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rivalled Monograph on the Nudibranch Mol- | than he; and as he stands, silent with awe, lusca. amid the pomp of nature's ever-busy rest, hears, as of old, "The Word of the Lord God walking among the trees of the garden in the cool of the day."

And now, worshipper of final causes and the mere useful in Nature, answer but one question, Why this prodigal variety? All these Nudibranches live in much the same way; why would not the same mould have done for them all? And why, again, (for we must push the argument a little further), why have not all the butterflies, at least all who feed on the same plant, the same markings? Of all unfathomable triumphs of design (we can only express ourselves thus, for honest induction, as Paley so well teaches, allows us to ascribe such results only to the design of some personal will and mind), what surpasses that by which the scales on a butterfly's wing are arranged to produce a certain pattern of artistic beauty beyond all painter's skill? What a waste of power, on any utilitarian theory of nature! And, once more, why are those strange microscopic atomies, the Diatomacea and Infusoria, which fill every stagnant pool, fringe every branch of sea-weed, which form banks hundreds of miles long on the Arctic sea-floor, and the strata of whole moorlands, which pervade in millions the mass of every iceberg, and float aloft in countless swarms amid the clouds of the volcanic dust,-why are their tiny shells of flint as fantastically various in their quaint mathematical symmetry, as they are countless beyond the wildest dreams of the Pantheist? Mystery inexplicable on all theories of evolution by necessary laws, as well as on the conceited notion which, making man, forsooth, the centre of the universe, dares to believe that variety of forms has existed for countless ages in abysmal sea-depths and untrodden forests, only that some few individuals of the western races might, in these latter days, at last discover and admire a corner here and there of the boundless realms of beauty. Inexplicable, truly, if man be the centre and the object of their existence; explicable enough to him who believes that God has created all things for Himself, and rejoices in His own handiwork, and that the material universe is, as the wise man says, "A platform whereon His eternal Spirit sports and maketh melody." Of all the blessings which the study of nature brings to the patient observer, let none perhaps be classed higher than this, that the farther he enters into those fairy gardens of life and birth, which Spenser saw and described in his great poem, the more he learns the awful and yet most comfortable truth, that they do not belong to him, but to one greater, wiser, lovelier

One sight more, and we have done. We had something to say, had time permitted, on the ludicrous element which appears here and there in nature. There are animals, like monkeys and crabs, which seem made to be laughed at; by those at least who possess that most indefinable of faculties, the sense of the ridiculous. As long as man possesses muscles especially formed to enable him to laugh, we have no right to suppose (with some) that laughter is an accident of our fallen nature, or to find (with others) the primary cause of the ridiculous in the perception of unfitness or disharmony. And yet we shrink (whether rightly or wrongly, we can hardly tell) from attributing a sense of the ludicrous to the Creator of these forms. It may be a weakness on our partat least we will hope it is a reverent one; but till we can find something corresponding to what we conceive of the Divine Mind in any class of phenomena, we had rather not talk about them at all, but observe a stoic "epoché," waiting for more light, and yet confessing that our own laughter is uncontrollable, and therefore we hope not unworthy of us, at many a strange creature and strange doing which we meet, from the highest ape to the lowest polype.

But, in the mean while, there are animals in which results so strange, fantastic, even seemingly horrible, are produced, that fallen man may be pardoned, if he shrinks from them in disgust. That, at least, must be a consequence of our own wrong state; for every thing is beautiful and perfect in its place. It may be answered, "Yes, in its place; but its place is not yours. You had no business to look at it, and must pay the penalty for intermeddling." We doubt that answer; for surely, if man have liberty to do any thing, he has liberty to search out freely his heavenly Father's works; and yet every one seems to have his antipathic animal; and we know one bred from his childhood to zoology by land and sea, and bold in asserting, and honest in feeling, that all, without exception, is beautiful, who yet cannot, after handling and petting and admiring all day long every uncouth and venomous beast, avoid a paroxysm of horror at the sight of the common house-spider. At all events, whether we were intruding or not, in turning this stone, we must pay a fine for

bably macerated to a pulp long before he has reached the opposite extremity of his cave of doom. Once safe down, the black murderer slowly contracts again into a knotted heap, and lies, like a boa with a stag inside him, motionless and blest.

having done so; for there lies an animal as foul and monstrous to the eye as "hydra, gorgon, or chimæra dire," and yet so wondrously fitted to its work, that we must needs endure, for our own instruction, to handle and to look at it. Its name we know not (though it lurks here under every stone), There; we must come away now, for the and should be glad to know. It seems some tide is over our ankles: but touch, before very "low" Ascarid or Planarian worm. you go, one of those little red mouths which You see it? That black, shiny, knotted lump peep out of the stone. A tiny jet of water among the gravel, small enough to be taken shoots up almost into your face. The biup in a dessert-spoon. Look now, as it is valve who has burrowed into the limestone raised, and its coils drawn out. Three feet knot (the softest part of the stone to his -six-nine, at least: with a capability of jaws, though the hardest to your chisel), is seemingly endless expansion; a slimy tape scandalized at having the soft mouths of his of living caoutchouc, some eighth of an inch siphons so rudely touched, and taking your in diameter, a dark chocolate-black, with finger for some bothering Annelid, who wants paler longitudinal lines. Is it alive? It to nibble him, is defending himself; shoothangs helpless and motionless, a mere velvet ing you, as naturalists do humming birds, string across the hand. Ask the neighbor- with water. Let him rest in peace; it will ing Annelids and the fry of the rock fishes, cost you ten minutes' hard work, and much or put it into a vase at home, and see. It dirt, to extract him: but if you are fond of lies motionless, trailing itself among the shells, secure one or two of those beautiful gravel; you cannot tell where it begins or pink and straw-colored scallops, who have ends; it may be a dead strip of sea-weed, gradually incorporated the layers of their Himanthalia lovea perhaps, or Chorda filum; lower valve with the roughnesses of the or even a tarred string. So thinks the little stone, destroying thereby the beautiful form fish who plays over and over it, till he touches which belongs to their race, but not their at last.what is too surely a head. In an in- delicate color. There are a few more bistant a bell-shaped sucker mouth has fast- valves, too, adhering to the stone, and those ened to his side. In another instant, from rare ones, and two or three delicate Manone lip, a concave double proboscis, just like gelie and Nase are trailing their graceful a tapir's (another instance of the repetition spires up and down in search of food. That of forms), has clasped him like a finger; and little bright red and yellow pea, too, touch it now begins the struggle; but in vain. He is being " played" with such a fishing-line as the skill of a Wilson or a Stoddart never could invent; a living line, with elasticity beyond that of the most delicate fly rod, which follows every lunge, shortening and lengthening, slipping and twining round every piece of gravel and stem of sea-weed, with a tiring drag such as no Highland wrist or step could ever bring to bear on salmon or on trout. The victim is tired now; and slowly, and yet dexterously, his blind assailant is feeling and shifting along his side, till he reaches one end of him; and then the black lips expand, and slowly and surely the curved finger begins packing him end-foremost down into the gullet, where he sinks, inch by inch, till the swelling which marks his place is lost among the coils, and he is pro

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the brilliant colored cloak is withdrawn, and instead, you have a beautifully ribbed pink cowry, our only European representative of that grand tropical family. Cast one wondering glance, too, at the forest of zoöphytes and corals, Lepralia and Flustræ, and those quaint blue stars, set in brown jelly, which are no zoophytes, but respectable molluscs, each with his well-formed mouth and intestines, but combined in a peculiar form of Communism, of which all one can say is, that one hopes they like it; and that, at all events, they agree better than the heroes and heroines of Mr. Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance.

Now away, and as a specimen of the fertility of the water-world, look at this rough list of species, the greater part of which are on this very stone, and all of which you § Botrylli. Polypes-continued.

Cypræa Europaa.

Molluscs-continued.

Cynthia,-2-species.
Botryllus, do.
Sydinum?

Sertularia rugosa.
fallax.
filicula.

might obtain in an hour, would the rude tide wait for zoologists; and remember, that the number of individuals of each species of polype must be counted by tens of thousands, and also, that, by searching the forest of seaweeds which covers the upper surface, we should probably obtain some twenty minute species more.

A goodly catalogue this, surely, of the inhabitants of three or four large stones; and yet how small a specimen of the multitudinous nations of the sea. From the bare rocks above high-water mark, down to abysses deeper than ever plummet sounded, is life, everywhere life; fauna after fauna, and flora after flora, arranged in zones, according to the amount of light and warmth which each species requires, and to the amount of pressure which they are able to endure. The crevices of the highest rocks, only sprinkled with salt spray in spring-tides and high gales, have their peculiar little univalves, their crisp lichen-like sea-weeds, in myriads; lower down, the region of the Fuci (bladder-weeds) has its own tribes of periwinkles and limpets; below again, about the neap-tide mark, the region of the corallines and Alge furnishes food for yet other species, who graze on its watery meadows; and beneath all, only uncovered at low spring-tide, the zone of the Laminaria (the great tangles and oar-weeds) is most full of all of every imaginable form of life. So that, as we descend the rocks, we may compare ourselves (likening small things to great) to those who, descending the Andes, pass in a single day from the vegetation of the Arctic zone to that of the Tropics. And here and there, even at half-tide level, deep rock basins, shaded from the sun, and always full of water, keep up, in a higher zone, the vegetation of a lower one, and afford, in min

Pleurobranchus plumula. Neritina.

|

Annelids.

"barran

iature, an analogy to those deep cos" which split the high table-land of Mexico, down whose awful cliffs, swept by cool sea-breezes, the traveller looks from among the plants and animals of the temperate zone, and sees, far below, dim through their everlasting vapor-bath of rank hot steam, the mighty forms and gorgeous colors of a tropic forest.

"I do not wonder," says Mr. Gosse, in his charming "Naturalist's Rambles on the Devonshire Coast,"*" that when Southey had an opporsins hollowed in the living rock, and stocked with tunity of seeing some of those beautiful quiet baelegant plants and animals, having all the charm of novelty to his eye, they should have moved his poetic fancy, and found more than one place in the gorgeous imagery of his oriental romances. Just listen to him:

"It was a garden still beyond all price, Even yet it was a place of paradise ;

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And here were coral bowers,

And grots of madrepores,

And banks of sponge, as soft and fair to eye
As e'er was mossy bed
Whereon the wood-nymphs lie

With languid limbs in summer's sultry hours.
Here, too, were living flowers,
Which, like a bud compacted,
Their purple cups contracted;
And now, in open blossom spread,
Strech'd, like green anthers, many a seeking
head.

And arborets of jointed stone were there, And plants of fibres fine as silkworm's thread: Yea, beautiful as mermaid's golden hair

Upon the waves dispread.

Others that, like the broad banana growing, Rais'd their long wrinkled leaves of purple hue, Like streamers wide outflowing.'

(Kehama, xvi. 5.)

"A hundred times you might fancy you saw

Plumularia falcata. setacea. Laomedea geniculata.

Phyllodoce, and other Nereid Campanalaria volubilis.

Cypræa.

Trochus,-2 species.

Mangelia.

worms.

Triton.

Polynoe squamata.

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Crustacea.

Cerithium.

Sigaretus.

Fissurella

Arca lactea.

Pecten pusio.

Tapes pallastra.

Kellia suborbicularis.

Sphænia Binghami.

Saxicava rugosa.
Gastrochoena pholadia.
Pholas parva.
Anomia-2 or 3 species.

4 or 5 species.
Echinoderms.

Echinius miliaris.
Asterias gibbosa.
Ophiocoma neglecta.
Cucumaria Hyndmanni.

communis.
Polypes.

Sertularia pumila.

Actinia mesemburyanthemum.

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* P. 187.

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the type, the very original of this description, I spot with a strange longing to follow them tracing, line by line, and image by image, the de- under the waves, and became for ever a tails of the picture; and acknowledging, as you companion of the fair semi-human forms proceed, the minute truthfulness with which it has been drawn. For such is the loveliness of with which the Hellenic poets peopled their sunny bays and firths, feeding his "silent flocks" far below, on the Zostera beds, green or basking with them on the sunny ledges in the summer noon, or wandering in the still bays or sultry nights, amid the choir of Amphitrite and her sea-nymphs-

nature in these secluded reservoirs, that the accomplished poet, when depicting the gorgeous scenes of eastern mythology-scenes the wildest and most extravagant that imagination could paint-drew not upon the resources of his prolific fancy for imagery here, but was well content to jot down the simple lineaments of nature as he saw her in plain, homely England.

"It is a beautiful and fascinating sight for

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those who have never seen it before, to see the little shrubberies of pink coralline-'the arborets of jointed stone-that fringe those pretty pools. It is a charming sight to see the crimson, bananalike leaves of the Delesseria waving in their darkest corners; and the purple fibrous tufts of Polysiphonic and Ceramia, fine as silkworm's thread.' But there are many others which give variety and impart beauty to these tide-pools. The broad leaves of the Ulva, finer than the finest cambric, and of the brightest emerald-green, adorn the hollows at the highest level, while at the lowest, wave tiny forests of the feathery Ptilota and Dasya, and large leaves, cut into fringes and furbelows, of rosy Rhodymeniæ. All these are lovely to behold; but I think I admire, as much as any of them, one of the commonest of our marine plants, Chondrus crispus. It occurs in the greatest profusion on this coast, in every pool between tide-marks; and everywhere-except in those of the highest level, where constant exposure to light dwarfs the plant, and turns it of a dull umber-brown tint-it is elegant in form and brilliant in color. The expanding, fan-shaped fronds, cut into segments, cut, and cut again, make fine bushy tufts in a deep pool; and every segment of every frond reflects a flush of the most lustrous azure, like that of a tempered sword-blade."-Gosse's Devonshire Coast, pp.

187-189.

And the sea bottom, also, has its zones, at different depths, and peculiar forms in peculiar spots, affected by the currents and the nature of the ground, the riches of which have to be seen, alas! rather by the imagination than the eye; for such spoonfuls of the treasure as the dredge brings up to us, come too often rolled and battered, torn from their sites, and contracted by fear, mere hints to us of what the populous reality below is like. And often, standing on the shore at low tide, has one longed to walk on and in under the waves, as the water-ousel does in the pools of the mountain-burn, and see it all but for a moment; and a solemn beauty and meaning has invested the old Greek fable of Glaucus the fisherman, how he ate of the herb which gave his fish strength to leap back into their native element, and, seized on the

Joining the bliss of the gods, as they waken the coves with their laughter,

has

In nightly revels, whereof one sung:So they came up in their joy; and before them the roll of the surges

Sank, as the breezes sank dead, into smooth, green, foam-flecked marble Awed; and the crags of the cliffs, and the pines of the mountains were silent.

So they came up in their joy, and around them the lamps of the sea-nymphs,

Myriad fiery globes, swam heaving and panting; and rainbows,

Crimson, and azure, and emerald, were broken in star-showers, lighting

Far in the wine-dark depths of the crystal, the gardens of Nereus,

Coral, and sea-fan, and tangle, the blooms and the palms of the ocean.

So they went on in their joy, more white than the foam which they scattered,

Laughing, and singing, and tossing, and twining, while eager, the Tritons

Blinded with kisses their eyes, unreproved, and above them in worship

Fluttered the terns, and the sea-gulls swept past them on silvery pinions,

Echoing softly their laughter; around them the wantoning dolphins

Sighed as they plunged, full of love; and the great sea-horses which bore them Curved up their crests in their pride to the delicate arms which embraced them;

Pawing the spray into gems, till a fiery rainfall, unharming, Sparkled and gleamed on the limbs of the maids,

and the coils of the mermen.

So they went on in their joy, bathed round with the fiery coolness,

Needing nor sun nor moon, self-lighted, immortal; but others

lay the sea-boys,

Pitiful, floated in silence apart; on their knees Whelmed by the roll of the surge, swept down by the anger of Nereus;

Hapless, whom never again upon quay or on strand shall their mothers

Welcome with garlands and vows to the temples; Gaze over island and main for the sails which but wearily pining, return not; they heedless Sleep in soft bosoms for ever, and dream of the surge and the sea-maids.

So they passed by in their joy, like a dream, down, Heaven forbid that those should say so, the murmuring ripples.

Such a rhapsody may be somewhat out of order, even in a popular scientific article; and yet one cannot help at moments envying the old Greek imagination, which could inform the soulless sea-world with a human life and beauty. For, after all, star-fishes and sea-anemones are dull substitutes for Sirens and Tritons; the lamps of the seanymphs, those glorious phosphorescent medusæ, whose beauty Mr. Gosse sets forth so well with pen and pencil, are not as attractive as the sea-nymphs themselves would be; and who would not, like Ulysses, take the gray old man of the sea himself asleep upon the rocks, rather than one of his sealherd; probably, too, with the same result as the world-famous combat in the Antiquary between Hector and Phoea? And yet is there no human interest in these pursuits, more human, ay, and more divine, than there would be even in those Triton and Nereid dreams, if realized to sight and sense?

whose wanderings among rock and pool have been mixed up with holiest passages of friendship and of love, and the intercommunion of equal minds and sympathetic hearts, and of the laugh of children drinking in health from every breeze, and instruction at every step, running ever and anon with proud delight to add their little treasure to their father's stock, and of happy, friendly evenings spent over the microscope and the vase, in examining, arranging, preserving, noting down in the diary the wonders and the labors of the happy, busy day. No; such short glimpses of the water world as our present appliances afford us, are full enough of pleasure; and we will not envy Glaucus; we will not even be over anxious for the success of his only modern imitator, the French naturalist, who is reported to have just fitted himself with a waterproof dress and breathing apparatus, in order to walk the bottom of the Mediterranean, and see for himself how the world goes on at the fifty-fathom line.

From Fraser's Magazine.

CHARLES KEMBLE.

On the morning of the 12th of November, ] expired at his residence in Saville Row, Charles Kemble, the last survivor of a triad of artists, whose names are written indelibly in the annals of dramatic art.

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of its emotions. The actor's task is fulfilled when the curtain descends upon his last impersonation.

Yet we are unwilling that the name of Charles Kemble, so long and intimately asThe life of an actor, so far as it is an ob- sociated as it has been with the brightest orject of public interest, closes with his scenic naments and the most intellectual age of the farewell. The decease of an actor, and drama, should be written on the roll of death especially of one long withdrawn from the without some accompanying comment and stage, might therefore attract little notice at commemoration. The poet, the painter, the any time beyond the circle of his immediate sculptor, and the architect perpetuate their friends; and at the present moment of anx fame in their works; but it is the hard conious anticipation, is more than ordinarily lia- dition of the actor, that his art is for the ble to pass from the register of the living present only; he has no patent for futurity with merely a brief expression of regret.-neither marble nor canvas, nor breathing Johnson, indeed, declared that the death of thoughts and burning words" embalm his Garrick eclipsed the gayety of a nation. But genius. With the generation which beheld this was a friendly hyperbole: the nation him his image and his influence pass away. laughed and wept as before, although the mighty master no longer touched the chords

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We are not in the number of those who regard with indifference the condition of the

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