Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore

Not merely interesting, too, but brilliant in their vegetation are sandhills; and the seemingly desolate dykes and banks of salt marshes will yield many a curious plant, which you may neglect if you will: but lay to your account the having to repent your neglect hereafter, when, finding out too late what a pleasant study botany is, you search in vain for curious forms over which you trod every day in crossing flats which seemed to you utterly ugly and uninteresting, but which the good God was watching as carefully as He did the pleasant hills inland: perhaps even more carefully; for the uplands He has completed, and handed over to man, that he may dress and keep them: but the tide-flats below are still unfinished, dry land in the process of creation, to which every tide is adding the elements of fertility, which shall grow food, perhaps in some future state of our planet, for generations yet unborn. But to return to the water-world, and to dredging; which of all sea-side pursuits is perhaps the most pleasant, combining as it does fine weather sailing with the discovery of new objects, to which, after all, the waifs and strays of the beach, whether “flotsom jetsom, or lagand,” as the old Admiralty laws define them, are few and poor. I say particularly fine weather sailing; for a swell, which makes the dredge leap along the bottom, instead of scraping steadily, is as fatal to sport as it is to some people’s comfort. But dredging, if you use a pleasure boat and the small naturalist’s dredge, is an amusement in which ladies, if they will, may share, and which will increase, and not interfere with, the amusements of a water-party.