Diversions of a Naturalist
9781465637741
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
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 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 exceptions in the north-west—with a fair prospect of returning in safety, those waters which are 100 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 compensate, 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, 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.
