewar in the Faraday Laboratory of the Royal Institution (where Sir James has shown them to me), for the purpose of investigating the action of intense cold on living matter. Although their luminous response to oxygen is arrested when they are frozen, yet immediately on allowing the temperature to rise above freezing-point the response of the living matter to oxidation recommences, and a luminous glow is seen. Hence we have in this glow a ready means of answering the question, " Does extreme cold, of long duration, destroy the simplest living matter?" Sir James Dewar has exposed a film of these bacteria to the extremest degree of cold as yet obtained in the laboratory, that at which hydrogen gas is solidified, and he has kept them in this, or nearly this, degree of cold for several months. Yet immediately on "thawing" the luminous glow was visible in the dark, showing that the bacteria were still alive. Curiously enough, whilst all chemical action in living matter can be thus arrested by extreme cold, and yet resumed on rise of temperature and restoration to the liquid condition, so that the old phrase and the conception of " suspended animation " are justified yet there is one widely-distributed form of activity, the effect of which the bacteria, even when hard frozen, cannot resist, namely, that of the blue and ultra-blue rays of light. These rays, if allowed to SAND-HOPPERS 159 fall on the hardest frozen bacillus, get at its chemical structure, shake it to pieces, destroy it. Hence Sir James Dewar argues that, whilst it would appear that the ex- treme cold of space would not kill a minute living germ, and prevent it passing from planet to planet, or from remotest space to our earth, yet one thing which is more abundant in space than within the shell of our atmosphere is absolutely destructive to such minute particles of living matter, even when hard-frozen, and that is intense light, the ultra-visible vibrations of smallest wave-length. A dance on the seashore : a sketch by Edward Forbes (1841). CHAPTER XVIII A SWISS INTERLUDE AFTER the hot summer of 1911 I escaped from London in September and made straight for Inter- laken. Thence 1 was " wafted " by the electric railway to the " Schynige Platte" a wonderful hill-side, 4500 feet above the " Bodeli," the flat meadowland in which Inter- laken is placed. At the Schynige Platte we are separated to the south from the Jungfrau and the great Oberland range of mountains only by a deep rift in which rushes the " Black Liitschine," coming down from Grindelwald to join its " white " brother-torrent close beneath us at Zweiliitschinen. To reach the " Platte " we creep in our train up the northern side of the mountain one of whose peaks is known by the curious name " Gummihorn " for more than an hour without a glimpse of what is on the other side. Then, when we are 6000 feet above sea-level, we enter a short tunnel in the shoulder of the mountain, and all is dark. When the train emerges every one in it gasps. You hear a cry from every mouth for the scene is astounding ! Coming through that tunnel we have stolen surreptitiously upon a band of gigantic snow-white brethren the Wetterhorner, the Schreckhorner, the Eiger, the Monch, the Jungfrau, the Mittaghorn, the Breithorn, and the Tschingelhorn. There they are lying close to us, unaware of our approach naked and unashamed, glistening in the sunlight, variously 160 A SWISS INTERLUDE 161 stretched in their immense repose. One feels on seeing them thus free from every scrap of cloud and clothing as though one had intruded upon a glorious company of titanic beings innocently sunning themselves in perfect nudity. It is with the sense that humble apologies for the intrusion are due to them, and will be graciously accepted because we hold them in such profound admira- tion and reverence, that we venture, little by little, to let our eyes dwell on their wondrous beauty. There are moments, it must be confessed, when we feel a qualm of modesty and are unwilling to take advantage of our rare chance moments when we should not be surprised if one of the giants were to lyarl a command at us in terms of thunder and avalanche ordering us at once to retire to the other side of the Gummihorn and leave them to their rightful privacy. There is no great view of snow mountains at close range not even that from the Gornergrat which is at once so fine and so easily accessible. In the following year I went early in June in search of another Alpine delight, the spring flowers not those of the highest " downs " and sheltering rocks 8000 or 9000 feet above sea-level, but those of the higher meadows, where the pine forests are beginning to thin out, and rich crops are cut before July by the skilful workers of the great Swiss industry, that of cow-herding and the production of cheese. It is difficult to define properly the term "Alpine" as applied to flowers. It is now used by horticulturists very generally for those exquisite small plants, the Saxifrages, Androsacae, Gentians, etc., which grow in the highest regions to which plant-life extends regions which are often covered by the winter's snow until June, and even late into that month. Some of these plants (as, for instance, the ii 162 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST Soldanellas those little lilac- coloured flowers like pen- dent foolscaps which are allied to our primrose and the crocus and the butterbur (Petasites) actually blossom beneath the snow and push their open flowers through it to the sunlight. Others of these " higher Alpines " have a peculiar mode of growth related to their special con- ditions of life. Their stems are very short and their foliage closely set, so that they form compact tufts or cushions, on which their short-stalked brilliant little flowers are dotted. The fact is they have not time in the short summer of these high regions to grow long stems. Their flowers are produced on low-lying parts of the plant, which carry small and abundant green leaves, but never send up long leaf-bearing stems. Not only do they thus do quickly, and without needless upward growth, what they have to do namely, expose green leaves to the sunlight for nutrition and their flowers to the fertilizing visits of insects so as to ripen their reproductive seeds but they benefit by keeping close to the warmth of the ground, which is heated by the strong sunshine, and is three and a half degrees higher in temperature than the cold moist air. In similar positions in low-lying regions the difference between the temperature of the air and that of the surface of the ground is not as much as one degree. The Alpine meadows do not occur above the height of 5000 to 6000 feet, and are bordered by pine woods, in which are many beautiful plants not to be found at all or not in such profusion in the lower valleys. Both the meadows and woods of the Alpine heights graduate into those of lower level, and it is difficult to draw the line and say these flowers should be, and these should not be, called " Alpines." Many rock-loving plants allied to those found at great heights flourish in com- A SWISS INTERLUDE 163 paratively low-lying regions, where the necessary rocky character exists. The flowers of the high Alpine meadows are not the rock-lovers, the inhabitants of a surface formed by fragments of broken rock, to which the name " Alpine " is often limited. The meadow plants grow on good soil, and cover whole acres, in which there is but little grass. The fields are coloured of almost uniform blue or white or purple or yellow as the weeks go on, and various species one after another have their turn of dominance and maturity. I paid, first of all, a brief visit to Aix and the lakes of Bourget and of Annecy, to the gorge of the River Fier, and to the finely-situated monastery of the Grande Chartreuse a huge building, devoid of beauty, which it seems to be difficult to utilize now that the Carthusian Brothers have been expelled. The richly-coloured Alpine centaury, deep blue and purple red, was growing in the woods around it abundantly, and many other handsome plants. Zoology was represented by most excellent little trout provided for us at the village inn. Then I stayed a couple of days at Geneva, where, in a pool in a richly-planted rock garden that of the well-known horticulturist M. Correvon I came across what I have long wished to see, namely, the blue variety of the edible frog. Six years ago I wrote an account of the little blue frog of Mentone, the rare variety of the green tree-frog, or rainette, so abundant in that region (see "Science from an Easy Chair," p. 50: Methuen, 1910). The edible frog (Rana esculenta) is often very beautifully coloured with blotches of dark brown and pale green, and a pale yellow stripe down the back. It is easily distinguished from the brown frog (Rana temporaria), which occurs with it. The latter is the common frog of our islands, though we also find the edible frog in 1 64 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST the South of England. The blue variety of the edible frog has been seen in various localities in Germany and along the valley of the Rhone. It owes its colour, as does the blue tree-frog, to the suppression of yellow pigment in its skin. The one I found was swimming in a small clear pool with two other very finely-marked specimens of the more usual colouring. A blue variety of our common brown frog has not been observed, although it is occasionally very pale in colour and, on the other hand, is sometimes of a bright orange-brown tint. Several species of toads and frogs are found on the Continent which do not occur in Great Britain. Years ago (when France and Germany began the great war of 1869-70) I travelled from Geneva to Chamonix by coach. It took the whole day. Now I and my companion, avoiding the railway, were driven in a motor-car past Bonneville, Cluses, and Sallanches (with its famous view of Mont Blanc), and along the vale of Chamonix to its far end above Argentiere in less than three hours. Here we stayed a few days in the Hotel du Planet, at a height of 4500 feet, in order to enjoy the sight of the meadows and woodland flowers. I may add that in this quiet hotel the proprietor gave us simple, good food, well cooked, which is more than I can say of the large hotels on the lakes and popular resorts, such as Geneva, Montreux, Glion, and Inter- laken, where I have carefully inquired into the kitchen arrangements and food supplies. The latter barrack-like edifices have of late years become intolerable owing to the mechanical supply to them (by a group of monopolist financiers who have acquired the contract) of the nastiest ice-stored fish, meat, and vegetables. These are heated in their kitchens with bottled sauces in patent ovens by underpaid scullery-helps, without the superintendence A SWISS INTERLUDE 165 of a qualified " cook." The result is a sham pretentious and inedible which yields a fine profit to the hotel companies, and is erroneously believed by the travelling crowds of to-day to be French cookery ! In reality it is a new device for bringing the " catering " in all hotels in the great holiday centres under a monopolist control. The scheme is similar to that to which the continental railway companies have yielded in leasing to a well- known company the restaurant and sleeping arrange- ments on their trains, with the result of causing much misery to travellers and profit to themselves and to the monopolists. Owing to differences in exposure and soil, the meadowland above Argentiere showed a fascinating variety of colour. Here was an acre of the large- flowered purple geranium, interspersed with the big Alpine yellow rattle (a greedy root-parasite) ; there (near some pine trees) a mass of the yellow anemone (Anemone sulfurea) ; farther on a whole meadow, blue with the abundance of large hairbells and viper's bugloss. Close by, in the damper parts of the valley descending from the Col des Montets, three or four acres of meadow- land were white, so thickly were they covered with tall plants of the distinguished-looking white buttercup (Ranunculus aconitifolius). In some parts, among these dignified Ranunculi, the plump yellow heads of the globe-flower (Trollius), also a kind of buttercup, were abundant. Overshadowed by these larger plants, or growing up between them, were orchids, plantains, poly- gonums, and many others. The most beautiful plant in these meadows was St. Bruno's lily, which we found in abundance on a steep bank. It is named after the founder of the Carthusian order, whose monastery (the Grande Chartreuse), first established when William the 1 66 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST Conqueror ruled England, I had visited a week before. St. Bruno's lily has large, white, funnel-shaped flowers, an inch or more long, three or four on a stalk. It is known to botanists by the pretty name " Paradisia liliastrum." It is the lily of the Alps, pure and un spotted, with a delicious perfume, and six golden stamens guarded by its beautiful and large white corolla. In the woods we found some of the larger orchids, and also whole banks covered with the waxy-looking flowers, variegated in colour, white, yellow, and red, of the large milk wort, the Poly gala chamaebuxus a plant very unlike in appearance to the little blue and white milk- worts of England. It flowers in winter as well as through the early summer. Another wonderfully waxy- looking flower which we found is that of the shrub known as the Alpine Daphne. There is something suggestive of exotic rarity and perfume about a waxy- looking flower. Of the same character are the flowers of the little shrubs of the genus Vaccinium known as the bilberry, the wortleberry, the cow-berry, and the bear-berry, which occur on the open scrubland. The rusty-leaved Rhododendron, with its crimson flowers, and the little Azalea (like the Vaccinia all members of the Heath family) were abundant as well as the true dark-red rose of the Alps, the richly-scented Rosa alpina. We left Argentiere and the constant companionship of the great glaciers of the vale of Chamonix, and descended by train through the awe-inspiring valley of the Trient (up which we used to walk many years ago, on our way to the higher regions) to Martigny, and then drove for four hours up a rough mountain road to the hotel of Pierre-a-voir whence we descended a few days later in sledges, over grass slopes and torrent beds, A SWISS INTERLUDE 167 4000 feet in an hour and a quarter, to Saxon in the Rhone valley, a truly alarming experience. The " luge " or sledge is supported in front by a strong mountaineer who prevents it from " hurtling " down at breakneck speed, topsy-turvy. As the avoidance of such a catastrophe depends on the strength and the sureness of foot of this individual, travelling by " luges " is not to be recommended in summer, however agreeable it may be when the mountain side is covered with snow. In the woods near Pierre-a-voir we found another member of the Heath family, looking like a lily rather than a heath, the sweet-scented winter-green with its large single white flower (Pirola uniflora), and on the rocks on open ground masses of the pink flowers of the little rock soap-wort (Saponaria ocymoides). The curious tall, big-leaved composite with only three purple florets to a head, the Adenostyles albifrons, was here much in evidence. We were too early for the flowers of the pretty little creeping plant allied to the honeysuckle which the great Linnaeus asked his friend Gronovius to name after him, the Linnaea borealis, though we had been told that it grows in this neighbourhood. Then we spent five days at Glion and on the in- comparable Lake of Geneva, never wearied of gazing at the changing mysterious lights and colours (sapphire, emerald, and silver) of its vast and restful expanse. The question often is asked, "Why is it that the same species of flower is brighter and stronger in colour when growing high up in the Alps than when growing in the lowlands and in our own country ? " The fact is admitted ; the blues of the blue-bells (Campanula), the bugloss, the forget-me-nots, the crimsons and purples of the geraniums and the pinks and the campions, and many 1 68 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST others, are examples. Careful study and consideration of the facts have enabled botanists to show, in many instances, within recent years, that the peculiarities of form and also of colour of the stems, leaves, and flowers of plants are not mere unmeaning " accidents," but are definitely of advantage and of " survival value " to the species. Thus we have seen that the tuft-like cushions formed by high Alpine plants are explained. The purple and reddish colour of stalks and leaves like that of the red variety of the common beech has not always, as in that plant, the purpose of protecting the chlorophyll from destruction by too vivid sunlight. In Alpine plants it is often present on the underside of leaves and of the petals, and acts to the plant's benefit, absorbing light and converting it into heat. But it also seems in many cases to protect the juices of the plant from the destructive action of white light. It is held by some botanists that the bright colour of Alpine (and Norwegian) samples of a flower elsewhere of a paler colour is due to the direct action of the greater sunlight of the high regions in causing the formation of pigment. This is inadmissible. The sunlight cannot act in that way. It causes increased formation of nutriment by acting on the chlorophyll, and an Alpine plant thus highly charged with nutritive matters can afford to form more abundant pigment than a plant which enjoys less brilliant sunshine. The high-coloured Alpine flowers are a breed or race ; a pale-coloured plant taken to the Alps from below does not itself be- come high coloured. It is a matter of natural selection. The occasional high-coloured " spontaneous " variations produced from seed have an advantage in the short summer of the high Alps. They attract the visits of the few insects in the short season more surely than do A SWISS INTERLUDE 169 the paler individuals, and consequently they are fertilized and reproduce, whilst the race of the paler individuals dies out from failure to attract the insects. Thus we get a high-coloured race established in the mountains, a race that can make haste and seize the brief oppor- tunities of the short but brilliant summer. There are many peculiarities of form and colour of plants the life conditions of which are diverse (e.g., woodland, moorland, aquatic, seashore, dry air, moist air, etc.), which can be shown by accurate observation to be specially related to those life conditions. Those conditions allow the peculiarities to survive and establish a race, in some cases a species, whilst preventing the maturity or destroying the life of those individuals not presenting that advantageous peculiarity of variation. CHAPTER XIX SCIENCE AND DANCING THERE is at the present day in this country a real and most happy revival of interest in the great art of dancing as exhibited on the stage. We owe this to the creative ability of the musical composers and directors of the Russian Imperial Ballet, as well as to the highly- trained and gifted Russian artists who have visited this country, and especially to the poetical genius of Madame Anna Pavlova. Though dancing may seem, on first thought, a subject remote from science, yet, like all other human developments, it is a matter for scientific investigation, and one upon which science can throw much light. What is the origin and essential nature of " dancing " ? Do animals dance ? What is its early history in mankind ? What is its relation not merely historically, but from the point of view of psychology the study of the mind to other arts ? What is its real " value " and possible achievement ? To dance is to trip with measured steps, and, whilst primarily referring to human movement, the word is secondarily applied to rapid rhythmic movements even of inanimate objects. Rhythm is what distinguishes dancing from ordinary movement of progression or from simple gesture or mere antics. Dancing on the part of 170 SCIENCE AND DANCING 171 man or animal implies a sense of rhythm. Though not common amongst animals, it is exhibited by many birds, by spiders, and by some crustaceans ! Rhythm is an essential feature of the sequence of sounds which we call " music." The singing of birds is related to their per- ception of and pleasure in rhythm, and it is not, there- fore, surprising that they should also dance. It is, however, curious that the birds which " dance " are not the " singing birds," and that there are many birds which neither sing nor dance. The dancing of birds is usually part of the " display " of the males for the purpose of attracting the females at the breeding season. It is well known in some African cranes, as well as in rails and other similar birds, and may be witnessed at the Zoological Gardens in London. Other birds " strut " rather than dance, whilst displaying their plumage, as, for instance, the turkey and pheasant tribe and the bustards. Parrots and cockatoos will often make a rhythmical up-and-down movement of the neck in time to music, but usually the " dance " is the accompaniment of definite emotion. The male spider of some species courts the female by making dancing movements and posing itself in a very curious way, so as to display a spot of bright colour on the head to her observation. The same kind of movement and action has been observed in marine shrimp-like creatures. Some spiders are excited and made to dance by the vibrating note of a tuning-fork set going near them. I once had the chance to observe a male octopus in the aquarium at Naples, who was displaying himself to the female, changing colour rapidly from one shade to another, and rolling his long sucker-bearing arms in the form of spirals. Probably one should not consider this as a " dance," since no rhythmic interruption or succession of movements was observable. 172 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST It is established that in mankind, as well as many animals, when in a state of emotion, movement and gesture, as well as the vocal utterance, take on a rhythmic character, that is to say, become a dance and a song. The emotion is not necessarily that of amorous passion ; in mankind it is frequently of a warlike or religious character, and is worked up by the sympathy, imitativeness, and desire for unison in expression which is common in troops or large gatherings of animals of social habits. Man presents a more advanced develop- ment in variety, sensitiveness, and abandonment to social or combined action and expression than do other animals, and this is equally true of the more civilized and of the more barbarous races. Apparently in obedience to the same tendencies as those which convert simple forms of movement into a rhythmic dance, the speech of man, under conditions of emotion, assumes a rhythmic form, so that dancing bears the same relation to the ordinary movements of locomotion and gesture which verse does to ordinary speech, or, again, which song bears to mere exclamations and cries, indicative of feeling. Dancing is the universal and most primitive expression of that sense of rhythm which is a widely distributed attribute of the nervous system in animals generally. In primitive men it is a simple but often very violent demonstration of strong emotion, such as social joy, religious exaltation, martial ardour, or amatory passion. The voice and the facial muscles, as well as those of the limbs and body, are affected, and the dancers derive an intense pleasure from the excitement, which so far from exhausting them leads them on to more and more violent rhythmic or undulatory action. In its purest form this ecstatic condition is seen in the spinning dervishes. It was developed into the mad and dangerous festivals of the worshippers of Bacchus and other deities in ancient SCIENCE AND DANCING 173 Greece. It has been seen in mediaeval Europe as the dancing mania and tarantism. The liability to this and similar forms of " mania " lurks beneath the surface among populations which "are nevertheless staid and phlegmatic in their usual behaviour. The Romans in ancient times recognized its unhealthy character, and though fond of ceremonial dances and theatrical shows, and even of the performances of dancing girls from Greece and the East, disapproved of dancing on the part of a Roman citizen. Cicero says, " As a rule no one, who is not drunk, dances unless he is, temporarily, out of his mind." Although the mad performances of bacchanalians and dervishes are recognized as unhealthy, civilized peoples in Europe since the fifteenth century have developed and practised dancing as an art in two directions first, as a popular amusement in which definite combinations of graceful movements are per- formed for the sake of the pleasure which the exercise affords to the dancer and to the spectator, and secondly, as carefully trained movements which are meant by the dancer vividly to represent the actions and passions of other people, and are exhibited by specially skilled performers on a stage. The first kind is what we call " country dances," " popular dances," also " Court and ball-room dances," and has been commended by the philosopher Locke and other writers as a valuable training for both mind and body, and by physicians as a health- giving exercise. The second is " the ballet." In the dances of savages and primitive peoples, some kind of music is always found associated with dancing, the one helping and developing the other ; they are descendants of one parentage. Very commonly, too, 174 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST some kind of " acting " the representation of a hunt, a fight, or a love adventure is an important feature of such dancing. Modern popular and Court dances are intimately connected with and dependent on special music, the rhythm and variation of time and strength in which is, as it were, illustrated by the dancing, and serves to guide it and to keep the dancers in unison. The signification behind all such modern dancing is courtship the addresses of the man to the woman, and her elusive reception or rejection of them. In the Cathedral of Seville, however, you may still see, at the festival of the Corpus Christi, a religious dance, a dance of worship and adoration, performed by acolytes in front of the high altar. In the early days of the Church such ritual dancing, by both old and young, was a regular thing, as it was in the still earlier religious ceremonies of the ancient Romans and in the time of King David. The development of dancing as a fine art has only been rendered possible by the establishment, under the patronage of various European princes, of great exhibi- tions of dancing, called " ballets," and the creation of a profession of dancers, who, like professional actors and musicians, devote their lives to the study of their art and the training necessary for efficiency in its practice. In this, its highest development, dancing, whilst main- taining its dominance, is entirely dependent on the aid of music, and becomes blended with the art of the actor and pantomimist. As in " opera " the effect of the musical art is enhanced by the meaning of the words sung, by the acting of the performers, and by the accessories of scenery and costume, so in the ballet do all these factors, except the human voice, contribute to the artistic result. The latest development of the ballet SCIENCE AND DANCING 175 is, in fact, " grand opera," without a voice, without words. Gesture, facial expression, and movement of the limbs, marvellous for its grace and directness of appeal, take the place of words. In fact, dance, the appeal to the eye, takes the place of verse, the appeal to the ear. And it is a fact, unexpected and astonishing to those new to it, that the same quality of " poetic imagination " which distinguishes " word-poems " from mere doggerel or commonplace verse, can also inspire the great dancer and give to a wordless dance the unmistakable value of poetical art, distinguishing it from purely acrobatic or barbaric capering. It is a fact that poetic imagination may be conveyed in one kind of art as in another, and that dancing, though greatly limited in its range of detailed expression, yet is closely similar in its forms to music, verse, and to glyptic and pictorial art, of all of which it is the parent and forerunner. Its primitive character is no less remarkable than the readiness with which it exerts its charm and develops new importance at the present day. Regarded as a fine art, and not merely as a pastime, dancing has frequently great beauty in its simple quality of the rhythmic movement of decorative form and colour. The dances depicted on Greek vases had this character, and so, with varying degree of merit, have the ballets common during the last fifty years in London and other great centres. But before this period the makers of ballet (a word which originally signified both dance and song, and represented three modern words ballet, ball, and ballad) did not aim at a mere exhibition of living rhythmic decoration, but at the production of a theatrical performance in which a story is told only by gesture and dancing accompanied by music. The real modern founder and exponent of the ballet as thus 176 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST understood was Noverre, a Frenchman (called by Garrick " the Shakespeare of the dance "), who died in 1810. He brought to a high degree of perfection the art of presenting a story by pantomime, and he never allowed dancing which was not the direct expression of a particular attitude of mind. His professed effort was to introduce the steps tmd poses of ancient Greek dancing shown in sculpture and painted pottery as the model for stage dancing. And he succeeded. The great dancers of the past who are known to us by tradition Vestris, Camargo in the eighteenth, and Cerito, Grisi, and Taglioni in the earlier half of the nineteenth 'century were not merely perfectly trained as dancers, but were actors, and possessed poetic imagination. Women did not appear in the ballet until the time of Louis XIV, and Mile Camargo was the first to wear the conventional short stiff ballet skirt. "Convention" has a great weight in such matters. But it seems to be undeniable that the conventional ballet-skirt conceals the beautiful movement of the leg on the hip joint, a disadvantage from which the male dancer does not suffer. Skirts are, in fact, out of place in really fine dancing. Flowing light drapery, or better still the Circassian jacket and full gauzy trousers fastened at the ankles, are the only possible dress for a really great danseuse. The dramatic ballet or ballet enaction lasted until the end of the fifties in London, and then ceased almost suddenly to occupy the leading position which it once held at the Opera House. In London, as in Paris and Vienna, it was transformed into a mere spectacular display of costume and meaningless rhythmic drill. The dramatic ballet ceased to exist. The great tradition of fine stage-dancing and ballet-drama was, however, SCIENCE AND DANCING preserved in Russia. It is not easy to explain, but the fact is that two peoples so far apart as the Russians and the Spaniards are more devoted to dancing than any other European nationalities. Successive Tsars have spent large sums in maintaining colleges in St. Petersburg and in Moscow, where boys and girls are lodged and carefully educated whilst they are trained from the age of ten years in the art of stage-dancing. The greatest musical composers have been encouraged to write " ballets," and the ablest designers and " pro- ducers " have been secured by large salaries. Something like ;8o,ooo a year is spent by the Tsar on the maintenance and development of this beautiful art, which is dead elsewhere, but seems to fit the genius of the Russian people. A new respect for Russia, a profound admiration for the Russian artists, has been the result of the revelation of the Russian ballet by the recent visits of its members to this country. During the last thirty years of its period of nurture and development in Russia the ballet has developed in two directions. Neither of these is popular and success- ful in Russia, where the old traditional and established ballet of the early nineteenth century what may be called " academic " dancing is alone in demand. What we call " the Russian ballet " is dramatic in nature, and includes such wonderful combinations of music, scenery, costume, and perfect artistic expression by dancing and gesture as we have seen in Scheherazade, Cleopatra, Prince Igorre, Tamar, and Petrouschka. It promises in its latest development to supplant the musical drama known as " opera," in which the human voice is used. But the most striking development is that in which dancing appears as the exponent of lyrical poetry. It is to the teaching of Isadora Duncan that the Russian 12 1 78 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST dancers admit their indebtedness for this new departure. When undertaken by untrained dancers and amateurs (even by the innovator herself) the attempt to interpret lyrical subjects showed some ingenuity in conception, but failed to command general appreciation, as the efforts of a painter or an actor, who has not acquired command of the material of his art, also fail. But when Anna Pavlova brought her lifelong training as a dancer and her poetic imagination to the interpretation of master- pieces of music inspired by such subjects as " Night," "The Dying Rose," "The Wounded Swan," and the moonlight mystery of " Les Sylphides," a new and most poignant form of emotional expression became apparent. A single figure moving over the stage with expressive steps and gestures of the arms, with lips and eyes guided and controlled by consummate art, blended itself with and interpreted to the spectator the poetic thought of a great musical composer and a great writer. This new develop- ment of the dancer's art may remain with us. But it requires the presence of one who combines the rare gifts possessed by Madame Pavlova perfect technique and poetic sympathy. Many people derive a definite part of the pleasure given to them by an orchestral concert from the con- templation of the movements of the instrumentalists and the directive interpreting gestures of a great " conductor." Others would prefer the orchestra and its leader to be unseen ; they find special delight in hearing great music surge and float from no visible source through the dimly- lit aisles of a vast cathedral. They do not desire their eyes to be called in aid of music unless the appeal to vision is complete and worthy of the theme. It is, I think, undeniable that Dr. Richter and my friend Sir Henry Wood, whose expressive backs and persuasive SCIENCE AND DANCING 179 hands are so dear to concert audiences, are a kind of dwindled ballet dancers, connected by the drum-major of the military band and the dancing " choragus " with the primeval phase of the arts when music and dancing were inseparable. CHAPTER XX COURTSHIP IT is always amusing to find the lower animals behaving in various circumstances of life very much as we do ourselves. There is a tendency to look upon such conduct on the animals' part as a more or less clever mimicry of humanity a sort of burlesque of our own behaviour. Really, however, it has a far greater interest ; it is a revelation to us of the nature and origin in our animal ancestry of various deeply-rooted " behaviours " which are common to us and animals. The wooing of a maid by a man and the various strange anfics and poses to which love-sick men and women are addicted, are represented by similar behaviour among animals, and that, too, not only among higher animals allied to man, but even among minute and obscure insects and molluscs. In fact, the elementary principle of " courtship " or "wooing," namely, the pursuit of the female by the male, is observed among the lowest unicellular organisms the Protozoa and the Protophyta and it holds among plants as well as among animals, for it is the pollen the male fertilizing material which travels, carried by wind or by the nectar-bribed " parcels-delivery company " of bees, to the ovules of a distant flower, and not the ovules (the female products) which desert their homes in quest of pollen. i so COURTSHIP 181 The " reproduction," or producing of new individuals, of many animals and plants can be, and is, effected by the detachment of large pieces of a parent organism. Thus plants split into two or more pieces, each of which carries on life as a new individual. Many worms and polyps multiply by breaking into two or more pieces, and very often the broken-off pieces which thus become new individuals and carry on the race are extremely small, even microscopic in size. The spores of ferns and the minute separable buds of many plants and animals are of this nature. They grow into new individuals without any fusion with fertilizing particles from another individual. Yet there seems to be even in the very simplest living things a need to be met, an advantage to be gained, in the fusion of the substance of two distinct parents in order to carry on the race with the best chance of success. We find that those organisms which can multiply by buds and fission yet also multiply regularly by ovules fertilized by sperms. We see this process in its simplest condition in microscopic plants and animals which are so minute that they consist of only a single " cell " a single nucleated particle of protoplasm. Such unicellular organisms have definite shape, even limb-like locomotor organs, shells, contractile heart-like cavities within the protoplasm, even mouths, digestive tract, and a vent. They produce new individuals by merely dividing into two equal halves or by more rapidly dividing into several individuals each like the parent, only smaller. But from time to time, at recurring periods or seasons, two of these unicellular individuals (of course, two of the same kind or species) come into contact with one another, not by mere chance, but attracted and impelled (probably by chemical guiding or alluring substances of the nature of perfumes) towards one another, and then fuse into one. Two (or sometimes 1 82 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST several) individuals thus melt together and become one individual a process the exact reverse of the division of one into two. This is known to microscopists as " con- jugation." The new individual resulting from conjugation after a time divides, and the individuals thus produced, each consisting of a mixture of the fused and thoroughly mixed substance of the two conjugated individuals, feed and grow and divide in their turn, and so on for several generations, until again the epidemic of conjugation sets in, and the scattered offspring of many distinct pairs of the previous conjugation-season in their turn conjugate. It is clear that the tendency of this process is to prevent the continued multiplication of one stock or line of descent in a pure state. By conjugation different lines of descent the progeny of different individuals, often brought together from widely separate localities are blended and fused. And this is, we are led to conclude, a matter of immense importance. To effect this mixture of separate stocks is, as Darwin has shown, a prime purpose of the habits and structures implanted in the very substance of living things, and developed and accentuated in endless ways and with extraordinary elaboration of mechanisms and procedure during the immense lapse of ages during which life has unfolded and developed on this earth. The fusion of different strains by conjugation gives increased variation in the offspring or new generations : for the two parental strains differ more or less, as all living individuals do, from one another. The result of their fusion is different from either parent. In fact, the process of fusion itself causes a disturbance a readjustment of the living matter so that completely new variations result and are selected or rejected in the struggle for existence. Either parental strain was perhaps not so suitable to a newly developed COURTSHIP 183 change in the surrounding conditions of life as the new blend may be. Thus a more certain and active pro- duction of possibly useful variations is provided for than would be the case were the variations of one self- multiplying stock alone presented for selection. In the case of simple conjugation the cell individuals which fuse or " mate " with one another, and may be called " maters " or " mating cells," are in all respects similar to one another. But we find among the uni- cellular plants and animals cases in which one of the mating cells, instead of fusing with another straight away, divides into a number of much smaller cells, which are very active in locomotion and are specially produced in order to mate or fuse with the larger cells. The mating cells are called " gametes," and the large motionless mating cells are called " macro - gametes," or " large maters," whilst the small motile mating cells are called " micro-gametes," or small " maters." The former are of the same nature as egg cells or ovules, the female re- productive particles, whilst the latter, the small " maters," are identical in nature with the sperms or spermatozoa or male reproductive particles of higher organisms. In the case of certain parasitic unicellular .animals called coccidia, and also in the parasite which causes malarial fever, quantities of small " mating cells " are produced which fuse with or " fertilize " other much larger mating cells. The small " maters " of coccidia have long vibrating tails and minute oblong bodies, and agree closely in appearance and active locomotion with the spermatozoa of higher animals and plants. The large spherical mating cells might be mistaken for the egg cells of larger animals. In the globe animalcule, Volvox globator, we find a transitional condition leading us to the production of small (male) and large (female) 1 84 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST mating cells, like those regularly produced by the massive plants and animals which are built up by hundreds of thousands of " cells " or protoplasmic units conjoined and performing different services for the common life. Volvox is one of those simple aquatic organisms which is not a single cell but a group of many cells (some hundred) hanging together in this case so as to form a hollow sphere. All the cells of an individual sphere are alike, and have originated by division from one first cell. When the " breeding season " arrives one or two cells of the sphere increase in bulk they become " large mating cells " in fact, egg cells. At the same time one or two divide (without separating), so as to form packets of minute oblong cells with vibrating tails. These are " small maters," or " spermatozoa." When ripe they separate and swim away to fertilize that is to say, to fuse with the large " mating cells " or egg cells of other Volvox spheres. Such a Volvox sphere as I have described is " bi-sexual " : it produces both large and small mating cells, both male and female reproductive cells. But sometimes we find that a number of Volvox spheres produce only large mating cells by the swelling up of one or two of their constituent cells. 'They are, in fact, female Volvox spheres. And other Volvox spheres produce only packets of small mating cells by the splitting and change of one or two of their constituent cells. They are male Volvox spheres. When we now look at the higher plants and animals formed of aggregations of innumerable cells (all derived from the division of a first cell an embyro cell or fertilized egg cell) we find that amongst the mass of variously shaped cells forming the " tissues " of these higher organisms some are set apart even in early growth as " mating cells " (gametes or reproductive cells) COURTSHIP 185 Usually they are in two groups namely, the ovary, which includes the large mating cells or egg cells or ova ; and the spermary, which includes the cells which break up into small mating cells or sperms. In many animals both ovary and spermary are present in the same individual, but in most of the larger animals (insects, crustaceans, and vertebrates) either the ovary is sup- pressed, when the creature is called a male, and produces only small mating cells, or the spermary is suppressed, and the creature is a female, producing only egg cells. In both cases there may be a distinct but minute repre- sentative of the suppressed organ present and recognizable by its microscopic structure. The point in this history, which seems to be important and must not be lost sight of, is that the small mating cell is in all the stages cited actively mobile and swims rapidly through water when its producer is an aquatic animal. The large mating cell is quiescent. It is more or less swollen with granular nutrient particles often vastly so enlarged. It already is acting the maternal part, preparing nourishment for the growing embryo which will develop from its protoplasm when fused with that of the relatively tiny but active male mating cell. And it is certainly very noteworthy that when these two kinds of mating cells become separated in distinct "carriers" (that is to say, produced one without the other in what are called male and female individuals), the primitive character of the mating cells whichever of the two kinds they be impresses itself on the com- plex elaborate many-celled organism in which they arise. The male is the more active, the more disposed to travel. It is always the male who seeks, courts, woos, and attacks the female, as the small mating cells seek and attack the larger mating cells. The character and 1 86 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST conduct of the female animal is largely (not without deviations and additions) based on that of the larger mating cell or macro-gamete ; she is the one who waits, is sought, is courted, and wooed. And like the egg cells of which she is the vehicle and envelope, she is specially concerned in the provision of nutriment for the early growth of the young. Courtship, then, seems to have had its foundations very deeply laid, even in the earliest and simplest forms of life at the time when the principle of the union ot the substance of two strains to produce a new generation was established, and when, further, the active, seeking male cell was differentiated from the immobile nourishing female cell. Amongst the polyps, sea-anemones, and jelly-fish, though we frequently find that there are distinct males and females, there is no courtship. This is connected with the fact that, like plants, they are (excepting the jelly-fish) fixed and immobile. The male cannot " court " the female, because neither of them can approach the other. I once saw in the aquarium at Naples a sudden and simultaneous discharge of a white cloud, like dust, into the water from half the magnificent sea-anemones fixed and immobile in three large tanks. The cloud consisted of millions of the small " mating cells," and were thrown off by the males. They were carried far and wide by the stream running through the tanks. In the sea such a discharge would be carried along by currents, and might fertilize egg-bearing sea-anemones of the same species growing a mile or two away. It is when we have to do with actively moving animals that " courtship " comes into existence. It has COURTSHIP 187 many features and phases, which comprise simple dis- covery of the female and presentation of himself by the courting male ; attempts to secure the female's attention, and to fascinate and more or less hypnotize her, by display of brilliant colours or unusual and astonishing poses or movements (such as dancing) on the part of the male; efforts of the male to attach the female to himself, and deadly, often fatal, combats with other males, in order to drive them off and secure a recognized and respected soli- tude for himself and his mate. The courtship of many insects, crustaceans, molluscs, fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals has been watched and recorded in regard to these details. Naturally enough, it is in the higher forms, the birds and the mammals, that there are the most elaborate and intelligible proceedings in regard to the attraction of the female. But when we compare what birds or, in fact, any animal, does with what man does, we must remember that man has, as compared with them, an immense memory, and has also consciousness. All other animals are to a very large extent mere automata, pleasurably conscious, perhaps (in the higher forms), of the passing moment and of the actions which they are instinctively performing, but without any understanding or thought on the subject. They cannot think because, though some of them are endowed to a limited extent with memory, they have not arrived at the human stage of mental development when consciousness takes account of memory, a memory of enormously increased variety and duration: Man has more and more, as he has advanced in mental growth, rejected the unreasoning instinctive classes of action, and substituted for them action based on his own experience and conscious memory, action which is the result of education not the education of 1 88 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST the school, but that of life in all its variety. But in many things he is still entirely guided by unreasoning mechanical instinct, and in others he is partly impelled by the old inherited instinct, partly restrained and guided by reason based on experience and memory. This makes the comparison of the courting man with the courting animal doubly interesting. We ought to distinguish what he is doing as a result of ancient inherited mechanism from what he is doing as a result of conscious observation, memory, and reasoning. CHAPTER XXI COURTSHIP IN ANIMALS AND MAN THE German poet Schiller arrived long ago at the conclusion that the machinery of the world is driven by hunger and by love. If we join with hunger, which is the craving of the individual for nourishment, the activities which aim at self-defence, whether against competitors for food, against would-be devourers, or against dangers to life and limb, from storm, flood, and temperature, we may accept Schiller's statement as equivalent to this, namely, that the activities and the mechanisms of living things are related to two great ends the preservation of the individual and the preservation of the race. " Love," or what we should call in more discriminating language " amorousness," or the " mating hunger," is the absolute and inherent attribute of living things upon which the preservation of the race depends. The pre- servation of the individual is of less importance in the scheme of Nature than the preservation of the race, and we find that food-hunger and the risk of dangers of all kinds to the continuance of an individual life are made of no account when satisfaction of mate-hunger and the preservation and perpetuation of the race requires the sacrifice or the shortening of the life, or the permanent distortion or self-immolation of the individual. Eccentric behaviour and strange exaggeration of form and colour, as judged by the standard of preservation of the in- 189 190 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST dividual, are found to be explained as due to structures (nervous or other) implanted in the race by natural selection, because, and in consequence of, the fact that they tend to the satisfaction of mate-hunger, and conse- quently to the preservation of the race. The fact that the male animal seeks out the female in order to mate with her leads to a competition amongst males in " courtship," both in man and in the higher and lower grades of the animal series. " Court- ship " comprises many procedures. Among them are the seizing and sometimes carrying off of the female by the mate-seeking male ; or else the attraction of the attention of the female by the male, and her subsequent fascination by him, followed by her responsive excitement and assent to union. Fighting, often to the death, between rival suitors not unfrequently occurs. Any animal practising the first of these arts of courtship must have developed greater strength and size than the female, and special claws or jaws or prehensile limbs which will become emphasized and increased in size by the success of the better-endowed males, and their consequent " natural selection " as parents. This elementary and violent form of courtship is found in primitive man, and is inferred to exist amongst the higher apes. It is also seen in many mammals, and in frogs and toads, and in some of the Crustacea and insects which are provided with powerful claws, jaws, or limbs. The second set of " courtship " activities mentioned above, which are of a persuasive (often hypnotic) and non-violent nature, are more widely distributed and varied. They include a number which come under the general head of " display," whether the appeal be by COURTSHIP IN ANIMALS AND MAN 191 sound (the voice), by odour, or by strange antics and gorgeous colour. They involve the production of the most remarkable special structures ; and by their appeal to the human sense of hearing, smell, and sight are in many cases well known and familiar to us. Following upon " display " are what may be classed as " caresses " attempts to soothe and to subjugate the female by the sense of touch. The third kind of activity developed in " courtship " is that of fighting fighting to the death with other suitors. It involves the production of all those natural weapons, horns, tusks, and special claws or spurs with which male animals fight one another at the breeding season. It also involves that perfection of muscular strength, rapidity, and skill in action which have enabled one male to triumph over others, and whilst destroying or banishing his less perfect opponent to transmit his own superior qualities to his offspring. It seems that to this incessantly recurring and relentless struggle between males, in courtship for the favour of the female, more rapid and important changes and developments of animal structure and endowments are due than to the more obvious competition for food, safety. from enemies, and shelter. Thus muscular power, grasping and ag- gressive weapons, wonderful colours, forms and patterns which catch the eye, perfumes and powers of song and arresting cries, instinctive antics and caresses, have been developed in the males and transmitted to some extent to both sexes, but predominantly to the males. Mr. Pycraft, in his book on this subject, 1 remarks that the tremendous power of " mate-hunger " has been overlooked by a strange confusion of cause and effect 1 "The Courtship of Animals," Hutchinson, 1913. 192 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST Almost universally its sequel, the production of offspring has been regarded as the dominant instinct in the higher animals, but this view has no foundation in fact. Desire, for the sake of the pleasure which its gratification affords, and not its consequences, is the only hold on life which any race possesses. And this is true both in the case of man himself and of the beasts that perish. Those whose business it is, for one reason or another, to study these emotions, know well that " mate-hunger " may be as ravenous as food-hunger, and that, with some excep- tions, it is immensely more insistent in the males than in the females. But for this appetite, reproduction in many species could not take place, for the sexes often live far apart, and mates are only to be won after desperate conflict with powerful rivals no less inflamed. It is idle to speak of an equality between the sexes in this matter, either in regard to animals or in the human race. The male is dominated by the desire to gratify the sexual appetite ; in the female this is modified by the stimulation of other instincts concerned with the care of offspring. Amorousness is the underlying factor which has shaped and is sustaining human society, and is no less powerful among the lower animals. Much that is considered contrary to human nature, and either out- rageous or ridiculous, would be understood and wisely dealt with if knowledge of nature, including man's nature, were cultivated, and took the place of vain assertions as to " what should be," accompanied by ignorance of" what is." An excellent sample of the more violent method of " courtship by seizure " is found in the proceedings of the northern fur-seal as described by Mr. Pycraft. The old bulls, after spending the greater part of the year in the open sea, arrive at the rocks which serve as the breeding grounds a full month before the cows arrive. The COURTSHIP IN ANIMALS AND MAN 193 younger bulls attempt, but fail, to get a place on the rocks. The bull holding the most advantageous place the nearest to the landing-place starts the collecting of cows. Having seized the first arrival, he places her by his side. As the later females arrive he proceeds in the same way. He soon has " herded " more cows than he can control. He cannot be in two places at once, and in scuttling off to chastise some covetous neighbour who is eloping with one of his wives, one or more bulls on the opposite side of his harem proceed to make captures from his horde. This sort of thing goes on till all the cows have been appropriated, according to the herding and holding capacities of the bulls, leaving a crowd of envious bachelors in the background not strong enough or courageous enough to fight. Each bull is master of the situation, whether his harem consists of five cows or fifty. If a cow is restless he growls at her. If she tries to escape he fiercely bites her, and if she tries to outrun him he seizes her by the skin of the neck and tosses her back, often torn and bleeding, into the family circle. Sometimes a cow is killed by the struggle of two bulls to pull her in opposite directions, and in this way the more querulous and discontented cows are eliminated in each generation, and the peculiarly gentle and passive nature characteristic of the cow seals has been developed. For three long months the bull seal has to keep watch and ward fasting. This is a most exceptional strain and effort, for in other animals fasting is associated with absolute rest and sleep. The bull fur-seal arrives at the breeding ground fat and in fine condition ; he leaves it, though triumphant, a starved and battered wreck. The more agreeable arts of courtship are exhibited by birds in greatest variety and in more familiar examples than in any other animals. The use of odours 194 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST secreted by special glands as attractions to the females is frequent in the mammals such as the musk-deer, the musk-rat, the civet, and many common hoofed animals, such as deer, antelopes, goats, and sheep but has not been noticed in birds, though known in butter- flies and moths. It is in the use of the voice in singing and in the special display of gorgeous plumage, grown, so to speak, for the purpose at the breeding season, and in strutting, fantastic posturing, and in dancing that the male bird excels. Not all birds do all these things, and female birds do none of them as a rule. I must break off for a moment here to warn the reader that whilst we find it difficult not to speak of these activities of the male bird and male animals generally in the same terms as we speak of such behaviours in human beings, there is yet a fundamental difference between the two cases which is apt to be lost sight of in consequence of the language used. When the musk-deer and other mammals attract the female by a scent, they have no consciousness or understanding of what they are doing. They do not as a matter of thought and intention produce their perfume any more than the birds produce their gay breeding plumage by "taking thought," or the stag his great antlers or the boar his tusks. Man is, on the contrary, in these matters, as in many others, ill-provided with natural automatically-growing mechanisms of life-saving or race- perpetuating importance. Though the behaviour of man in courtship is singularly like that of many animals, he has not inherited an automatically-produced bundle of charms to allure the other sex. He has had to think the matter out and consciously and deliberately to " make " or procure from external sources both perfumes and coloured decorations and arresting (often absurd and COURTSHIP IN ANIMALS AND MAN 195 astounding) " costumes." The males of the most savage and primitive races of men are like the bigger apes, devoid of natural " charms " ; they do not allure by sweet odours, by brilliant colours, nor by caressing musical voices. They have not these possessions as natural growths of their own bodies, and they have not yet learned probably not yet desired to " make " or to " procure " them. There is consequently a great gulf in kind between many of the details of animal and human courtship. We have no knowledge of how the extinct creatures between ape and man stood in this respect. In the matter of forcible seizure the conduct of the primitive man is on precisely the same footing as that of the fur-seal. As to when he began to learn from the birds and to do consciously what they do unconsciously no one knows. In regard to the fighting with other males man appears at a very early period to have given up the use of his natural weapons, the teeth, and to have discovered the greater utility of sharp stones and heavy clubs, and thus to have again placed himself apart from male animals, which depend on and develop automatically their tusks, horns, and claws in conse- quence of their value in fighting. The great interest of the jaw of the man-like Eoanthropus from Piltdown is that it was still fitted with a large canine tooth like that of a gorilla, big enough to be useful in a fight with another Piltdowner (see p. 287). But it dwindled, and in the course of time very early man-like extinct creatures were developed who had ceased to have big canines. They made use of chipped flints instead. This substitution by man of " extraneous " weapons, decorations, and alluring appeals to the senses in place of those " intrinsic " to the animal body is all the more 196 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST interesting, since we find that such substitution is already made by a number of birds, as, for instance, the magpie and the jackdaw, who collect all sorts of bright objects. The allied bower-bird of Australia makes a " play-run " or reception-room in which he places shells and bits of bone to attract the female, and the gardener bird of New Guinea clears a space in the scrub, roughly fences it and decorates it daily with bright-coloured flowers and mushrooms, freshly gathered and placed there by him, as any human bachelor may decorate his sitting-room for the delectation of his lady friends ! It is a very noteworthy fact that these birds, which use extraneous decorative objects as lures, are them- selves of dull plumage, but are allied to the wonderful group of Birds of Paradise, which show the greatest variety and brilliance of intrinsic decorative plumage known among birds. The love of brilliant decoration is equally keen in both groups, and is gratified in the one case by the use of extrinsic objects, in the other by the growth of intrinsic plumage. It appears that that strangely anthropoid bird the penguin or rather one species of penguin, familiar to Captain Scott and his companions in the Antarctic, has a similar habit of using an extrane- ous object as a gift or, shall we say, an excuse for an introduction when courting. The male penguin is shown in Mr. Poynting's wonderful cinema films of the Antarctic, picking up a well-shaped stone of some size and ad- vancing with it in his beak to the lady penguin whom he has selected for his addresses. He places the stone at her feet, and retires a pace or two watching her. It is as though he said, " I am ready to build for you a first-class nest ; best stones only used, of which this is a sample." If he is fortunate she looks at the stone and then at him, and without a word waddles to his side. Without more ado she accepts his proposal, and the work of construct- ing the stone-built nest is rapidly pushed on. CHAPTER XXII COURTSHIP AND DISPLAY THE "displays" made by male birds and by some other animals which lead to the " fascination " of the females, and apparently to a condition similar to that which is called " hypnotic " in man, are very remark- able. One is tempted to say that these " displays " are made " for the purpose " of fascinating the female. But though that would be correct in describing similar pro- ceedings on the part of a human " gallant," it is not strictly so in the case of animals, any more than it is true that a bird grows its fine plumage " for the purpose " of attracting the female. The male bird finds itself provided with fine feathers, and has probably a brief conscious pleasure in the fact, just as it has in singing, but it has, of course, no control over the growth of its feathers, nor conscious purpose in their production. Similarly, it has no knowledge or consciousness of a purpose in the antics of " display," nor in singing its melodious song, though certainly it is gratified, and has pleasurable sensations in the instinctive performances which it finds itself going through. The great French entomologist, Fabre, who has more minutely and thoroughly than any other naturalist studied the wonder- ful proceedings of insects in regard to these matters and others, such as nest building, care and provision for young, deliberately says, " Us ne savent rien de rien " 198 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST they know nothing about anything ! And that is true with only small exception about even the highest animals until we come to man. Some of the higher animals have a brief and fleeting " consciousness " of what they are doing, and some of the hairy quadrupeds nearest to man have the power of "recollecting"; that is to say, have in a small degree conscious memory, and actually do reason and make use of their memory of their own individual experience to a very small and limited degree. It is only in man that the power of reasoning the conscious use of memory, of deciding on this or that course of action by a conscious appeal to the record of the individual's experience inscribed in the substance of the brain becomes a regular and constant procedure. And in the lowest races of man as, for instance, the Australian " black fellows " this power is much less developed than in higher races, owing to the feebleness of their memory. Just as a little child or an old man recognizes the fact that his memory is bad, so does the Australian native confess to the white man that he cannot remember, and marvels at the memory of the white man, who, he says, can see both what is behind and what is to come. " Displays " are often made by birds which have no very brilliant colours. The ruff a bird of agreeable but sombre plumage spreads out a ruff of feathers which grows round his neck in the breeding season and stands in a prominent position alone on the open ground with his head facing downwards and his long beak nearly touching the ground. These birds are to be seen behaving in this way at the Zoological Gardens in London. When thus posed they have a comical appearance of being absorbed in profound thought. COURTSHIP AND DISPLAY 199 Suddenly, after posing for perhaps ten minutes or more immovably in this attitude, the ruff starts into life, running in a wide circle and spreading his wings, and then as suddenly relapses into his pose, with downcast eyes and beak touching the ground. This, it appears, is all a challenge to any other ruff who ventures near him, and often results in a fight with another individual who is offended by his "swagger" and attacks him. It also is an invitation and attraction to the female or " reeve " who is on the look out for a mate. The display of the bustard, though his feathers are only light brown and white, is a very strange and arresting performance. In ordinary circumstances his feathers are nicely smoothed down, and he looks neat and fit. But at the breeding season he behaves like Malvolio when he wore cross-garters to please his lady. He approaches two or three females who are quietly feeding, and throwing his head back and his chest forward, swelling his neck out with inspired air and reflecting his tail feathers inside out (so to speak) over his back, he makes the most extraordinary havoc of his previously neat costume. The feathers are made to stanq! up and reflected backwards in groups, and show their underlying white surfaces round the head, on the chest, and on the wings and back, so that he suggests the appearance of a portly old gentleman, in full evening dress, the worse for liquor, his high collar unbuttoned and flapping, his short " front " bulging and loose, whilst he maintains all the time a pompous and dignified pose strangely inconsistent with his disordered costume and hesitating gait. As he struts and poses the lady bustards, though intensely interested in his strange behaviour, make no sign, and continue pecking for food, as who should say with Beatrice, " I wonder 200 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick : nobody marks you." After enduring this snubbing on several occasions and doggedly continuing to display his antics, the persistent bustard reaps his reward. One among the dissembling females can no longer keep up the pretence of indifference, and suddenly runs off, inviting him to follow her ! The same general scheme of play is seen in the case of the peacock, who spreads his magnificent " train " around his head and neck (not to be confused with his tail, as it often is) ; in the case of the turkey, bubblyjock, or gobble-cock, who struts and shows off his coloured wattles and fine feathers ; in that of the domestic fowl, who raises his head and neck, crows, and has a pretty trick of scraping the ground with his wing. Many other birds perform special antics suited to the display of their special plumage. Among the most varied and remarkable are those of the Birds of Paradise, which drop through the air, hang upside down on tree twigs, and pose themselves variously (often warbling the while seductive notes) according to the particular beauties which distinguish each species. Cranes and some other birds dance in groups at the mating season really dance, making steps and jumps with the legs and movements of the wings in rhythm. Reptiles do only a little in the way of display. The male newt gets a crest in the spring like the wanton lapwing of Tennyson, and a splendid orange-red colour on the belly. Male fishes often develop " display " colours at the breeding season, and it is a mistake to suppose that their eyes and brains are not sensitive to colour. We have a familiar instance in the male of our common little stickleback, who, in early summer, builds, in his native pond, his nest of fragments of weed cemented together, with a wide entrance and a COURTSHIP AND DISPLAY 201 back door. He then becomes brilliant blood-red on the belly (he was white before) and dark green on the back, and swims about near the nest, and has an occasional fight with a competitive neighbour, whilst hustling and shepherding any female stickleback he may meet so as to make her enter it. She enters it alone, and lays an egg, or, perhaps, two or three, and then goes out by the back-door ! The male, well pleased, at once goes into the nest, fertilizes the eggs, and swims out again to get another contribution to his future family. After several females have thus deposited eggs in his nest, and he has fertilized them, he keeps guard for many days whilst the young are developing. Even when they are hatched he is in constant attendance on them, for there is danger of their being eaten not by other males, who are as busy as he is, but by the emancipated females, who neither build the nest nor care for the young, but just lay an egg here and an egg there when invited, and pursue a selfish life of amusement and voracious feeding. It is still doubtful how far male insects of the true six-legged group appeal to the females by colour- display, even when they are brightly coloured, or in other ways than by perfumes (which they do very generally), but among the spiders there are some kinds (not common ones) in which the males have on the front of the body one or two extraordinarily brilliant spots of colour (red, apple-green, or yellow). The male moves round the female in courtship, and poses himself in most curious attitudes, so as to exhibit the brilliant colour to her ; forcing it, as it were, on her attention. In other species of spiders the male dances and circles round the female, making curious and definite antics. Some spiders also have rasp-like organs, with 202 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST which they can make a kind of singing note, which appears to fascinate the other sex. The vibration of a tuning- fork will cause some spiders to dance ! In most spiders the female is much larger than the male in some cases, ten times as large and the approach of the male to the female is a dangerous business for him, for usually after his embrace she turns on him, kills him, and eats him. This is almost a unique case amongst animals (though ancient legends tell of princesses of similar ferocity), and curiously enough is not invariable among all species of spider. In some the males and females are quite friendly. The ogre-like habit of female spiders is not so injurious a thing as it may appear. For the most nourishing food is thus afforded to the female who has to ripen her eggs, and take care of her young, whilst, if the male escapes, it appears that he is short-lived and very soon dies. This cannibal tendency is very strongly developed also in the allied group, the scorpions. Two hundred scorpions were left in a cage in the South of France, whilst the naturalist (Maupertuis) who had placed them there was obliged to go to Paris, On his return he found one large, very plump and active scorpion in the box, surrounded by legs and hard bits of the bodies of the rest. The survivor was in the position of Gilbert's ancient mariner, who said that he was " the cook and the mate, and the captain's boy and the crew of the Nancy Belli* Scorpions do not perform any courtship display. The males and females are of equal size, and dance together, holding one another by their large claws, before mating and retiring into a burrow. Cuttle-fishes, squids, and the octopus called Cephalo- pods were considered by Aristotle to be the spiders of the sea. It is curious how they not only have a super- COURTSHIP AND DISPLAY 203 ficial resemblance of form to spiders, but in some habits are like them, though the Cephalopods are molluscs allied to snails and mussels, and are quite unlike spiders in deeper structure and remote from the whole group of hard-skinned, jointed-legged animals such as crustaceans, spiders, and insects. I once had the chance to see a male octopus " displaying " to a female in one of the tanks of the aquarium at Naples. There were a male and a female already living there when we introduced from another tank a second male, which had just destroyed and fed upon a large lobster, who had him- self, with no evil purpose, crushed the head of a Mediterranean turtle foolishly placed by that animal between the open fingers of the lobster's big nippers. The new arrival promptly drove the earlier tenant octopus out of the tank. He pursued his rival round and round with great rapidity until the latter leapt from the surface of the water (by a violent contraction of the mantle) and escaped into the adjacent tank. Then the triumphant intruder approached the female floods of changing colour, reddish-brown, purple, and yellow, passing over the surface of his body and com- menced an extraordinary display with his eight long sucker-bearing arms. He made these wind into close- set flat spirals and again unwind and gracefully trail in the water, when they immediately wound up again in spiral coils. The female watched this proceeding for more than an hour, and then they embraced. I could not follow any further details, but a few days after this the female piled up a number of stones, so as to make a nest in shape like a shallow basin. We enticed the male into a net and placed him in another tank, so that he should not be able to molest the female or to devour her offspring, which he would do if he had the chance. Then the female laid her eggs minute oval, transparent 204 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST bodies, each with a long stalk and all joined on to a common branching stem : the whole resembled a head of millet seed. The female tended her eggs by continually pumping a stream of water over them, and could not be driven from them. She fought savagely and heroically in their defence. But I succeeded in enticing her into a net by aid of a toothsome crab, and then took a few only a few of the cherished eggs, and replaced their mother in the tank, where she at once resumed the " incubation " of her eggs. For it is an " incubation," although one in which oxygenated water, and not warmth, is the accom- paniment of the sitting of the " hen." I was able to watch the development of the young within the trans- parent eggs, which I kept in a stream of fresh sea- water, and I published a short account of what was novel in the growth of these embryos. It had not been studied previously, nor have I seen any later account of the development of octopus. The true cuttle-fish, with the hard oblong shell sunk in the back, lays each egg in a dark leathery shell. They look like small grapes, and are left, thus protected, to their fate. They have been studied, both before I obtained octopus eggs and since, in great detail. The " squid " embeds her eggs, many together, in bunches of long fingers of colourless jelly. Only the octopus and the argonaut, among Cephalopods, are known to give maternal care and incubation to their eggs. CHAPTER XXIII COURTSHIP, INSTINCT AND REASON APART from the familiar instances of male colour- decoration afforded by birds, we find that even some of the minute water-fleas inhabiting freshwater lakes and the sea, and known as Crustacea Entomos- traca, put on a courting dress at the breeding season ; that is to say, the males become brilliantly coloured with patches of red and blue. And among the highest mammals we find that the same colours are, in some cases, displayed by the males as a fascination to the females. This is the case with the males of some of the baboons, though not with those of the highest man- like apes, who, like the primitive " savage " man, have no decoration, no pretty seductive ways appealing to either the eye or the ear, but rely on their strength and ferocity to overawe and paralyze the female. In the male " mandrill " baboon the skin of the sides of the great snout is of a deep blue colour, whilst the nose and a tract behind it is wax-like and bright red. Not only that, but the buttocks are brilliantly coloured, a central red area passing at the sides through rich purple to pale blue. The animal, which is often to be seen in menageries, is evidently proud of this finely-coloured region of his body, and turns it to a visitor and remains quietly posed, so that it may be well seen and duly admired. The hind-quarters of other monkeys, both 205 206 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST male and female, show a brilliant red colouring during the mating season, and the skin and hair of the face is variously coloured, so as to produce a decorative pattern (eyebrows, moustache, beard, nose, all strongly contrasted in colour) in the smaller monkeys, usually more strikingly in the males than in the females. A brilliant emerald- green patch of colour is shown in the hinder part of the body of the male in one species sometimes to be seen at Regent's Park. The making of sounds is a capacity possessed by many animals, small and big. Often it seems to have no particular significance, but, as in the case of the " humming " of bees and flies and the " droning " of beetles, is the necessary accompaniment of the vibration of the wings. But many animals make sounds as a " call," either to other individuals of their species, irrespec- tive of sex, or more definitely as signals and appeals to the other sex, just as the luminosity which happens to accompany certain necessary chemical activities in the bodies of the lower animals has become specialized and utilized in the glow-worm and other higher forms as a signal and appeal. The rubbing of rough surfaces against one another is developed into a " stridulating organ " which we find in crickets, locusts, scorpions, spiders, and even in marine Crustacea, and it is often specialized as a sexual appeal. The mere production of sound by tapping against wood is used by the little beetle, the death-watch, as a call, and is responded to by his mate with similar tapping. Such " tapping " is developed into a remarkable rhythmic vibrating sound by the birds called woodpeckers, and has its significance in courtship. But it is chiefly by the inspiration and expiration of air over vibrating cords or membranes called " vocal organs " that animals produce distinctive COURTSHIP, INSTINCT AND REASON 207 and musical sounds. In most cases such animals have a more general and simple " cry," which is not necessarily a sexual appeal, but addressed to comrades generally, and also a more elaborate cry or song which is primarily used by the male as an attraction in courtship, but has in the case of many birds been inherited from original male singers by the females also. The " singing " of birds apart from simpler cries and calls is a sexual address, an act of courtship. It is a display of power and capacity on the part of the male, and that such is its character is shown by the competition between male birds in the endeavour to " out-sing " one another. Some birds become extraordinarily excited in these competi- tions, which take the place of actual fighting, the victor who silences his opponents being the winner of the female bird, who is at hand listening to the competition. Caged chaffinches are celebrated for their eagerness to compete with one another in singing. They deliver their little song alternately until one is exhausted and unable to take up his turn. He is vanquished. So excited do the birds become that it occasionally happens that one of the competitors drops down dead. The beginning and directive causes of the particular song of different kinds of birds is not understood. But it is well known that they have a great gift of imitation. Parrots, piping crows, ravens, and other such birds are familiar instances, whilst little birds such "as bullfinches can be trained to whistle the melodies which human beings have invented. Even the house-sparrow, which, though allied to singing finches, never sings at all when in natural conditions, has been converted into a songster .by bringing it up in company with piping bullfinches. Other animals which cannot sing like the birds yet use their voices in courtship. The frogs and toads are 208 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST no mean performers in this way, whilst cats, deer, and other large animals are " singers," of a kind, when stirred by mate-hunger. The monkeys chatter and make various vocal sounds, but the gibbons and man-like apes produce excessively loud and penetrating cries. These cries, though sometimes of fine note and repeated rhythmically (as in the gibbons and chimpanzees), have not the character of song. The beginnings of song in mankind are lost in the mist of ages. The Australian black-fellows chant and dance with rhythmic precision and a certain kind of melancholy cadence, but they never attempt to fascinate the other sex by the use of the voice (nor, so far as is known, in any other way), and, indeed, there is a vast interval between their vocal per- formances and the love-songs of modern civilized races. Man has not inherited singing from his animal ancestry, but has re-invented it for himself. His real knowledge and command of " music " is actually a novelty which has sprung into existence within the last few hundred years. There is no doubt that animals ot the same species are attracted to one another by smell, and that distinct species have distinct smells. Further, there is no doubt that in many cases the special smell of either sex attracts the other. But modern man has so nearly lost the sense of smell why it is difficult to say, excepting that it is because it was not of life-saving value to him that it is very difficult for us to estimate properly the significance of perfumes and odours. We know that the dog has what to us seems a marvellous power of tracking and recognizing by smell, and that other animals appear to be similarly endowed, though most usually we cannot perceive the smell at all which they recognize and follow. It appears that nearly all the hairy quadrupeds have COURTSHIP, INSTINCT AND REASON 209 distinctive odours, which they and their companions can readily recognize, secreted by certain glands in the skin placed here and there on the body, often on the legs and toes. Some of these odours, like musk and civet, we can perceive, though most have no effect on us. It seems to be an evidence of the absence of any need for man to produce " perfumes " by the action of his own structure that he has a feeble sense of smell and has so little perception of any perfumes or odours peculiar to himself that he has when civilized always made use of odorous substances (perfumes and scents) extracted from other animals and from plants for the purpose, before the days of cleanliness, of masking the unpleasant odours of putrescence pervading his body and clothing. Later, when dirt became less common, he made use of perfumes for the purpose of giving an agreeable whiff to the olfactory organs of his associates. In insects, for instance in moths and butterflies, and no doubt in most if not all others, the sense of smell is astonishingly keen, and serves as the great guide and attraction in courtship and the appeasement of mate- hunger. A single female emperor moth was placed in a box covered with fine net in a room with an open window in a country house. In three hours a dozen males of this species had entered the room, but no other moths. In twenty-four hours there were over a hundred, all fluttering around the net-covered box in which was the female. In this and other similar experiments it was found that the odour of the female moth, though imperceptible to man, clung to the box after she was removed, and that, for some days following, the empty box was nearly as powerful an attraction to the males as when it contained the female. The antennae which carry the olfactory sense-organs are far larger in the 14 2io t)I VERSIONS OF A NATURALIST males than in the females, as is also the case in many other lower animals where smell is a guide to mating. A single female of the vapourer moth, which is common in the London squares and parks, has been found to attract when placed in a box in an open window in Gower Street a number of males from the neighbouring plantations ; and such is the penetrating and powerful character of these odorous substances produced by female moths that in one species, in which the female is wingless and lives under water, the odour escapes through the water and attracts the males in quantities to its surface. The females then arise from the depths, and, like mer- maids or the witch of the Rhine, draw the infatuated males beneath the water to love and death. In several butterflies it has been shown that the males produce sweet perfumes on the surface of the wings, which can be detected as such by man, and act as stimulants to the mate-hunger of the female butterflies, which follow the scented male in numbers. The sense of smell is thus seen to be a much more powerful guide in insects than might be supposed, and it is of equally great importance to them in other enterprises and activities of life besides those of courtship. It has also a leading importance in all the lower and lowermost animals, and is the ultimate guide (for smell and taste are not separable in such simple forms) of the motile spermatic filament in its journey to the egg cell. I have in the course of these notes on " Courtship " more than once stated that though man shares in common with all other animals the ultimate impulse to " courtship," namely, " mate-hunger," yet that it would be a mistake to suppose that he has mechanically in- herited from animal ancestors (as they do) those methods of attracting and endeavouring to fascinate the female, COURTSHIP, INSTINCT AND REASON 211 such as the use of gay costume, dancing and posing, beautiful singing, sweet perfume, and gentle caresses, which, at various phases of his development, he has practised. True, these methods are also practised by a variety of animals, but not by man's immediate ape-like ancestors. None of these means of courtship are in- herited instincts or structures in man as they are in animals. All have been arrived at and devised by man afresh, as the result of " taking thought." And in the latest advance of civilization some of them have been to a large extent either discarded or, curiously enough, handed over to the female sex. It is the woman now who endeavours to captivate the man by a display of brave colours, clothes, plumes, and jewellery, and by exquisite dancing and gesture. Not so long ago both sexes of man practised such display, but in earliest times only the male, the woman being allowed to sport a discarded rag or a broken old necklace if she were very satisfactory and submissive in her general conduct ! I must endeavour very briefly to explain how this contrast of " instinct ." with " thought, knowledge, reason, and will " must (as it seems to me) be regarded. There are three great steps in the gradual evolution of the mind. The first is the slow formation (by variation and survival of the fittest) of transmissible, and therefore inherited, mechanisms of the mind, which are of various degrees of complexity, and characterize different species and kinds of animals. These mechanisms act auto- matically like those of a " penny-in-the-slot machine," and are just as regularly present, and as much alike in all individuals of a species, as are the other inherited structures, such as bones, flesh, viscera, the skin and its coloured clothing of decorative feathers or hair. 212 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST Later, and added to these inherited mechanisms often interfering with them and putting an end to them are the mechanisms of the second step. These are mechanisms arising from individual experience ; they depend on memory the inscription on " the tablets of the mind," of the experience that this follows that. They control movement and action, usurping the privi- lege of the previously omnipotent inherited mechanisms or instincts. This second step in the development of mind requires an excessive quantity of brain-cells. It only makes its appearance at all in animals with large brains, and reaches a far greater development in man even than in the apes, his brain being from twice to three times the size of that of the largest living ape. This use of memory and individual experience instead of an inherited mechanism, which is the same in every member of the species is obviously a great advantage in the struggle for existence. There are traces of it in some of the cuttlefish and insects, but even in the fishes and reptiles among living vertebrates it is of small account, and the small brain carries on its work by good, sound, inherited mechanisms or instincts, but learns nothing, comprehends nothing ! In the birds we see a Httle a very little more capacity for " learning by individual experience," and it is only in the larger and later mammals that educability, or the power of learning by individual experience, becomes of serious importance. All the larger living mammals horse, cattle, sheep, rhinoceros, tapir have acquired an enormous increase in the size of their brains as much as six or eight times the volume of that of their extinct ancestors whose bones and brain cavities we find fossilized in the Tertiary strata. Man has by far the biggest brain of all these animals, and has a unique degree of educability, together with the fewest instincts or in-born hereditary mechan- COURTSHIP, INSTINCT AND REASON 213 isms among animals. He has practically to learn by individual experience and therefore in the form best suited to his individual requirements a host of most important actions and behaviours which even monkeys as well as dogs and sheep and horses never have to " learn," but proceed to put in practice as soon as they are born, or, at any rate, without any preliminary process of ex- periment and effort. Man is the one highly " educable " animal. In consequence of his large brain and its roomy memory he can be, and is even when a " savage " educated. Monkeys and dogs have only small " educability " as compared with man, though more than have reptiles or fishes. Man's mind is, therefore, in this essential feature different from that of animals. The modern mammals with brains as much as eight times the bulk of their early Tertiary ancestors have, it is true, acquired " educability " and the power of storing individual experience as " memory," but their memory is far less extensive than that of man, and though its guidance is of great value to them it acts entirely, or nearly so, without consciousness. No doubt man's brain includes some hereditary mechanisms, but in the main it distinctively consists of nerve-mechanisms, formed by his own individual education, acting on re- ceptive and specially educable brain matter. And the brain mechanism formed by education is of greater life- saving value than is that of the inherited instincts which meet general emergencies, but not those new and special to the individual. The third step in the development of mind is the arrival (for one can call it by no other term) of that condition which we call " consciousness " the power of saying to oneself " I am I," and of looking on as a detached existence not only at other existences but at one's own 2i 4 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST mental processes, feelings, and movements. With it comes thought, knowledge, reason, and will. We may speak of consciousness as invading or spreading gradually over the territory of mind. All the three steps of the growth of mind which I have distinguished can be seen following one on the other in the growth of a human child from infancy to adolescence. The second step the develop- ment of individual mechanisms due to memory is not in most animals, and not entirely in man, pervaded by or " within the area of " consciousness. Memory is at first " unconscious memory," and there still remains in man a capacity for forming " memory " which never (or in some matters only exceptionally) becomes illuminated by consciousness. Apparently the inherited mechanisms which we call " instincts " are never within the reach of consciousness, though, of course, the actions determined by them are. It is a difficult matter to decide how far the memory of apes, dogs, and such animals nearest to man is conscious memory. Probably very little. But it is only when memory, as well as the impression of the moment, is pervaded by consciousness that reflection, and reason and action dependent on reason, are possible. 1 Hence it is that man in all the procedure of courtship stands apart from animals. Even the Australian has not only an educable brain, but a more or less conscious memory. He seems to be permanently, in this respect, in the condition of an ordinary European child of about five years old. Gradually in the course of the develop- ment, both of increased educability and of more and more efficient and serviceable education, man has first aban- doned by slow degrees his violent ancestral methods of procuring a mate, and has, as the result of observation, 1 I have alluded to this subject again, necessarily with some repetition in the chapter on "The Mind of Apes and of Man," p. 262. COURTSHIP, INSTINCT AND REASON 215 reflection, and conscious reasoning, taken to courtship by persuasion and fascination, similar to that of the birds and other remote creatures, retaining, however, for a long period his habit of fighting with other males to establish his claim to the woman of his choice. And at last, in his later development in civilized lands, he has abandoned the more obvious arts of courtship and has taken to decorating his womankind instead of himself. He has made woman take over the habit of courtship by the fascination of colour and pose whilst he looks on in sombre clothing with thoughtful reserve. He does not any longer even rely on his strength or skill in righting in order to scatter his rivals, but makes appeal by word to the sympathy of the desired mate and trusts to the fascination which the power, given either by superior in- tellectual quality or by accumulated wealth, have for her. CHAPTER XXIV DADDY-LONG-LEGS IN early September, golf links and other such grass- lands swarm with a large gnat-like fly of reddish- brown body, feeble flight, and long, straggling legs. These flies are generally called " Daddy-Long- Legs," or, by the more learned, " Crane-flies." I find that they are sometimes confused with another fly of about the same size with bright reddish-brown body, which is very much less abundant and occasionally flutters around the lamps and candles in a country house when the windows are open in the evening. This second kind of fly has a formidable black-coloured sting, which it shoots out from the end of its tail when handled ; it has also two pairs of wings, and is an Ichneumon-fly, one of the Hymenop- tera, the order of insects to which bees, wasps, ants, and gall-flies belong. Our daddy-long-legs has no sting, though the female has a sharply pointed tail. It has only one pair of wings, and belongs to the order Diptera, or tway-wing flies, in which our house-fly and bluebottle, horse-flies, tsetse-flies, gnats, and midges of vast number and variety are classified. They none of them have tail " stings," though the tail may be elongated and pointed. Though the two-winged flies or Diptera have only two wings well grown and of full size, the second or hinder pair of wings which other insects possess of full 216 DADDY-LONG-LEGS 217 size, are present in them in a very much dwindled condi- tion. Since most of our common flies are very small it is A, The Crane-fly (Daddy-Long-Legs), Tipula olefacea. 96, 97 Jelly-fishes which sting, 95 Juniper, the, 308, 330 Junipers, 330 Kauri resin, similar to amber, 73 Kowalewsky, the Russian zoologist, ii Labouchere, Mr. Henry, his view on food, 293 Lacteals, or milky lymphatic vessels, 333 Lampyris noctiluca, the common glow- worm, 233 Lancelet, the, 2 Langouste, 99 Larch tree, the common, 307, 319 Laughter in apes, 241 Leather-jackets, the grubs of the Crane-fly, 221 Lebanon, cedar of, 320 Lepas anatifera, the ship's barnacle, 109 Leprosy and fish-diet, 357 favoured by same conditions as scurvy, 296 Lervik (Norway), 3 Lights, nocturnal, attract insects and birds, 230, 232 Lily of St. Bruno, 166 Limpet and cockle compared, 146, 148 Lizard, the parachute, is the model upon which the heraldic dragon is founded, 382 Lobsters, 99, loo Loch Fyne herrings, their food, 155 Longevity of a sea-anemone, 86 Lophohelia, 9 Luciola italica, the fire-fly of South Europe, 233 Luges, or mountain sledges, 167 Lug-worm, 79 Luminous bacteria, 158 grub of Paraguay called the railway - beetle, 234 or luminescent insects, 232 Lyell, Mr., his Bill for the preserva- tion of the Great Grey Seal, 32, 34 Sir Charles, used the term " missing link," 276 Lymph, amount of, in man's body, j 333, 34? and lymphatic system, 332 et seg. Lymphatic vessels of the human arm (figure), 334 Lymph-hearts, 337 Magi, the priests of Zoroaster, 368 Magic, history of, 369, 370 sympathetic, 369 Male, the seeker and wooer, 185, 190 Man, his conscious memory, 187 primitive, courtship of, 195 Mandrill, beautiful colours of the, 205 Man's modern method of courtship, 215 structure compared with that of the gorilla and chimpanzee, 239, 240, 241 Manu, the Indian Noah, 353 Mare, Lord Morton's, 400 Mares not infected by sire, 399-400, 401 Mastodon, fragments of teeth of, found with the Piltdown jaw, 289 Mate-hunger, Mr. Pycraft on, 191, 192 Maternal impressions, 396 et seq. Max Miiller, Professor, his suggestion as to the origin of the belief that barnacles give rise to geese, 139-141 May-flies or Ephemerids, 230 some are phosphorescent or lumin- escent, like glow-worms, 231 Mechanisms of instinct, inherited, 268, 269 of the mind, distinguished, 211, 212 Medicines, quack, and credulity, 366 422 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST Memory essential to consciousness, 264 unconscious, 266 unconscious and conscious, distin- guished, 212, 214 Mendes, Catulle, the French poet, and jelly-fish, 97 Metchnikoff on disharmonies, 367 Midge (Chironomus), its grub has red blood, 346 Midges, large kind of, 223 Milk and infantile scurvy, 296 Pasteurized, 300 supply of pure, 292 et seq. Millais, Sir Everett, on telegony, 400 Millionaire and sodium in the sun, 378 Milton the poet, his belief in spon- taneous generation, 126 Mind, the, of apes and of man, 262 et seq. of man differs from that of animals, 213 Missing link, the, 275 et seq. Molluscs, alternate swelling of and shrinking of parts of the body, 149 and their shells, 142 et seq. Monboddo, Lord, his views on man and apes, 276 Monkey-puzzle or Araucarian pine, 329 Moray, Sir Robert, on the transforma- tion of the ship's barnacle into a goose, 115, 127 Moth, the, and the candle, 226 et seq. vapourer, male pursues female living in water and is drowned, 210 Mules, 399 Muller, Iwan, and the microscope, 28 Murray, Sir John, at Millport, 155 Muscles of apes and men, 247 Music a late acquisition of man, 208 Mussel, the edible, 145 Name-gods or totems of ancient Greeks, 356 Naples, 2, 52, 203 Naturalist on the seashore, 25 Nature reserves, 13 Nature-worship, the ancient, 352 Nauplius, the young form or larva of crustaceans, 105, 106, 107 Neander or Moustierian man, 280 Necromancy, or communication with the dead, 371 Needles of firs and pine trees, 303, 315 of pine-trees in tufts of one to five, 321 Nero, the Roman Emperor, and amber, 71 " Nigromantia " and the black art, 371 Nobel prizes, 412 Normand, Rev. Canon, 3 Norway, I Noverre, "the Shakespeare of the dance," 176 " Nullius in verba," the motto of the Royal Society, 128, 362, 407 Nutrition, not so simple a matter as supposed, 293 Occultism, modern, 363 Octopus, courtship of the, 203 Odours as attractions and guides in courtship, 209 Opal, 57 Orchestia, a sand-hopper, 153 Orpheus, the fish-god, substituted for Dionysus, the wine-god, 355 the warden of the fishes, a fish- god, 355 Ovules and sperms, 181 Oxygen carried by the red corpuscles of blood, 347 Oysters growing on trees, 145 Palmistry or chiromancy, 372, 373 Paradisia liliastrum, 166 Pasteur, the Institut, a great seat of discovery, 416 what he cost to France, 415 Pavlova, Madame Anna, 169, 178 Pebbles of the seashore, 55-63 Penguins, method of courtship of, 196 Pentargon Cove and a young Grey Seal, 35, 40 Perfumes produced by male butter- flies, 210 use of, by man, 209 Phagocytes, 336, 349 Phonograph and chants of Australian natives, 31 Phosphorescence of the sea, 153 Phosphorescent insects, 232 sand-hoppers, 156 shrimps, 154, 155 INDEX 423 Photo-taxis or light guidance, 235 Picea, the genus of the Spruce or Christmas tree, 317 Pierre-^- voir, 167 Piltdown jaw, age of the, 289 jaw and Heidelberg jaw compared, 286 jaw, as reconstructed by Dr. Smith Woodward, 288 skull and jaw, Pine, origin of the word, 304 Aleppo, 322 Arolla (Pinus cembra), 328 Bhotan (Pinus excelsa), 329 Californian prickly, 320 cluster, or Pinaster, 322 Corsican or Austrian, 322 Monterey, or Pinus insignis, at Bournemouth, 324 Montezuma of Mexico, 329 Pyrensean or Calabrian, 322 stone, or parasol pine, 323 trees and other conifers, 302 et seq. umbrella, of Japan, 330 Weymouth (Pinus strobus), 328 Pipe-fish, 75 Pollen of pine trees carried by wind, 304 Ponds as nature-reserves, 27 Prawns, 99 Primates, apes and bats, 238 Proteids, special, necessary in food, 297 Pseudotsuga, the Douglas fir, 327 Ptarmigan, 45 Ptomaines of putrid fish, 357 Puteoli, near Naples, 52 Quartz, 57 crystals, rubbed together produce flame, 67 Raised beaches, 52 Rats, experiments on feeding young, 294 Razor -fish, 80 Reasoning, the origin of false as well as of true beliefs, 367 Record, the Great, the peculiar posses- sion of humanity, 271 Redi, Italian naturalist, on the generation of maggots by eggs laid by flies, 126 Regeneration of legs and tails, 218, 219 Religion and magic, one in origin, 369 Reproduction, mechanism of, 181 Research, scientific, a delicate plant, 411 how to help it by money, 413 various attempts at promoting, 411 Reserves for native fauna in various countries, 19 Rhabdopleura, 4, 5, 6, 7 Rice, polished, and berri-berri, 297 Rings of the body of crab, lobster, and prawn, 104 Rock-pools, 25, 8 1 Roman road, submerged, near Naples, 5 2 Royal Society, its influence on superstition, 361 its motto, 128, 362, 407 the method of its founders, 362 Ruff, the display in courtship of the, St. Swithin's Day, belief about, ex- ploded, 406 Sagartia troglodytes, a beautiful sea- anemone, 85, 88 Samland, where amber is mined, Jo Sand, dry, shrinks when wetted, 64 of the seashore, 65 size and shape of its grains, 62 Sand-eels, 79 Sand-hoppers, 152 disease of, 156, 157 Sardines, 360 Savin, a kind of juniper, 308 Scavengers, phagocytes as, 349 Schliemann's great experiment, 406 Schynige Platte, view from the, 160 Sciadopitys, the Japanese umbrella pine, 330 Science and the unknown, 361 et seq. Scientific discovery aided by money, 408 et seq. Scorpions, cannibalism of, 202 Scots fir, 305, 312 Scurvy, infantile, described by Sir Thomas Barlow, 296 nature of that disease, 295 Sea-anemones, 81, 84, 85, 86 Seal, the Great Grey, 32 et seq. the northern fur-seal, courtship of, 192, 193 Sea-shells, 142 424 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST Seashore as nature-reserve, 24 constituents of, 48, 55 Sea-worms, 78, 79 Seeds, winged, of fir trees, 317 Sequoia, the Big- tree and the Red- wood, 329 Shakespear and barnacles, 120 Shells of molluscs, 142 Singing competitions of male birds, 207 Skeleton of apes and man, 245 et seq. Skull and jaw found at Piltdown, 277, 290 Smell, the sense of, in man and animals, 208, 209 Smithson, founder of the Smithsonian Institute, 409 Snail, pond-, with red blood, 346 Soap- wort, 167 Soho, old house in, 14 Song, the beginnings of, in man, 208 Sounds as attractions in courtship, 206 Space, extreme cold of, not fatal to life, 159 Spencer, Professor Baldwin, shows bioscope pictures of Australian % natives, 30 Sperms and ovules, 181 Spider's courtship and dance, 201 Sprats fraudulently sold as Anchovies and as Sardines, 360 Spruce introduced to Britain by man, 37 or Norway pine, 306, 317 Stickleback's nest and courtship, 200, 201 Stordo (Lervik), 3 Strieker of Vienna, the microscopist, 336 Succinite, correct name for amber, 75 Survival value of colour in flowers, 168 Switzerland, 160 et seq. Synapta, and anchors in its skin, 80 Tail of man, a disharmony, 228 Talitrus, a sand-hopper, 153 Taxodince, a group of fir trees, 329 Teeth of apes and of man, 248, 249 of extinct animals on the seashore, 59 wisdom, as disharmonies, 228 Telegony described, 399 Tetraonida?, the grouse family, 44 Thoracic duct, the, 334 Thumb of apes and of man compaied, 243 Thuya, the Arbor vitse, 330 Tipula oleracea, the Crane-fly or Daddy-Long-Legs, 216 et seq. Toads found living in stone, 376 et seq. 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WAR WEDDING, THE. C. N. and A. M. Williamson. WARE CASE, THE. George Pleydell. WAY HOME, THE. Basil King. WAY OF THESE WOMEN, THE. E. Phillips Oppenheim. WEAVER OF DREAMS, A. Myrtle Reed. WEAVER OF WEBS, A. John Oxenham. WEDDING DAY, THE. C. N. and A. M. Williamson. WHITE FANG. Jack London. WILD OLIVE, THE. Basil King. WILLIAM, BY THE GRACE OF GOD. Marjorie Bowen. WOMAN WITH THE FAN, THE. Robert Hichens. WO 2 . Maurice Drake. WONDER OF LOVE, THE. E. Maria Albanesi. YELLOW CLAW, THE. Sax Rohmer. YBLLOW DIAMOND, THE. Adeline Sergeant. Methuen's One and Threepenny Novels Fcap. Svo. is. $d. net BARBARA RESELL. Mrs. Belloc Lowndes. BY STROKE OF SWORD. Andrew Balfour. DERRICK VAUGHAN, NOVELIST. Edna Lyall. HOUSE OF WHISPERS, THE. William Le Queux. INCA'S TREASURE, THE E. Glanville. KATHERINB THE ARROGANT. Mrs. B. M. Croker. MOTHER'S SON, A. B. and C. B. Fry. PROFIT AND Loss. Jobn Oxenham. RED DERELICT, THE. Bertram Mitford. SIGN OF THE SPIDER, THE. Bertram Mitford. 27/6/19. 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