Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore

You go down to any shore after a gale of wind, and pick up a few delicate little sea-ferns. You have two in your hand, which probably look to you, even under a good pocket magnifier, identical or nearly so. {37} But you are told to your surprise, that however like the dead horny polypidoms which you hold may be, the two species of animal which have formed them are at least as far apart in the scale of creation as a quadruped is from a fish. You see in some Musselburgh dredger’s boat the phosphorescent sea-pen (unknown in England), a living feather, of the look and consistency of a cock’s comb; or the still stranger sea-rush (Virgularia mirabilis), a spine a foot long, with hundreds of rosy flowerets arranged in half-rings round it from end to end; and you are told that these are the congeners of the great stony Venus’s fan which hangs in seamen’s cottages, brought home from the West Indies. And ere you have done wondering, you hear that all three are congeners of the ugly, shapeless, white “dead man’s hand,” which you may pick up after a storm on any shore. You have a beautiful madrepore or brain-stone on your mantel-piece, brought home from some Pacific coral-reef. You are to believe that its first cousins are the soft, slimy sea-anemones which you see expanding their living flowers in every rock-pool— bags of sea-water, without a trace of bone or stone. You must believe it; for in science, as in higher matters, he who will walk surely, must “walk by faith and not by sight.”