Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore

But perhaps the most interesting of all the tribes of the Naiads,— (in default, of course, of those semi-human nymphs with which our Teutonic forefathers, like the Greeks, peopled each “sacred fountain,”)— are the little “water-crickets,” which may be found running under the pebbles, or burrowing in little galleries in the banks: and those “caddises,” which crawl on the bottom in the stiller waters, enclosed, all save the head and legs, in a tube of sand or pebbles, shells or sticks, green or dead weeds, often arranged with quaint symmetry, or of very graceful shape. Their aspect in this state may be somewhat uninviting, but they compensate for their youthful ugliness by the strangeness of their transformations, and often by the delicate beauty of the perfect insects, as the “caddises,” rising to the surface, become flying Phryganeæ (caperers and sand-flies), generally of various shades of fawn-colour; and the water-crickets (though an unscientific eye may be able to discern but little difference in them in the “larva,” or imperfect state) change into flies of the most various shapes;— one, perhaps, into the great sluggish olive “Stone-fly” (Perla bicaudata); another into the delicate lemon-coloured “Yellow Sally” (Chrysoperla viridis); another into the dark chocolate “Alder” (Sialis lutaria): and the majority into duns and drakes (Ephemeræ); whose grace of form, and delicacy of colour, give them a right to rank among the most exquisite of God’s creations, from the tiny “Spinners” (Baëtis or Chloron) of incandescent glass, with gorgeous rainbow-coloured eyes, to the great Green Drake (Ephemera vulgata), known to all fishermen as the prince of trout-flies. These animals, their habits, their miraculous transformations, might give many an hour’s quiet amusement to an invalid, laid on a sofa, or imprisoned in a sick-room, and debarred from reading, unless by some such means, any page of that great green book outside, whose pen is the finger of God, whose covers are the fire kingdoms and the star kingdoms, and its leaves the heather-bells, and the polypes of the sea, and the gnats above the summer stream.