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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924005004456 
 
THE SEA. 
 
UJVIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME, 
 
 And by the same Author. 
 
 LOVE (1' AMOUR.) {Twenty-seventh edition.) Price, $1,00 
 
 WOMAJV (hA FEmnE.) (Thirteenth edition.) 1,00 
 
 THE CHILD (h'EHF AST.) (Impress.) 
 
 THE IJVSECT (l'insecte ) Its Life, Loves and Labors. (In press.) 
 THE BIRD (l'oiseao.) Its Life, Loves, and Labors. (In prees.) 
 WOMEJV OF THE FREJVCH REVOLUTIOJV. (In press.) 
 
THE SEA 
 
 Ux.) 
 
 From the French of 
 
 M. J. MIC HE LET, 
 
 Of the Faculty of Letters, Author of " A History of France," 
 "Love," " Woman," " The Child," " The Insict," 
 " The Bird," " Womeji of the French Rev- 
 olution," etc., etc., etc. 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE LATEST PARIS EDITION. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 RDDD & CAKLETON, 130 GRAND STEEET 
 
 PARIS : L. HACHETTE ET C", 
 
 MDCCCLXI. 
 
A- ax)7o;;^ 
 
 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1861, by 
 
 EUDD & OAELETOSr, 
 
 In the Clerls'B office of tlie District Court of tlie Southern District of New York. 
 
 
EXTRACT FROM fHE LONDON ATHENAEUM, Feb. 9. 1861. 
 
 « The Sea ' is another of M. Michelet's dreamy volumes, — half science, 
 half fancy, with a blending in both of sensuous suggestion. M. Michelet 
 takes the seas of the ■world in his hands, manipulates them, invokes 
 their monsters, assembles all their 'finny droves, gossips Tvith the sirens, 
 sails among the Hyperborean waters with Behemoth, and is on intimate 
 terms with Tennyson's little shell-king, who lives in a palace with doors 
 of diamond, and wears a rainbow frill , for the admiration of the nations 
 that dweR in his dim, sunken wildernesses. * » » * » 
 He discourses upon marine terrors and beauties, and teRs the reader, 
 as a sublime Peter Parley might, that the salt of all the seaa, if piled 
 upon America, would spread over the continent a soUd, olifF-edged mass, 
 4,500 feet high. There are chapters on Sands, Cliils and Beaches ; on 
 Waves; on the anatomy of the Sea itself, which resembles " a gigantic 
 animal arrested in the earliest stage of its organization ; " on Tempests ; 
 on the sympathy between Air and Water ; on the Fecundity of the Sea, 
 which, were it not self-devouring, would putrefy, according to M. Mich- 
 elet into one soRd mass of herring ; on Fish of every species, and espe- 
 cially on Pearls. The Queens of the East, he says, dislike the gleams of 
 the diamond. They will aUow nothing to touch their skins except pearls. 
 A necklace and two bracelets of pearls constitute the perfection of orna- 
 ment. The pearls silently say to the woman, " Love us ! hush ! " 
 In the North, too, dainty Countesses love their pearls, — wearing them 
 beneath their clothes by night and by day, concealing them, caressing 
 them, only now and then exposing them. So do the Odalisques of Asia 
 prize the soft linen vestment that just covers their limbs, never taking 
 ■ it off until worn out, which says little for Oriental baths. 
 
 if********** 
 
 The book is pleasant reading, like aU else that M. Michelet writes. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 Extract feom The Loitdon Atheneum, 5 
 
 BOOK FIBST. 
 
 A GLANCE UPON THE SEAS. 
 
 I. The Sea as seen from the Shore, 11 
 
 n. The Beach, the Sands, and the Iron Bound Coast, . . 19 
 
 m. The Same, ( Continued) 24 
 
 IV. The Same, (Continued) 81 
 
 v. The Fiery and the Watery Circle. The Currents of the Sea, 40 
 
 VI. Tempests, 58 
 
 Vn. Tempests (Continued) 63 
 
 Vni. The Storm of October, 1869, 72 
 
 IX. The Beacons, 91 
 
 BOOK S£CONI). 
 
 THE GENESIS OF TEE SEA. 
 
 I. Fecundity 105 
 
 n. The Milky Sea 114 
 
 m. The Atom, 128 
 
 IV. Blood-Flower 139 
 
 V. The World Makers, .... . . 149 
 
 VL Daughter of the Seas, . . .... 160 
 
Till CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 VII. The Stone Picker l'^^ 
 
 VIII. Shells, Mother of Pearl, and Pearl, .... 182 
 
 IX. TheSeaKovers (Poulpe, &o.) 19* 
 
 X. Crustaoese. Battle and Intrigue, . . • ■ • 202 
 
 XI. The Fish 212 
 
 Xn. The Whale 225 
 
 xni. The Syrens 236 
 
 BOOK THIRD. 
 
 CONQUEST OF THE SEA. 
 
 I. The Harpoon 251 
 
 II. Discovery of the Three Oceans, 260 
 
 m. The Law of Storms, 275 
 
 IV. The Polar Seas, 289 
 
 V. Man's War upon the Baces of the Sea 806 
 
 VI. The Law of the Ocean, 319 
 
 BOOK FOURTH. 
 
 THE EESTOKATION OP THE SEA. 
 
 I. Origin of Sea Bathing 329 
 
 II. Choice of Coast, 340 
 
 m. The House 349 
 
 IV. First Aspiration of the Sea, 360 
 
 V. Baths. Restoration of Beauty 369 
 
 VI. The Eestoration of Heart and Brotherhood, . . 377 
 Vn. The New Life of the Nations 388 
 
 Notes 401 
 
BOOK FIRST. 
 A GLANCE UPON THE SEAS. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE SEA AS SEEN FROM THE SHOBE. 
 
 A GALLANT Dutch seaman, a cool and stern observer, who 
 has passed his whole life at sea, frankly tells us that his 
 feeling on first seeing the ocean was fear. For all ter- 
 restrial animals, water is the non-respirable element, 
 the ever heaving but inevitably asphyxiating enemy ; 
 the fatal and eternal barrier between the two worlds. 
 We need not, all things being considered, be at all sur- 
 prised, if that immense mass of waters which we call 
 the sea, dark and inscrutable in its immense depths, 
 ever and alway impresses the human mind with a vague 
 and resistless awe. 
 
 The imaginative Orientals see it only and call it only, 
 as, the Mg-ht of the Depths. In all the antique tongues, 
 from India to Ireland, the synonymous or analagous 
 name of the sea is either Night or the Desert. 
 
 Ah ! With what a great and a hallowed and a hallow- 
 ing, with what an at once soothing and subduing melan- 
 
12 THE SEA AS SEEN FROM THE SHORE. 
 
 choly it is that, evening after evening, we see the Sun, 
 that great world's joy, that brilliant, life-quickening, 
 and light-giving Sun of all that lives, fade, sink, die — 
 though so surely to rise and live again ! Ah ! as that 
 glorious light departs, how tenderly do we think of the 
 human loves that have died from us — of the hour when 
 we, also, shall thus depart from human ken, lost, for the 
 time, to this world — to shine more gloriously in that 
 other world, now dark, distant, unknown, but certain. 
 
 Descend to even a slight depth in the sea, and the 
 beauty and brilliancy of the upper light are lost ; you 
 enter into a persistent twilight, and misty and half-lurid 
 haze ; a little lower, and even that sinister and eldritch 
 twilight is lost, and all ' around you is Night, showing 
 nothing, but suggesting everything that darkness, — ^hand- 
 maiden of terrible Fancy — can suggest. Above, below, 
 beneath, all around, darkness, utter darkness, save when, 
 from time to time, the swift and gracefully terrible mo- 
 tion of some passing. monster of the deep makes " dark- 
 ness visible " for a brief moment— and, then, that pass- 
 ing gleam leaves you in darkness more dense, more ut- 
 ter, more terrible, than ever. Immense in its extent, 
 enormous in its depth, that mass of waters which cov- 
 ers the greater part of our globe seems, in truth, a 
 great world of shadows and of gloom. And it is 
 that which, above all, at once fascinates and intimidates 
 us. Darkness and Pear ! Twin sisters, they ! In the 
 
THE SEA AS SEEN FROM THE SHORE. 13 
 
 early day, the at once timid and unreasoning Childhood 
 of our race, men imagined that where no Light was, 
 neither could there be Life ; that in the unfathomed 
 depths, there was a black, lifeless, soundless. Chaos ; 
 above, nought but water and gloom, — beneath, sand, 
 and shells, the bones of the wrecked mariner, the rich 
 wares of the far off, ruined, and vainly bewailing mer- 
 chant ; — those sad treasures of " that ever-receiving and 
 never-restoring treasury — the Sea." 
 
 The waters of the sea afford us no encouragement by 
 their transparency. Look not there for the seductive, 
 brightly sparkling, and ever-smiling nymph of the foun- 
 tain. Opaque, heavy, mighty, merciless, your sea is a 
 liquid Polyphemus, a blind giant that cares not, reasons 
 not, feels not — but hits a terribly hard blow. Trust 
 yourself upon that vast and ever-heaving bosom, bold 
 • swimmer, and marvellously will you be upheld ; the 
 mighty thing that upholds you dominates you, too ; you 
 are a mere weak child, upheld, indeed, for the instant 
 by a giant-hand — in another moment that giant-hand 
 may smite you with a giant's fatal force. 
 
 Her anchor once tripped, who can tell whither the 
 good ship may be urged by some sudden wind, or some 
 unsuspected but irresistible current ? Thus it was that 
 our northern fishermen, not only without their intention, 
 but even in spite of it, discovered polar America, and 
 supped full of the horrors of funereal Greenland. Not 
 
1-1 THE SEA AS SEEN FROM THE SHOKB. 
 
 a nation upon the earth but has its tales and traditions 
 of the sea. Homer and the Arabian Niglits, have 
 handed down to us a goodly number of those frightful 
 legends, of shoals and tempests and of calms no less 
 murderous than tempests, — those calms during which the 
 hardiest sailor agonizes, moans, loses all courage and 
 all hope in the tortures of the hours, days, haply even 
 weeks, when, with cracked lip and blood-shotten eye, 
 he has around him, heaving upward and sinking down- 
 ward, but never progressing a cable's length, 
 
 " Water, water, everywhere, 
 But not a drop to drink." 
 
 Thrilling and saddening legends have all our old 
 writers handed down to us of the Anthropophagi, those 
 loathsome man-eaters, and of the Leviathan, the Kra- 
 ken, the great sea-serpent, &c. The name given to the 
 great African desert — The Abode of Terror, —may 
 very justly be transferred to the sea. The boldest sail- 
 ors, Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the conquering 
 Arabs who aspired to encircle and grasp the whole 
 world, seduced by what they heard of the Hesperides 
 and the land of gold, sailed out of the Mediterranean 
 to the wide ocean, but soon were glad to seek their port 
 again. The gloomy line eternally covered with clouds 
 and mist which they found keeping their stern watch 
 before the equator, intimidated them. They lay to; 
 they hesitated ; from man to man ran the murmur 
 
THE SEA A3 SEEN PROM THE SHORE. 15 
 
 " It is the Sea of Darkness — and, then, back went 
 they to port and, there told to wondering landsmen 
 what wonders they had seen, and what horrors they had 
 imagined." Woe to him who shall persist in his sacri- 
 legious espionage of that dread region ! On one of 
 those weird and far isles stands a sternly- threatening 
 Colossus, whose sempiternal menace is — "Thus far 
 thou hast come — farther thou shalt not go ! " 
 
 Childish as we may think those terrors of the long 
 by-gone ages they really were much the same as the 
 emotions which we may any day see evinced by an in- 
 land-born novice who for the first time looks upon the 
 sea. And not merely man, but all animals, experience 
 the same surprise, the same shock, when suddenly brouglit 
 face to face with the mighty watei'-world. Even at ebb 
 tide, when the water so gently and so lovingly caresses, 
 as it leaves, that shore to which it shall so boisterously 
 return, your horse quite evidently likes it not ; he shud- 
 ders, balks, snorts, — and very often bolts from it at 
 the very top of his speed. Your dog recoils, howls, 
 and, after his own canine fashion, returns insult for in- 
 sult to the waves that annoy and terrify him ; he never 
 concludes a real peace with the element which to hiin 
 seems less doubtful than positively hostile. A certain 
 traveller tells us that the Kamtschatkan dogs, accus- 
 tomed as they are to the sight of the sea, are neverthe- 
 less irritated and alarmed by it. During the long nights 
 
16 THE SEA AS SEEN FROM THE SHORE. 
 
 immense troops of them howl back to the howling waves 
 that break, in their furious might, upon the iron-bound i 
 shores of the northern ocean. 
 
 The natural introduction, the portico, the ante-room, 
 of the Ocean, which prepares us thoroughly to appreci- 
 ate its vast and melancholy extent, is to be found ia 
 the dreary course of the rivers of north-western France, 
 the vast sands of the South, or the sad and rarely trod- 
 den Landes of Brittany. All who approach the sea by 
 any of those routes are greatly impressed by that inter- 
 mediate region. All along the rivers, there is a seem- 
 ingly infinite chaos of roots and stumps, of willows and 
 the like water-loving vegetation, and the waters becom- 
 ing more and more brackish, at length become abso- 
 lutely salt — the veritable sea-water. In the Landes, 
 on the other hand, as we approach the sea, we have a 
 preliminary and preparatory sea of low-growing and 
 coarse shrubs, broom, and bushes. Proceed a league or 
 two, and you see sickly and drooping trees which seem, 
 after their manner, to tell you how much they suffer 
 from the blighting breath of their near neighbor, and. 
 great tyrant, the Sea. Evidently, if they were not held 
 there by their great strong roots they would fly to some 
 climate more genial and some soil more generous ; they 
 turn every branch from the sea and towards the earth, 
 as though they were a routed host, disorganized, panic- 
 stricken, and prepared to seek safety in flight. Fixed^ 
 
THE SEA AS SEEN FROM THE SHORE. 17 
 
 to the soil, they bend themselves eastward, twisting, 
 writhing, mutely agonized at every new assault of the 
 storm- winds from the seaward. Still nearer to the Sea, 
 the trunk of the tree is slender, its stature dwarfish, 
 and its few poor branches spread themselves confusedly 
 to the horizon. On the shore, on the very margin and 
 boundary line between land and Sea, where the crushed 
 shells rise in a fine and pungent dust, the trees are in- 
 vaded, covered, choked up with it ; their pores are 
 closed, they inhale no air, they are stifled ; still living 
 as to form, they are mere petrified trees, spectral trees, 
 melancholy shadows which have not even the privilege 
 of departing, — sad prisoners — even in death ! Long 
 before we are face to face with the Sea, we can hear 
 and imagine that grand and terrible entity. At first, 
 ■we hear only a dull, uniform, and distant moaning, 
 which grows louder and louder still, until its majestic 
 roar silences, or covers, all meaner sounds. Very soon 
 we perceive that that roar is not monotonous, but has 
 its alternating notes ; its full, rich, mellow tenor, and 
 its round, deep, majestic bass. The pendulum of the 
 clock oscillates less regularly than that alternating moan 
 and roar of the Ocean in its grand unrest. And this 
 latter, let me repeat it, has not the monotony of the 
 pendulum, for in " what those wild waves are saying," 
 we feel, or fancy that we feel the thrilling intonations 
 of life. And in fact, at high flood, when wave rears 
 
18 THE SEA AS SEEN FEOM THE SHORE. 
 
 its crest upon wave, immense, electric, there mingles 
 with the tumultuous roaring of the fiercely rushing 
 waters, the sound of the shells and pebbles, and the 
 thousand things animate as well as inanimate that they 
 carry with them in their shoreward rush. When the 
 ebb comes, a soft murmur tells us that, together with 
 the sands, the sea carries back into her depths all with 
 which for a few brief hours the shore had been adorned 
 or enriched. 
 
 And how many other voices hath the mighty sea ! 
 Even when least agitated, how her wailings and her 
 deep sighs contrast with the dull dead silence of the de- 
 serted shore, which seems to expect, in mute terror, the 
 threatening of that mighty mass which so recently lav- 
 ed it with a gentle and caressing wavelet. And will 
 she not speedily fulfil her threat ? I know not, and 
 will not anticipate. I will not, just now, at least, speak 
 of those terrible concerts in which, haply, she ere long 
 will take the principal part ; of her duets with the rocks, 
 of the basses, those muttered thunders which she utters 
 in the deep caverns of the rocky shore, or of those 
 strange, wild, weird, shrieking tones in which we seem 
 to recognize the " Help, spare, save me ! " of some tor- 
 tured or fearfully imperilled humanity. No ; let us, for 
 the present, contemplate her in her calmer moods ; when 
 she is strong, indeed, but not violent. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 We need not be at all surprised if childhood and ig- 
 norance are astounded, astonied, when they first find 
 themselves face to face with that vast and mysterious 
 Sphinx of the Great Master's sculpture, the Ocean. 
 "Why, in fact, should we be astonished by their gaze of 
 mingled awe, admiration and bewilderment, when we 
 ourselves, despite our early culture and life-long expe- 
 rience, see so much in the great Riddle of that great 
 Sphinx which we cannot even hope to explain ? 
 
 What is the real extent of the ocean ? That it is 
 greater than that of the earth is about as much as, con- 
 scientiously, we can at all positively affirm. On the 
 entire surface of our globe, water is the Generality — 
 land the Exception. But what is their relative propor- 
 tion ? That, water covers four-fifths of the globe is 
 probable, though, some say a third or a fourth. It is 
 difficult, not to say impossible, to answer the question 
 precisely. A bold explorer discovers a polar land, lays 
 
20 THE BEACH, THE SANDS, AND 
 
 it down, latitude and longitude, with scientific preci- 
 sion ; in the very next year an equally bold and no less 
 scientific adventurer seeks it in vain ; and in all lati- 
 tudes immense shoals and lovely Coral islands form in 
 the dark depths, rise to the surface, and disappear, just 
 as suddenly and unaccountably as they arose. 
 
 The real depth of the sea is still less known to us 
 than its extent ; we are only at the mere commence- ' 
 ment of our early, few, and imperfect soundings. 
 
 The daring little liberties which we take with the 
 surface of the invincible element, and the confidence 
 with which we go hither and thither upon its unsounded 
 depths, have really nothing to say against the grand and 
 well-founded pride of the Ocean, impenetrable as she is 
 as to her secrets, ever moving yet unchangeable, a re- 
 ality, yet, in all but a few of her phenomena, as unreal 
 to us as the spectres of our actual dreaming. That 
 those mighty depths contain a whole world, a marvel- 
 lously great and diversified world, of life, love, war, 
 and reproduction of all sorts and sizes, we must imag- 
 ine and may already with confidence affirm ; but we 
 have only, and barely, touched upon the threshold of 
 that world. "Wo are in such a hurry to leave that 
 strange and hostile element ! If we need the Ocean, 
 see ye, my brothers, the Ocean in no wise needs us. 
 Nature, fresh from the hand of Deity, scorns the too pry- 
 ing gaze and the too shallow judgment of finite but pre- 
 sumptvious man. 
 
THE IRON-BOUND COAST. 2L 
 
 That very element which we term fluid, shifting, ca- 
 pricious, suffers, in reality, no change ; on the contrary 
 it is a very perfect model of regularity. The really 
 and constantly changing creature is Man. His body of 
 this year will have evaporated by this time next year, 
 for, according to Berzolius, four-fifths of our frame arc 
 water, which at every instant we yield to the ever crav- 
 ing atmosphere. Fragile and fleeting creature as Man 
 is, he has indeed good reason for reflection and for hu- 
 mility when he finds himself in presence of the gi'eat 
 unchanging, and, humanly speaking, unchangeable, pow- 
 ers of nature, just, and grand, glorious, as is his hope, 
 his belief, his certainly of a spiritual immortality. De- 
 spite that delightful hope, that confident belief, that 
 sustaining certainty, Man yet is necessarily and terribly 
 saddened by the smiting and strange suddenness with 
 which he hourly sees the thread of man's life forever 
 broken. The Sea seems to exult over our fleeting ten- 
 ure of a life of which we cannot anticipate, far less 
 command, one added moment. Whenever we approach 
 her, she seems to murmur from her dark, inscrutable 
 depths, unchangeable as His will who made them — 
 " Mortal ! to-morrow you shall pass away, but I, / am, 
 and ever shall be, unchanged, unchangeable, mighty 
 and mysterious. The earth will not only receive your 
 bones but will soon convert them into kindred and in- 
 distinguishable earth, but I, ever and always, shall re- 
 
22 THE BEACH, THE SANDS, AND 
 
 main, the same majestic and indifferent entity, the great 
 perfectly balanced Life, daily harmonising myself with 
 the harmonious and majestic life of the bright far worlds 
 that shine above and around you." A stern and a 
 scorning rebuke that is which is given to our poor hu- 
 man pride when, twice in our every mortal day the sea 
 tears from our vexed shores the stony spoils which twice 
 in every day she scornfally and terribly hurls back 
 again. To any imagination but that of the trained and 
 veteran seaman, the fierce rush of the rising tide infalli- 
 bly suggests the likeness of a fierce and deadly com- 
 bat ; but when the child, or the Savage, observes that the 
 fury of the sea has its inevitable limits, the terror of 
 the child or Savage is turned — true coward-fashion ^- 
 into an unreasoning compound of hate and rage, and 
 he as fiercely, as impotently, pelts the terrible waves 
 with the very pebbles which without effort, without con- 
 sciousness, she has cast, heaps upon heaps, by ship loads, 
 at every vast beat of her serai-diurnal pulse ! Foam- 
 ing, roaring, threatening, the waves rush shoreward ; 
 the boy observes that though they may kiss, they can- 
 not, at his safe stand-point, submerge his delicate little 
 feet, returns laughter for their roarings, petty pebbles 
 for their impotent threats. 
 
 I saw a battle of this sort at Havre, in July, 1831. 
 A little boy whom I took thither felt his young courage 
 aroused and his young pride stung, by the loud chal- 
 
THE lEON-BOUND COAST. 23 
 
 lenges and fierce threats of the iucoming tide, and he 
 returned scorn for threat, feebly-thrown pebble for 
 surging and mighty wave. Greatly, aye, laughably un- 
 equal was the strife between that small, white, delicate 
 and feeble hand of the young mortal, and the vast and 
 terrible force which cared not about it, feared it not, 
 folt it not, knew it not. Laughably, said I ? Ah ! no in- 
 clination towards laughter remains with us when we re- 
 flect upon the fleeting existence, the ephemeral and impo- 
 tent fragility of our best beloved, our fellows, our Mak- 
 er's favored, erring, vain-glorious, and, in the last issue, 
 utterly helpless Humanity, when in presence of that tire- 
 less and inscrutable Eternity to which we may at any mo- 
 ment be recalled ! Such was one of my earliest glances at 
 the Ocean ; such the gloomy meditations, only too tru- 
 ly and too sternly realized, that were suggested to me 
 by that combat between the fierce Sea upon which I 
 look so often, and the glad and laughing, and buoyant 
 child upon whom, alas ! I shall look, lovingly and anx- 
 iously, no more. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE BEACH, THE SANDS, AND THE IRON-BOUND COAST, 
 CONTINUED. 
 
 Look upon the Ocean where and when you may, you 
 everywhere and alvvay shall find her the same grand 
 and terrible teacher of that hardest of all the lessons 
 man has to learn, — man's insignificance. Take your 
 stand upon some bold headland, from which with earn- 
 est and well trained eye, you can sweep the entire 
 horizon ; or, wander, with shortened ken, in the sandy 
 desert ; — go whithei-soever you will, where old Ocean 
 shall lash the shore, and everywhere and alway, I re- 
 peat, you shall find Ocean the same — mighty and terri- 
 ble. True it is, that our finite and dim gaze cannot 
 discern the, humanly speaking. Infinity of the Ocean ; 
 but we feel, we instinctively comprehend, that Infinity, 
 and the impression made by that instructive compre- 
 hension is even deeper than could be made by Ocean 
 visibly to our material eye, tangibly to our poor human 
 hand. 
 
 Such, so deep, so permanent, was the impression 
 
THE IRON-BOUND COAST. 25 
 
 made upon me by that wild tumultuous scene on the 
 scourged-shore where Granville — dear old Granville ! 
 — keeps neutral watch between Normandy and Brit- 
 tany. The wealthy, kindly and hearty, though bluff, 
 and somewhat vulgar Normandy witli its vast outspread 
 of orchard and meadow suddenly disappears, and, by 
 Granville and by the frowning Saint Michel we pass all 
 at once into quite anotlier world. For Granville, though 
 Norman as to race, is thoroughly Breton as to aspect. 
 Sternly, solidly, invincibly, the great Rock rears his de- 
 fiant front, and looks down in a quite insolent contempt 
 upon the wild surges that incessantly assault, but never 
 harm, that passionless and mutely mocking Titan. Let 
 the wild winds, unpent from their northern caverns, 
 sweep the rugged coast ; borne on the cross-currents 
 from the angry West, let the wind sweep all things else 
 clear from its path and this stern unconquerable rock 
 ever and alway saith " thus far shalt thou come, but no 
 farther. Strengthened though you are by your mad 
 trans-Atlantic leap of a thousand leagues, against me 
 your fury shall be spent in vain." 
 
 I loved that odd and somewhat dull little town, 
 which owes its support to the distant and most perilous 
 fishery. Every family there, feels that it is supported 
 by a dread game in which human life is at stake ; and 
 this feeling produces a certain harmonious gravity in 
 the aspect and tone of the dwellers hereabout, and of 
 
26 THE BEACH, THE SANDS, AND 
 
 all their surroundings. A touching and a hallowing 
 melancholy, that, of which I have often felt the influ- 
 ence, when, walking on the already darkening shore or 
 gazing from the upper town that crowns the great rock, 
 I have seen the sun sink below the far and misty hori- 
 zon, harshly streaked by alternate rays of luridness 
 and gloom, and not pausing to tint the sky with those 
 glowing and fantastic brilliances which in other climes 
 delight us. Here it is already autumn in August, and 
 twilight scarcely exists. Scarcely has the sun set, when 
 the shrewd winds freshen, and the dark green waves 
 sweep on with added force ; below, you see a few spec- 
 tral forms hurrying along in their dark cloaks, and 
 from afar you hear the melancholy bleatings of the 
 sheep already benighted on their scanty pasturage. 
 
 The very small upper town rears its northern front 
 sharply and boldly above the very edge of a cold dark 
 abyss, facing the great sea, and swept by an eternal 
 blast. This part of the place consists of only poor 
 houses, and in one of them I found my quarters with a 
 poor man a maker of those pretty shell pictures for 
 which the place is famous. Ascending by a ladder, 
 rather than a staircase, into a dark little room, I looked 
 out upon the strange wild scene, as strange and tragic, 
 as wild and impressive, as that which had presented it- 
 self, when, also from a window, I had caught my first 
 view of the great glacier of the Swiss Grindenwald. 
 
THE lUON-BOUND COAST. 27 
 
 The glacier had shown an enormous monster of peaked 
 icebergs which seemed crashing down upon me ; and 
 this vexed sea of Granville seemed an army of mon- 
 strous waves all rushing together to the attack. 
 
 My host here, though far from old, was feeble and 
 suffering, and, as I examined his shell work and talked 
 with him, I perceived that his mind was somewhat 
 shaken. Poor fellow ; upon that shore his only brother 
 had perished, and from that moment the sea appeared 
 to him an intelligent and persistent enemy. In the 
 winter it beat his window's with snow or with .icy 
 winds, and kept him sleepless and peaceless during the 
 long and dreary nights, and in the summer it brought 
 him the vivid lightnings and the far resounding thun- 
 ders. At the iiigh tides it was still worse ; the spray 
 then beat upon his very windows, and he felt doubtful 
 if some day he would not be drowned even on his own 
 hearth. But he had not the means of finding a more 
 secure shelter, and perhaps he was unconsciously re- 
 tained there by we know not what sti-ange fascination. 
 He had not resolution to break altogether with that 
 terrible foe, for which he had a certain respect, as well 
 as a great awe. He seldom spoke of it by name ; like 
 the Icelander who, when at sea, does not name the 
 Ourque, lest she should hear, and appear. I fancy thai 
 even now I can see his pale face, as, pointing to the 
 wave-beaten beach, he said — " That terrifies me ! " 
 
28 THE BEACH, THE 8ANDS, AND 
 
 Was he a lunatic ? Not at all. He spoke quite sen- 
 sibly, and was in reality interesting and even distin- 
 guished. A nervous being, too delicately organized for 
 such a scene as that in which he was placed. 
 
 But the sea can madden, and often does. Livingston 
 brought from Africa a bold and intelligent man who 
 had hunted and killed Lions, but had never seen the 
 Sea. When taken on board ship, the novel sight was 
 too much for his brain, he became frantic, and threw 
 himself headlong into the heaving deep, which at once 
 terrified and fascinated him. On the other hand, so at- 
 tached do some men become to the sea, that they can 
 never quit it. I have seen old pilots, compelled by 
 infirmity to abandon their ofi&ce, fret themselves into 
 imbecility. 
 
 On the very summit of Saint Michael you are shown 
 what tliey call Maniac's Slielf; aind I know no place 
 better fitted to make one mad than that giddy height. 
 All around a vast stretch of white sand, solitary ever, 
 and ever treacherous. It is neither land nor water ; it 
 is neither sea water nor fresh, though streams are con- 
 stantly flowing beneath. Rarely, and but for brief 
 moments, a boat can cross there, and if you cross when 
 the water is out you risk being swallowed in. I can 
 state that with full authority, for I nearly lost my life 
 there. A very light vehicle in which I ventured there, 
 and the horse that drew it, disappeared in too, and only 
 
THE IRON-BOUND COAST. 29 
 
 by a perfect miracle I escaped on foot, feeling myself 
 sinking at every step. At length, however, I reached 
 tlie Rock, that gigantic Abbey, Fortress and Prison, 
 that frowning sublimity, so well worthy of the scene 
 which it so sternly dominates. This is no place for. a 
 detailed description of such a monument. On a huge 
 block of granite, that Titanic pile rises and rises still, 
 rock upon rock, age upon age, and still dungeon above 
 dungeon. At the foot, the in pace of the Monks ; 
 higher up, the iron cage made by Louis XI. ; higher 
 still, that of Louis XIV. ; higher still,. the prison of our 
 own day. And all this in a whirlwind, a perpetual 
 tempest ; a Sepulchre without tlie Sepulchre's peace. 
 
 Is it the fault of the sea, if this beach is treacherous ? 
 Not at all. There, as elsewhere, the Sea arrives strong 
 and loud, indeed, but in all frankness and loyalty. 
 The real fault is in the land, apparently solid, but un- 
 dermined by numberless streams of fresh water which 
 converts that seemingly solid bfeach into a treaclierous 
 and devouring quagmire. And especially is the fault 
 in the ignorance and negligence of man. In the long 
 dark ages when man invented the legend and the pil- 
 grimage of the Archangel who vanquished the Devil, 
 tlie Devil took possession of that deserted plain. The 
 sea is quite innocent in the matter. Far, indeed, from 
 doing harm, the sea upon its madly bounding waves 
 brings in a nourishing and fecundating salt more pre- 
 
30 THE BEACH, THE SANDS, &C. 
 
 cious than the fat slime of the Nile, enriching the once 
 hideous marshes of Dol into the lovely gardens of our 
 own day. The Sea is a somewhat violent mother, no 
 doubt; — but a mother still. Abounding in fish, she 
 lavishes upon the opposite Cancale, and upon many 
 another bank, millions, thousands of millions, of oysters, 
 whose crushed shells give beauty, and verdure, and 
 flowers, and fruit. We must enter into a right under- 
 standing with the Sea, and not be led away by the false 
 notions which its barren beach or its own more violent 
 phenomena — often only the disguises of veiy real and 
 very great benefits — may suggest to us. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE BEACH, THE SANDS, AND THE IRON-BOUND COAST, 
 CONTINUED. 
 
 The headlands, the sandy beaches, the bold capes and 
 the low shores, command various, but ever useful, views 
 of the great sea, stern and wild at the first glance, but 
 divine and friendly, as we come to know it better. The 
 advantage of the headlands is that at the foot of one 
 of those giant rock-walls we more entirely than else- 
 where appreciate the breathing and bounding pulse of 
 the sea. Insensible, imperceptible, on the Mediterra- 
 nean, that pulse is very distinct on the ocean. The 
 Ocean breathes and pulsates, even as you and I do ; it 
 compels me to calculate my days and hours, and to look 
 up to Heaven. It reminds me alike of myself and of 
 the world. Let me seat myself upon some such shore, 
 that, for instance, of Antifer, whence I may look out 
 upon that vast expanse. The sea which, but a moment 
 agone, seemed dead, has suddenly shuddered and be- 
 come tremulous — first symptom of the great approach- 
 
3:2 THE BEACH, THE SANDS, AND 
 
 iag movement. The tide has heaved past Cherbourg and 
 Barfleur, and turned sharply and violently round the 
 lighthouse ; its divided waters lave Calvados, rush up- 
 on Havre and come to me at Eloretat, at Fecamp, at 
 Dieppe, to hurl themselves into the canal despite the 
 strong Northern currents. It is for me to watch its 
 hour. Its height, almost indifferent to the sandhills, 
 is here, at the foot of the headland, alike worthy of 
 your attention and powerful to command it. This long 
 rock-wall of thirty leagues has but few stairways. Its 
 narrow inlets, which form our smaller havens, occur at 
 rare and great distances. And at low water we caa 
 with inquiring gaze inspect and question the strata above 
 strata, gigantically and regularly superposed, which, as 
 so many Titanic registers, tell us the history of accumu- 
 lated ages of growth and decay, of life and death. 
 From that great open book of time every year tears 
 away a page. We have before us a piece of an hourly 
 perishing, hourly renewing, world, which the sea from 
 beneath is hourly devouring, and the torrents and the 
 tempests, the frosts and the thaws from above, are hour- 
 ly, and still more destructively, attacking. Wearing, 
 crushing, beating, pulverising, wave, and wind, and 
 storm and Time, that great Edax rerum, that unspar- 
 ing and untiring Moth of the Universe, are, even as we 
 gaze, converting the one vast rocky mass into the round- 
 ed and petty pebble. It is this rough work which makes 
 
THE IBON-BOUND COAST. 33 
 
 this coast, so richly fertile on the land side, a real mar- 
 itime desert on the seaward. A few, very few, sea 
 plants survive the eternal crushing and grinding of the 
 ever Crushed and ever crushing pebbles driven hither 
 and thither by every wave that every wind scourges 
 into motion. The moUuscae, and even the very fish 
 shun this vexed shore. Great contrast that between an 
 inland country so genial, and such a stern, rugged, 
 threatening and inhospitable coast. 
 
 It is only to be seen thoroughly when looked down 
 upon from the bold headland. Below, the hard neces- 
 sity of toiling over the beach, the sand yielding, and 
 the pebbles round, hard, and rolling, makes the task of 
 traversing this narrow beach a real and violent gym- 
 nastic exercise. No ; let us keep to the heights where 
 splendid villas, noble woods, the waving harvests, the 
 delicious gardens which even to the very edge of the 
 great rocky wall, look down upon that magnificent chan- 
 nel which separates the two shores of the two great em- 
 pires of the world. 
 
 The land and the sea ! What more ! Both, here, 
 aave a great charm ; nevertheless, he who loves the sea 
 for her own sake, he who is her friend, her lover, will 
 rather seek her in some less varied scene. To be real- 
 ly intimate with her, \.he great sandy beaches, provided, 
 always, that they be not too soft, are far more conven- 
 ient. They allow of such infinite strolls ! They suffer 
 
34 THE BEACH, THE SANDS, AND 
 
 US SO well to build up our air castles, and to meditate 
 upon so many things ; they allow us to hold such famil- 
 iar and deep conference with that never silent sea ! 
 Never do I complain of those vast and free arenas in 
 which others find themselves so ill at ease. When 
 there, I am never less lonely than when alone. I come, 
 I go, I feel that ever present sea. It is there, ever 
 there, the sublime companion ; and if haply that com- 
 panion be in gentle mood, I venture to speak, and the 
 great companion does not disdain to speak to me again. 
 How many things have we not said to each other in 
 those quiet wastes, when the crowd is away, on the lim- 
 itless sands of Sheveningen, Ostend, Royan, and Saint 
 Georges. There it is that in long interviews we can 
 establish some intimacy with the Sea, acquire some fa- 
 miliarity with its great speech. 
 
 When from the towers of Amsterdam the Zuyderzee 
 looks muddy, and when at the dykes of Scheveningen 
 the leaden waves seem ready to overleap the earthy 
 mound, the Sea wears its least pleasing aspect ; yet I 
 confess that this combat between land and water attracts 
 me forcibly — this great invention, this mighty effort, 
 this triumph of man's skill and man's labor, over the 
 fiercest force of inanimate nature. 
 
 And this sea also pleases me by the treasures of fe- 
 cund life which I know to abound in its dark depths. 
 It is one of the most populous in the world. On the 
 
THE IRON-BOUND COAST. 35 
 
 night of St. John, when the fishery opens, you may see 
 anotlier sea arise from the depths — tlie Sea of Herrings. 
 You will imagine that the boundless plain of waters 
 will prove too limited for this great living upburst, this 
 triumphant revelation of the boundless fecundity of 
 Nature. Such was my first impression of this sea, and 
 when I saw the pictures in which genius has so well 
 marked Its profound character, Ruysdael's glooniy^s- 
 tacade beyond any other painting in the Louvre has 
 always irresistibly attracted me. Why ? In the ruddy 
 tints of those phosphorescent waters, I feel not the cold 
 of the North Sea, but the fermentation, the stream, the 
 rushing energy of life. 
 
 Nevertheless, were I asked what coast the most grand- 
 ly and powerfully impresses me, I should answer, that 
 of Bi-ittany, especially those wild and sublime head- 
 lands of granite which terminate the old world at that 
 bold point which dominates the Atlantic and defies the 
 western storm winds. Nowhere have I better felt than 
 there, those lofty and ennobling melancholies which are 
 the best impressions of the sea. 
 
 But I must explain, here. There are different mel-; 
 ancholies ; there is a melancholy of the weak, and a 
 melancholy of the strong, — the melancholy of the too 
 sensitive souls who weep only for themselves, and that 
 of the disinterested hearts, which cheerfully accept their 
 own lot, and find nature ever blessing and blessed, but 
 
S6 THE BEACH, THE SANDS, AND 
 
 feel the evils of society, and in melancholy itself find 
 strength for action, means for creating good or miti- 
 gating evil. Ah ! what need we have, we of the work- 
 ing brain, often to strengthen our souls in that mood 
 which we may call heroic melancholy. 
 
 When, some thirty years since, I paid a visit to this 
 country, I could not account for the potent attraction 
 that it had for me. At the foundation of this attractive 
 potency of Brittany, is its great harmony. Elsewhere, 
 we feel, though we cannot explain it to ourselves, a cer- 
 tain discordance between the race and the soil. The 
 very beautiful Norman race, in those districts in which 
 it is most unmixed, and where it retains the peculiar, 
 ruddy complexion of the true Scandinavian, has not 
 the slightest apparent af&nity with the territory upon 
 which it has intruded itself. In Brittany, on the con- 
 trary, on the most ancient geological formation on our 
 globe, on that soil of granite and of flint, lives a race 
 solid as that granite, shai-p as that flint, a sturdy 
 and antique race. Just as much as Normandy progres- 
 ses, Brittany retrogrades. Witty, lively, and too imag- 
 inative, the impossible, the utterly absurd, are ever wel- 
 come to her. But, if wrong on many points, she is 
 great upon a most important one ; she has character; 
 often you may think her erroneous, but never can you 
 deem her commonplace. 
 
 If we would for p, time emerge from that wretched 
 
THE IKON-BOUND COAST. 37 
 
 commonplace, that deadly liveliness, tliat horrible wak- 
 ing dream " of stupid starers and of loud huzzas," let 
 us seat ourselves on one of the impending and com- 
 manding peaks that overlook the bay of Douarneuez, — 
 the stern, bold headland, for instance, of Penmark. Or, 
 if the wind blow too strongly there for our frame, ef- 
 feminated by the late hours, the bad atmosphere, and 
 the hateful habits, and still more hateful passions, of the 
 thronged city, let us take a quiet sail among the lower 
 isles of the Morbihan, where the soft warm tide is lazy, 
 and all but soundless. Where Brittany is mild, Britta- 
 ny is surpassingly mild. Sailing among her islands and 
 on her gentler tides, you might fancy yourself on Lethe ; 
 but, on the other hand, when Brittany is aroused, Brit- 
 tany, take my word for it, is terribly strong and' terri- 
 bly iu earnest ! 
 
 In 1831 I felt only the sadness of that coast, not its 
 more than compensating inspiration ; I was yet to learn 
 the real character of that sea. It is in the most solita- 
 ry little creeks, pierced in between the wildest and 
 most rugged looking rocks, that you will find her truly 
 gay, joyous, buoyant, abounding in glad and vigorous 
 life. Those rocks seem to you to be covered by you 
 know not what greyish ashy asperities — look a little 
 more closely and you perceive that that layer of seem- 
 ing dust is a little world of living creatures, left there 
 high and dry by the ebb of the sea, to be revived and 
 
38 THE BEACH, THE SANDS, AND 
 
 fed again next tide. There, too, you see our little 
 stone workers, hosts upon hosts of those sea hedgehogs or 
 urchins, which M. Cailland has so intelligently watch- 
 ed and so admirably described. All this swarming 
 though minute world chooses and feels just contrari- 
 wise to our choice and our feeling. Beautiful Norman- 
 dy terrifies them ; the hard pebbles of the beach would 
 crush them, and they love not, either, the crumbling 
 limestone that overhangs the more smiling shore, for 
 they care not to build where at any moment building 
 and foundation may sink into the depths forever. They 
 love and affect only the solid rocks of Brittany. Let 
 us take a lesson from them, and trust only to truth and 
 not to mere appearance. The marine life shuns pre- 
 cisely those enchanting shores whose vegetable life is 
 the most abounding and the most brilliant. They are 
 rich, but rich only in fossils ; very curious are they to 
 the geologist, but they yield to him only the bones of 
 the dead. The stern granite, on the contrary, looks 
 down upon the sea swarming with its piscine life, and 
 supports upon its massive breast the humble, but none 
 the less interesting little molusca whose laborious life 
 makes the serious charm, the great moral of the sea. 
 
 And yet amidst all that teeming life there is a deep 
 silence ; that infinite population is ever and and inevi- 
 tably silent. Its life is self-concentrated, its labors un- 
 marked, uncheered, by a sound ; it has no connection 
 
THE lEON-BOUND COAST. 39 
 
 with you or me — to us, tliat life is only another aspect 
 of Death. A great and a dead solitude, says some femi- 
 nine heart ; it alarms, it saddens me. 
 
 Wrong ! All here is lovable and friendly. These 
 little creatures speak not to the world,. but they all the 
 time are hard at work for it. They yield themselves 
 up to the sublime voice of their sublime parent, the 
 Ocean, that speaks for them ; by his great utterance, 
 they speak, confidingly, and by proxy. 
 
 Between the silent earth and the mute tribes of the 
 sea, a great, strong, grave, and sympathetic dialogue is 
 constantly carried on — the harmonious agreement 
 with the Great I AM, with himself and his great work 
 — that great eternal conflict which, everywhere and al- 
 ways, is Love. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE PIEEY AND THE WATERY CIRCLE THE CURRENTS 
 
 OP THE SEA. 
 
 Scarcely has the earth east one glanee upon herself 
 ere she not merely compares herself to the Heavens 
 above, but vaunts her own superiority. Geology, the 
 mere infant, hurls a Titanic cry against her elder sis- 
 ter, Astronomy, that haughty and splendid queen of all 
 the sciences. " Our mountains," exclaims Geology, 
 " are not cast confusedly hither and thither like those 
 stars in the sky ; our mountains form systems in which are 
 found the elements of a general and orderly arrange- 
 ment of which the celestial constellations present no 
 trace." Such is the bold and impassioned phrase which 
 is uttered by a man as modest as he is illustrious, — M. 
 Elias de Beaumont. Doubtless, we have not yet devel- 
 oped the order, which, yet, we may not doubt is great, 
 which prevails in the seeming confusion of the Milky 
 Way, but the more obvious regularity of the surface of 
 the globe, the result of the revolutions in its unfathom- 
 
THE CURRENTS OP THE SEA. 41 
 
 ed and unfathomable depths, preserve still, and ever 
 will preserve, for the most ingenious science, many 
 clouds and many mysteries. The forms of that great 
 mountain, upheaved from the mighty mass of waters, 
 which we call the Earth, shows many arrangements 
 which, while they are sufficiently symmetrical, are still 
 not reducible to what would seem a perfect system. 
 The dry and elevated portions show themselves more or 
 less as the waters leave them bare. It is the limiting 
 line of the sea which, in reality, traces out the form of 
 continent and of island ; it is by tlie Sea that wo com- 
 mence all true understanding of Geography. 
 
 Let us note another fact, which has been discovered 
 only within a few years past. The Earth presents us 
 with some seemingly antagonistic features. The New 
 World, for instance, stretches from north to south, the 
 Old World from east to west ; the sea, on the contrary, 
 exhibits a great harmony, an exact correspondence be- 
 tween the two hemispheres. It is in the fluid portion 
 of our world, that portion which we have deemed to be 
 so capricious, that the greatest regularity exists. That 
 which this globe of ours presents of the most rigidly reg- 
 ular, the most symmetrical, is just that which appears 
 to be most utterly free, most entirely the mere sport of 
 unrestricted motion. No doubt, the vertebrae and the 
 bones of that vast creature have peculiarities which we, 
 as yet, are not qualified to comprehend. But its living 
 
42 THE FIERY AND THE WATERY CIRCLE. 
 
 movements which cause the ocean currents, convert 
 salt water into fresh water, which anon is converted to 
 vapor to return again to the salt water, that admirable 
 mechanism is as perfect and systematic as the sanguine- 
 ous circulation of. the superior animals ; as perfect a re- 
 semblance as.possible to the constant transformation of 
 your own venous and arterial blood. 
 
 The world would wear quite another aspect, were we 
 to class its regions, not by chains of mountains but by 
 maritime basins. 
 
 Southern Spain, resembles Morocco, more than Na- 
 varre ; Provence, resembles Algeria, rather than Dau- 
 phiny ; Senegambia, the Amazon, rather than the Red 
 Sea ; and the great valley of the Amazon, is more like 
 to the moist regions of Africa than it is to its arid neigh- 
 bors, Peru, Chili, &c. 
 
 The symmetry of the Atlantic is still more striking 
 ill its under-currents and the winds and breezes that 
 sweep over it. Their action potently helps to create 
 these analogies, and to form what we may call the /ro- 
 ternily of the shores. 
 
 The principle of Geograpliical unity, will be more and 
 more sought for in the maritime basin, where the wa- 
 ters and the winds, faithful intermediaries, create the 
 relation, the assimilation, of the opposite shores. Far 
 less can we ask this illustration of Geographical unity 
 from the mountains, where two slopes frequently pre- 
 
THE CURBENTS OP THE SEA. 43 
 
 sent to you, under the same latitude, both a Flora and 
 a population absolutely different ; on the 6ne slope, eter- 
 nal summer, on the other, eternal winter, according to 
 the aspect of each. The mountain rarely gives unity 
 of country ; far more frequently, duality, discordance, 
 actual diversity. ^ 
 
 This striking state of the case was first pointed out 
 by Borg. de Saint Vincent, and has since, in a tliousand 
 instances, been confirmed by the discoveries of Maury. 
 
 In the immense valley of the sea, beneath the double 
 mountain of the two continents, there are, strictly 
 speaking, only two basins : — 
 
 1. The basin of the Atlantic ; 
 
 2. T7ie great basin of the Indian Ocean, and the 
 Pacific. 
 
 We cannot give the name of basin to the indetermi- 
 nate cincture of the great Austral Ocean, which has no 
 boundary save that on the north it is touched by the In- 
 dian Ocean, the Coraline and the Pacific. 
 
 The Austral Ocean alone exceeds in extent all other 
 seas together, and covers almost one-half of the entire 
 globe. Apparently, the depth of that sea is in propor- 
 tion to its extent. While recent soundings of the At- 
 lantic give a result of 10,000 to 12,000 feet, Ross and 
 Denham found in the Southern Ocean from 14,000 to 
 46,000 feet. Here, too, we may note the mass of the 
 Aiitartic ice, infinitely more vast than the Arctic. We 
 
44 THE FIERY AND THE WATERY CIKCLE. 
 
 shall not be very wide of the truth, if we say that the 
 southern hemisphere is the world of waters, the uorth- 
 ' ern the world of land. 
 
 He who sails from Europe to cross the Atlantic, hav- 
 ing been fortunate enough to get clear of our ports In 
 which he tm frequently is imprisoned by the westerly 
 wind, and having cleared the variable zone of our ca- 
 pricious seas, speedily gets into the fine climate and 
 constant serenity which the N. E. breezes, the genial 
 trade-winds, spread over sea and sky. Above and 
 around, everything favors him, everything smiles upon 
 him, but, as he approaches the Line, the inspiring breei- 
 OS cease to breathe balmily upon him, and the air is al- 
 most suffocating. He enters the circle of those calms 
 which prevail under the Equator, and present unchang- 
 ably their barrier between our northern trade-winds and 
 those of the south. Heavy mists and clouds are all 
 above and around him, and the tropical rains descend 
 in mighty torrents. Bitterly the seaman complains of 
 those gloomy and deluging clouds, but only for their 
 gloomy screen what scathing beams would descend upon 
 the poor dizzy heads, and be reflected in smiting power 
 from the bright, broad mirror of the Atlantic ? Bui for 
 those torrents which fall upon the other face of our 
 globe, the Indian Ocean and the sea of Coral, what 
 would be their fermentation in the craters of their an- 
 tique volcanoes ! That dark mass of blackest clouds, 
 
THE CUIJRENTS OP THE SEA. 45 
 
 once the terror of the navigator and the, obstacle to 
 navigation, that sudden and dense night extended over 
 those broad waters form precisely the safeguard, the 
 protecting facility which softens our passage and ena- 
 bles us, sailing southward still, to meet again the bright 
 sun, the clear sky, and the balmy mildness of the regu- 
 lar winds. 
 
 Quite naturally, quite inevitably, the heats of the 
 Line raise the waters in masses of vapor, and form that 
 dark band, so threatening in appearance, but in reality 
 so beneficent. 
 
 The observer who from some other planet could look 
 upon our world would see around her a ring of clouds not 
 unlike the belt of Saturn. Did he seek the purpose 
 and the use of that ring, he might, in reply, be told — 
 " It is the regulator which, by turns absorbing and giv- 
 ing forth, equalizes the evaporation and fall of the wa- 
 ters, distributes the rains and dews, modifies the heat 
 of each country, interchanges the vapors of the two 
 worlds, and borrows from the southern world the rivers 
 and streams of our northern world." Marvellous co- 
 partnership and mutual reaction ! South America, from 
 the respiration of its vast forests, condensed into clouds, 
 fraternally nourishes the flowers and fruits of our Eu- 
 rope. The air which revives and inspirits us, is the 
 tribute paid by the hundred isles of Asia, exhaled by 
 the great vegetation of Java or Ceylon, and entrusted 
 
46 THE FIEBY AND THE WATEEY CIRCLE. 
 
 to the great cloud-messenger that turns with the world 
 
 ^nd sheds life and freshness upon it. 
 
 Place yourself in imagination upon one of the many 
 islands of the Pacific and look to the southward. Be- 
 hind New Holland you will perceive that the southern 
 ocean touches with its circular wave the two extreme 
 points of the old and the new continents. No land in 
 that antarctic world ; not one of those little islands or 
 of those pretended Polar lands which discorerers have 
 marked only to behold their disappearance, and which 
 probably have been but so many icebergs. Water, still 
 water ; water without end. 
 
 From the same post of observation on which I have, 
 
 ' in imagination, placed you, in contrast with the great 
 circle of antarctic waters, look eastward, towards the 
 arctic hemisphere, and you may discern what Kitter 
 terms the circle of fire. To speak more precisely, it is 
 an opened ring, formed by the volcanoes commencing at 
 the Cordilleras, passing by the heights of Asia, to the 
 innumerable basaltic isles of the eastern ocean. The 
 first volcanoes, those of America, present, for a length 
 of a thousand leagues a succession of sixty gigantic 
 Beacons whose constant eruptions command the abrupt 
 coast and the distant waters. The others, from New 
 Zealand to the North of the Phillipines, number eighty 
 still burning, and a countless host that are extinct. 
 Steering northward, from Japan to Kamschatka, fifty 
 
THE CURRENTS OP THE 47 
 
 flaming craters dispense their ruddy lights far away to 
 the gloomy seas of the Arctic. In the whole,there is a 
 circle of three hundred active volcanoes around the^ 
 eastern world. 
 
 On the other front of the globe, our Atlantic Ocean 
 presented a similar appearance, prior to the revolutions 
 which extinguished most of the volcanoes of Europe 
 and annihilated the continent of the Atlantis. Hum- 
 boldt believes that that great ruin, only too strongly at- 
 tested by tradition, was only too real. I may venture 
 to add that the existence of that continent was in logi- 
 cal concordance with the general symmetry of the world, 
 for that face of the globe was thus harmonized with the 
 other. There rose, with the volcano of Tenerifife, which 
 alone remains of them, and with our extinct volcanoes 
 of Auvergne, of the Rhine, &c., those which were to 
 destroy Atlantis. Altogether, they formed the coun- 
 terpoise of the volcanoes of the Antilles, and other 
 American craters. 
 
 From these burning or extinct volcanoes of India 
 and the Antilles, of the Cuban and the Javanese seas 
 proceed two enormous streams of hot water, which are 
 to warm the north, and which we may fitly term the 
 aortse of the world. They are provided, beside or be- 
 neath, with their two counter currents which, flowing 
 from the north, bring cold water to compensate the flow 
 cf hot water and preserve the balance. To the two 
 
48 THE FIEKY AND THE WATERY CIRCLE. 
 
 streams of hot water which are extremely salt, the cold 
 currents administer a mass of fresher water which re- 
 turns to the equator, the great electric furnace, where it 
 is heated and made salt. 
 
 These streams of hot water, narrow at first, some 
 twenty leagues in breadth, long preserve their force and 
 their identity, but by degrees they grow weaker as they 
 widen ultimately to about a thousand leagues. Maury 
 estimates that the hot water stream which flows from 
 the Antilles in a northernly course towards us displaces 
 and modifies a fourth part of the waters of the Atlantic. 
 These great features in the life of the seas, noticed odIj 
 recently, were, however, as visible as the continents 
 themselves. Our great Atlantic and her sister, the In- 
 dian artery, proclaim themselves by their color. In 
 each case it is a great blue torrent which traverses the 
 green waters ; so darkly blue is this torrent, that the 
 Japanese call theirs the black river. Ours is very 
 clearly seen, as it leaps boilingly from the Gulf of 
 Mexico, between Cuba and Florida, and flows west, salt, 
 and distinguishable between its two green walls. In 
 vain does the Ocean press upon it, on either side, it still 
 flows on, unbroken. By I know not what intrinsic den- 
 sity, or molijcular attraction, these blue waters arc so 
 firmly held together, that, rather than admit the green 
 water, they rear their centre into an arch, and they 
 thus slope to the right and to the left, so that anything 
 
THE CUUUENTS OF THE SEA. 49 
 
 thrown into theiu rolls off into the ocean. Rapid and 
 strong, this Gulf stream at first flows towards the 
 north, along the shores of the United States ; but, on 
 reaching the great bank of Newfoundland, its right 
 arm sweeps off to the eastward, while the left arm, 
 as an under current, hastens to create, towards the Pole, 
 the recently discovered open sea where all else around 
 is fast frozen. The right arm spreading out, and pro- 
 portionately weakened, at length reaches Europe, 
 touches Ireland and England, which again divide the 
 waters previously divided at Newfoundland. Weaker 
 and weaker, it yet carries a little warmth to Norway, 
 and carries American woods to that poor Iceland which, 
 but for them, would die frozen beneath the very fires of 
 her volcano. 
 
 The Indian and the American streams have this in 
 common, that, starting from the Line, from the electric 
 centre of the globe, they carry with them immense 
 powers of creation and agitation. On the one hand 
 they seem the deep and teeming womb of a whole world 
 of living creatures ; on the other hand, they are the 
 centre and the vehicle of tempests, whirlwinds, and 
 water spouts. So much nursing gentleness and so 
 much destroying fury ; have we not here a great contra- 
 diction ? No, it proves only that the fury disturbs only 
 the exterior and not any considerable depths. The 
 weakest creatures, shelled atomies, the microscopic me- 
 
 2 
 
50 THE FIERY AND THE WATERY CIRCLE. 
 
 dusse, fluid creatures that a mere touch dissolves, avail- 
 ing themselves of the same current, sail, in all safety, 
 though the tempest is loud and fierce right above them. 
 Few of them reach our shores ; they are met at New- 
 foundland by the cold stream from the Pole, which slays 
 them by myriads. Newfoundland is the very bone- 
 house of these frost-stricken voyagers. The lightest 
 remain in suspension, even after death ; but at length 
 sink, like snowy showers to the depths, where they de- 
 posit those banks of shells which extend from Ireland 
 to America. 
 
 Murray calls the Indian and American streams of hot 
 water, the two Milky Ways of the sea. 
 
 So similar in color, heat, direction, and describing 
 precisely the same curve, they yet have not the same 
 destiny. The American, at the very outset, enters an 
 inclement sea, the Atlantic, which, open to the North, 
 bears down the floating army of icebergs from the Pole, 
 and it thus early parts with much of its heat. The In- 
 dian stream, on the contrary, first circulating among 
 the isles, reaches a closed sea well protected from the 
 North, and thus for a long time preserves its original 
 heat, electric and creative, and traces upon our globe 
 an enormous train of life. 
 
 Its centre is the apogee of terrestrial energy, in 
 vegetable treasures, in monsters, in spices, in poisons. 
 From the secondary currents which it gives oflF, and 
 
THE CURRENTS OP THE SEA. 51 
 
 ■which flow towards the North, results another -world, 
 that of the Sea of Coral. There, says Maury, over a 
 space as large as the four continents the polypes are 
 industriously building thousands of islands, shoals, and 
 reefs, which are gradually studding and dividing that 
 sea ; shoals which at present are the annoyance and the 
 dread of the mariner, but which will at length rise to 
 the surface, join together to form a continent, which, 
 some day — who knows ? may be the refuge of the hu- 
 man race, when flood, or fire, or earthquake, leave it no 
 other shelter. 
 
 John Reyuaud in his fine article in the Encych- 
 pedie, remarks that our world is not solitary. The in- 
 finitely complicated curve which it describes represents 
 the forces, the various influences, which act upon her, 
 and bear testimony to her connection and communica- 
 tion with the great luminaries of the Heavens. 
 
 That connection and communication are especially 
 visible with the Sun and Moon ; the latter, though the 
 servant of earth, has none the less power over her. 
 As the flowers of the earth turn their heads sunward, 
 so does the flower-bearing earth aspire towards him. 
 In her most movable portion, her immense fluid mass, 
 she raises herself tind gives visible token of feeling his 
 attraction. She rises as far as she can and swelling her 
 bosom twice a day gives, at least, a sigh to the friendly 
 stars. 
 
52 THE FIERY AND THE WATERY CIRCLE. 
 
 Does not our earth feel the attraction of yet other 
 globes ? Are her tides ruled only by the sun and 
 moon ? All the learned world say it, all seamen be- 
 lieve it ; thence terrible errors resulting in shipwrecks. 
 At the dangerous shallows of Saint Malo the error 
 amounted to eighteen feet. It was in 1839 that Cha- 
 zallan, who nearly lost his life through these errors, 
 began to discover and calculate the secondary, but con- 
 siderable undulations which, under various influences, 
 modify the general tide. Stars less dominant than the 
 sun and moon have, doubtless, their share in producing 
 the alternate rise and fall of the waters of our globe. 
 But under what law do they produce this effect ? Cha- 
 zallan tells us; — " the undulation of the tide in a port 
 follows the lata of vibrating chords." A serious and 
 suggestive sentence, that, which leads us to compre- 
 hend that the mutual relations of the stars are the 
 mathematical relations of the celestial music, as anti- 
 quity affirmed. 
 
 The earth, by great and secondary tides, speaks to 
 the planets, her sisters. Do they reply to her? We 
 must think so. From their fluid elements they also 
 must rise, sensible to the rise of the waters of the earth. 
 The mutual attraction, the tendency of each star to 
 emerge from egotism, must cause sublime dialogues to 
 bo heard in the skies. Unfortunately the human ear 
 can hear but the least part of them. There is another 
 
THE CURRENTS OF THE SEA. 53 
 
 point to be considered. It is not at the very moment 
 of the passing of the influential planet that the sea 
 yields to its influence. She is in no such servile haste 
 to obey ; she must have time to feel and obey the 
 attraction. She has to call the idle waters to herself, 
 to vanquish their inert force, to attract, to draw to 
 her the most distant. The rotation of the world, too, 
 so terribly rapid, is incessantly displacing the points 
 subjected to the attractive power. To this we must 
 add that the great army of waves in its combined mo- 
 tion has to encounter all the opposition of natural 
 obstacles, — islands, capes, straits, the various curvings 
 of shores, and the no less potent obstacles of winds, 
 currents, and the rapid descent of mountain torrents, 
 swelled by the melted snows ; — these, and a thousand 
 other unforseen accidents occur, to alter the regular 
 movement into terrible strife. The ocean yields not. 
 The display of strength which is made by broad and 
 swift rivers cannot intimidate him. The waters, that 
 the rivers pour down upon him, he heaps them up into 
 mountainous masses and drives them back so violently 
 that he seems bent on forcing them to the summits of 
 the mountains from whence they have descended. 
 
 Obstacles thus numerous and various cause apparent 
 tidal irregularities, which at once impress and confuse 
 our minds. None of those irregularities is more sur- 
 prising than the diflFerence of their time between two 
 
54 THE PIBRT AND THE WATERY CIRCLE. 
 
 quite closely neighboring ports. One Havre tide, foi 
 instance, equals two of Dieppe, — as is mentioned by 
 Chazallon, Baude, &c. It is greatly to the honor of 
 human genius to have subjected phenomena so complex 
 to even proximately accurate calculation and positive 
 laws. 
 
 But beneath these exterior movements, the sea has 
 others within ; those under currents by which she is 
 traversed in various directions and at varying depths. 
 Superposed at different depths, or flowing laterally in 
 opposite directions, hot currents in one direction, cold 
 counter currents in another, they, between them, keep 
 up the circulation of the sea, the exchange of salt and 
 fresh waters, and the alternating pulsation which is the 
 result. The hot pulse-heat is from the line to the 
 pole ; the cold, from the pole to the line. Shall we be 
 warranted in saying, as it has sometimes been said, that 
 these currents so distinct and unmingling, may be 
 strictly compared to the vessels, veins and arteries,of 
 the superior animals ? Strictly speaking, we cannot so 
 compare them ; but they have considerable resemblance 
 to the less determinate circulation which materialists 
 have lately discovered in some inferior creatures* as 
 molluscs and annelides. That lacunary circulation 
 supplies the want of, and at the same time prepares, the 
 vascular ; the blood flows in currents before it has pre- 
 cise channels. 
 
THE CURRENTS OF THE SEA. 55 
 
 Such is the sea. She resembles a vast animal that 
 has stopped short at the first degree of organization. 
 Who has developed the currents, those regular fluctua- 
 tion of the abysses into which we never descend ? Who 
 has taught us the geography of those dark waters ? 
 Those that live within or float upon those waters ; — 
 animals and vegetables. We shall see how the huge 
 whale and theminute shelled atomies, how even the woods 
 of America, floating to bleak Iceland, have concurred 
 in revealing the flow of hot water from the Antilles to 
 Europe, and the counter current of cold meeting it at 
 Newfoundland, passing it beside or below, and thus 
 getting its ices melted into immense fogs. 
 
 A vast cloud of red animalcules, carried by a tem- 
 pest from Orinoco to France, explained the great aerial 
 current of the Southwest which brings to our Europe 
 the rains that have their birth place in the far Cordille- 
 ras of South America. 
 
 But for the constant change of waters which is made 
 by the currents in the depths of the sea, she would, in 
 parts, be filled up with salt, sands, animal and vegeta- 
 ble remains and the like detritus. It would be another 
 case of the Dead Sea, which, for want of movement, 
 has its banks loaded with salt, its vegetation incrusted 
 with salt, and the very winds that cross its surface, 
 burning, withering, breathing only of famine and of 
 death. 
 
56 THE FIERY AND THE WATERY CIRCLE. 
 
 All the scattered observations upon currents of tie 
 air and of the water, the seasons, the winds and the 
 tempests, were long confined to the memory of the fish- 
 ermen and sailors, and too frequently died with them. 
 Meteorology, that guide of navigation, for want of 
 being systematized and centralized seemed vain, and 
 was even denied rank and usefulness as a science. The 
 illustrious M. Biot, demanded a strict account of the 
 little that she had yet done. However, upon the two 
 opposite shores of Europe and America, persevering 
 men founded that neglected and denied science upoa 
 the basis of observation. 
 
 The latest and most celebrated of these observers, 
 Maury the American, courageously undertook what a 
 whole administration had recoiled from, viz., to extract 
 from and arrange the contents of I know not what mul- 
 titude of log books, those often confused and ill-kept 
 records of the sea captains. These extracts, reduced 
 into tables under regular heads, gave, in the result, 
 rules and generalities. A congress of seamen assem- 
 bled at Bruxelles decided that the observations, hence- 
 forth to be logged with more care, shall be sent from 
 all parts to the observatory at Washington. A noble 
 compliment, that, paid by Europe to young America 
 and her patient and ingenious Maury, the learned poet 
 of the sea. He has not only summed up and exem- 
 plified her laws ; he has done much more, for, by the 
 
THE CURRENTS OF THE SEA. 57 
 
 force of heart and by the love of nature as much as by 
 positive results, he has carried the whole world with 
 hira. His charts and his first work, of which a hun- 
 dred and fifty thousand copies were printed, are liber- 
 ally distributed to sailors of all nations by the United 
 States government. A number of eminent men in 
 Prance and in Holland, Tricot, JuUien, Margole, Zur- 
 cher, and others, have made themselves the interpre- 
 ters, the eloquent missionaries, of this apostle of the sea. 
 Why is it that in this matter America, so young, has 
 outstripped Europe, so old ? It is precisely because 
 she is young, and burning with a desire to be in close 
 connection with the whole globe. Upon her superb 
 continent and in the midst of so many states, she yet 
 deems herself solitary. So far from her European 
 brother, she looks towards that centre of civilization as 
 the earth looks toward the sun, and whatever seems to 
 draw her into closer and more familiar connection with 
 the grand old world, thrills her in every nerve. "We 
 have abundant proof of that from the joy, the intoxica- 
 tion, the perfect frenzy with which she hailed the com- 
 pletion of the submarine telegraph which joined the two 
 distant shores, and promised that they should commu- 
 nicate within the brief space of minutes, in such wise 
 that the two worlds should have but one thought. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 TEMPESTS. 
 
 It is with a very real and masterly genius that Maury 
 has demonstrated the harmony that exists between air 
 and water. As is the maritime ocean, so is the aerial 
 ocean. Their alternating movements and the exchange 
 of their elements are precisely analogous. The aerial 
 ocean distributes heat over the world and making dry- 
 ness or humidity. The latter, the air draws from the 
 seas, from the infinity of the central ocean, and espe- 
 cially at the tropics, the great boilers of the universal 
 cauldron. Dryness, on the contrary, the air acquires 
 as it sweeps over the arid deserts, the great continents, 
 and the glaciers (those true intermediate poles of the 
 globe), which draw out its last drop of moisture from 
 it. The heating at the equator and the cooling again 
 at the pole, alternating the weight and lightness of the 
 vapors, cause them to cross each other in horizontal 
 currents and counter currents ; while under the line 
 
TEMPESTS. 59 
 
 the heat which lightens the vapors creates perpendicu- 
 lar currents^ ascending from sea to sky. Previous to 
 dispersing they hover in this misty region, forming, as 
 it were, a ring of clouds around the globe. 
 
 Here, then, we have pulsations both maritime and 
 aerial, different from the pulse of the tide. This latter 
 was external, impressed by other planets upon ours, but 
 this pulse of various currents is inherent in the earth, 
 it is her own veritable life. 
 
 To my taste, one of the finest thingsin Maury's book, 
 is what he says of salt : " The most obvious agent in 
 producing maritime circulation, heat, would not alone 
 suffice ; there is another and a no less important agent, 
 nay, an even more important — it is salt." 
 
 So abundant is salt in the sea that if it could be cast 
 on shore it would form a mountain 4,500 feet thick. 
 
 Though the saltness of the sea does not vary very 
 greatly, it yet, is augmented or diminished somewhat,ac- 
 cording to locality, currents and proximity to the equa- 
 tor or to the poles. As it is more or less salted, the sea 
 is lighter or heavier, and more or less mobile. This con- 
 tinued, with its variations, causes the water to run more 
 or less swiftly, that is to say, causes currents, so like 
 the horizontal currents in the bosom of the sea and the 
 vertical currents from the sea of water upward to the 
 sea of air. 
 
 \. French writer, M. Lartique, has ingeniously cor- 
 
60 TEMPESTS. 
 
 rected some deficiences and inexactitudes in M. 
 Maury's great work " Maritime Annals." But the 
 American author had anticipated criticism by frankly 
 pointing out where and why he thought his work and 
 his science incomplete. On some points distinctly 
 confining himself to hypothesis, at times he shows 
 himself uncertain, and anxious. His frank and candid 
 book quite plainly reveals the mental struggle which the 
 author undergoes between biblical literalism and the 
 modern sentiment the sympathy of nature. The 
 former makes the sea a thing, created by GTod at once, 
 a machine turning under his hand, while the latter sees 
 in the sea a living force, almost a person, in which the 
 Loving Soul of the World, is creating still, and ever will 
 create. 
 
 It is curious to observe, how, by degrees, as it were 
 by irresistible proclivity, Maury approaches this latter 
 view. As far as possible he explains himself mechani- 
 cally, by weight, heat, density, &c. But this does not 
 suffice, and for certain cases he adds a certain molecu- 
 lar attraction or a certain magnetic action. But even 
 this does not suffice, and then he has recourse to the 
 physiological laws which govern life. He attributes to 
 the sea a pulse, veins, arteries, and even a heart. Are 
 these mere forms of style, simple comparisons? Not 
 so ; he has in him — and it is one source of his strength 
 — an imperious, an irresistible feeling of the personality 
 
TEMPESTS. 61 
 
 of tlie sea. Before him the sea was to most seamen a 
 thing; to him it is a person, a violent and terrible 
 mistress whom we must adore, but must also subdue. 
 
 He loves, he deeply loves the sea ; but on the other 
 hand, he every moment thinks it necessary to restrain 
 his enthusiasm and to keep within bounds. Like Le- 
 vammerdam, Baunet and many other illustrious men at 
 once philosophical and religious, he seems to fear that 
 in explaining nature too completely by her own phe- 
 nomena We show disrespect to Nature's God. Surely, 
 a very ill founded timidity. The more we exhibit the 
 universality of life, — the more we confess our adoration 
 of the great soul of the universe. Where would be the 
 danger were it proven that the sea in her constant as- 
 piration towards organized existence is the most ener- 
 getic form of the Eternal Desire which formerly evoked 
 this globe and still creates in it ? 
 
 This salt sea, like blood, which has its circulation, 
 its pulse, and its heart (for so Maury terms the equa- 
 tor) in which its two bloods are exchanged, is it quite 
 sure that an entity that has all these is a mere thing, 
 an inorganic elements ? 
 
 Look at a great clock, or a steam engine which imi- 
 tates almost exactly the movement of the vital forces. 
 Is that a freak of nature ? Should we not far rather 
 imagine that in these masses there is a mixture of ani- 
 mality ? 
 
62 TEMPESTS. 
 
 One immense fact that he exhibits, but only seconda- 
 rily, and as it were in a mere side view, is that the 
 infinite life of the ocean, the myriads upon myriads of 
 beings which it at every moment makes and destroys, 
 absorb its various salts to form their flesh, their shells, 
 &c., &c. They thus, by depriving the water of its salt, 
 render it lighter, and, by so much, aid in producing cur- 
 rents. In the potent laboratories of animal organiza 
 tion, as those of the Indian ocean and the Coraline, 
 that force, elsewhere less remarkable, appears as what 
 it really is — immense. 
 
 " Each of these imperceptibles," says Maury, " chan- 
 ges the equilibrium of the ocean, they harmonize and 
 compensate it." But is this saying enough ? Should 
 they not be the grand moving powers which have created 
 the currents of the sea, put the immense machine into 
 motion ? 
 
 Who knows whether this vital circulus of the ma- 
 rine animality is not the starting point of all physical 
 circulus ? If animalized sea does not give the eternal 
 impulse to the animalizable sea — not organized, indeed, 
 as yet, but aspiring to be so, and already fermenting 
 with approaching life ? 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 TEMPESTS. 
 
 There are occasional commotions of the sea, which 
 Maury, in his forcible way, calls " the Sea's spasms." 
 He especially alludes to the sudden movements which 
 appear to proceed from below, and which in the Asiatic 
 seas are often equivalent to a genuine tempest. These 
 sudden outbursts are attributed to various causes, as : 
 1st, the violent collision of two tides or currents ; 2nd, 
 the sudden superabundance of rain water on the sea's 
 surface ; 3rd, the breaking up and sudden melting of 
 the icebergs, &c. To these causes, some authors add 
 the hypothesis of electric movements and volcanic sub- 
 marine heavings. 
 
 It seems probable, however, that the depths of the 
 great mass of the waters are quite peaceable ; were it 
 otherwise, the sea would be unfitted for her office of 
 nursing-mother to her myriads upon myriads of living 
 beings. If these occasional commotions, so violent at 
 
64 TEMPESTS. 
 
 the surface, were equally so at the bottom of the sea, 
 what could preserve the nurslings of that great nursery 
 where a whole world of delicate creatures more fragile 
 even than those of our earth, are cradled in and nour- 
 ished by its waters ? The myriad-life of the Ocean as- 
 sures us that these violent commotions cannot be com- 
 mon in its depths. 
 
 Naturally, the great sea is of great general regulari- 
 ty ; subject to great periodical and uniform movements. 
 Tempests are the occasional and transient violences in- 
 to which the sea is lashed by the winds, by electric 
 power, or by certain violent crises of evaporation. They 
 are the mere accidents which reveal themselves on the 
 surface, but tell us nothing about the real, the mysteri- 
 ous personality of the sea. It would be sad reasoning 
 were we to judge of a human temperament by the rav- 
 ings of a brain-fevered man ; and by what better right 
 do we judge the sea on account of the momentary and 
 merely superficial movements which probably do not 
 make themselves felt to the depth of a very few hun- 
 dred feet ? Everywhere that the sea is very deep, we 
 may fairly assume that she is constantly calm, ever pro- 
 ducing, ever nourishing, her quite literally countless 
 brood. She takes no note of those petty accidents 
 which occur only at the surface. The mighty hosts of 
 her children that live, as we cannot too often repeat, in 
 the depths of her peaceful night, and rise at the most 
 
TEMPESTS. 65 
 
 only once a year within the influence of light and storm 
 must loTe their great, calm, prolific mother as Harmony 
 itself. 
 
 But these surface-disturbances of the great mother 
 Ocean have too serious a bearing upon the life of man, 
 to allow of his sparing any pains towards obtaining a 
 thorough comprehension of them. And to obtain that 
 comprehension is no easy matter ; in making the neces- 
 sary observations, the boldest of us is a little apt to lose 
 his cool presence of mind. Even the most serious descrip- 
 tions give only vague and general features, scarcely 
 anything of the marked individuality which makes 
 every tempest a thing of originality, a thing sui generis, 
 the unforeseen result of a thousand unknown circum- 
 stances, potent in their influence, but obscure far be- 
 yond our power of search. He who safely gazes from 
 his safe watch-tower on the shore, may, no doubt, see 
 more clearly, as he is not distracted by his own danger. 
 But for that very reason, he cannot so well appreciate 
 the temp»st in its grand and terrible entirety, as he can 
 who is in the very centre of its rage and of its power, 
 and looks in every direction upon that terrible pano- 
 rama 1 
 
 We mere landsmen are indebted to the bold naviga- 
 tors for at least the courtesy of giving what old Chau- 
 cer calls " faith and full credence " to what they tell us 
 about what they have actually seen and suffered. It 
 
66 TEMPESTS. 
 
 seems to me that there is exceedingly bad taste in that 
 sceptical levity which men of the study, those stay-at- 
 home travellers occasionally exhibit in their criticisms 
 of what seamen tell us, for instance, about the height 
 of the waves. They laugh at the seaman who tells us 
 of waves a hundred feet in height. Engineers affect to 
 be able to measure the tempest, and to assure us that 
 twenty feet is the utmost height of a wave. On the 
 other hand, an excellent observer assures us, on the tes- 
 timony of his own sight, that standing in safety on the 
 shore, observing calmly, and in absence of all distrac- 
 tion, he has seen waves that would overtop the towers 
 of Notre Dame, and the heights of Montmartre. It is 
 abundantly evident that these opposing witnesses speak 
 of two totally different things ; and hence their flat 
 contradiction. If we speak of the lower bed of the 
 tempest, of those long bowling waves which even in 
 their fury preserve a certain regularity, probably the 
 calculation of the engineers is pretty exact. With 
 their rounded crests alternating with depresse(J valleys, 
 it is likely enough that their utmost height does not 
 greatly exceed twenty or five-and-twenty feet. But 
 your chopping sea, where cross wave furiously hurls it- 
 self against cross wave, rises far higher. In their 
 fierce collision they hurl each other to a quite prodi- 
 gious height, and fall with a crushing weight, assailed 
 by which the stoutest craft would open her seams, and 
 
TEMPESTS. 67 
 
 go bodily down into the dark depths of the angry sea. 
 Nothing so heavy as sea water, in those mighty shocks, 
 those enormous falls of whicn sailors truthfully speak, 
 and of which none but those who have witnessed them, 
 can calculate the tremendous greatness and power. 
 
 On a certain day, not of tempest but of emotion, 
 when old Ocean indulged only in .wild and graceful gai- 
 eties, I was tranquilly seated upon a beautiful headland 
 of some eighty feet in height, and I enjoyed myself in 
 watching the waves as upon a line of a quarter of a 
 league they rushed in as if to assail my rocky seat, the 
 green crest of each wave rounding and rearing, wave 
 urging wave as though in actual and intelligent raciflg. 
 Now and then a sea would strike so that my very head- 
 land seemed to tremble, and burst as with a thunder 
 clap at my very feet. Advancing, retiring, returning, 
 breaking, the wildly sportive waves were for a long 
 time quite admirably regular in their movements. But 
 on a sudden this regularity was at an end. Some wild 
 cross wave from the west suddenly struck my great reg- 
 ular and hitherto well behaved wave from the south. 
 Such was the crash that in an instant the very sky above 
 me was darkened by the blinding spray ; and on my 
 lofty promontory I was covered, not with the many 
 colored and fleeting mist, but with a huge, dark, mas- 
 sive wave, which fell on me, heavy, crushing, and tho- 
 roughly saturating. Ah ! Just then I should very much 
 
68 TEMPESTS. 
 
 have liked the company of those very learned Acade- 
 micians and ultra positive Engineers, who are so well 
 fiosted up in the combats of the Ocean, and so very cer- 
 tain that the utmost height of a veave is just twenty 
 feet ! No ; tranquilly seated in our studies we should 
 not lightly question the veracity of so many bold, hardy, 
 and resolved men, who have looked Death in the face 
 too often to be guilty of the childish vanity of exaggerat- 
 ing -the dangers which they have often braved — and 
 are ready to brave again. Nor should we ever oppose 
 the calm narratives of ordinary navigators on the great 
 and well known courses to the animated and often thril- 
 ling pictures occasionally presented to us by the bold 
 discoverers who seek the very reefs and shoals which 
 the common herd of sailors so carefully avoid. Cook, 
 Peron, Durville — discoverers such as these incurred 
 very real dangers in the then unfrequented Australian 
 and Coraline seas, compelled as they were to dare the 
 continually shifting sand bank, and the coniiicting cur- 
 rents which raise such frightful commotions in the nar- 
 row channels. 
 
 " Without tempest, with only roIlei:s to deal with, 
 and with a moderate wind right abaft, a cross wave 
 will giv^ your craft such a shock, that the ship's bell 
 will strike, and if these big rollers with their sweeping 
 motion, continue for any time, your masts will go by 
 the board, your seams will open — you will be a wreck." 
 
TEMPESTS. 69 
 
 So says the experienced Durville — gallant sailor, if 
 ever there was one. And he tells us that he has him- 
 self seen waves from eighty to a hundred feet high. 
 " These waves," he says, " only boarded us with their 
 mere crests, or the craft must have been swamped. As 
 it was she staggered, and then for an instant stood still, 
 as though too terrified to understand what was the mat- 
 ter. The men upon the deck were for moments com- 
 pletely submerged. For four long hours that night this 
 horrible chaos endured ; and those hours seemed an 
 eternity to turn one's hair grey. Such are the southern 
 tempests, so terrible that even ashore the natives have 
 a presentiment of their approach, and shelter them- 
 selves in caves." 
 
 However exact and interesting these descriptions 
 may be, I do not care to copy them ; still less would I 
 bo bold enough to invent descriptions of what I have 
 not seen. I will only speak briefly about tempests 
 which I have seen, and which have, as I believe, taught 
 me the different characteristics of the Ocean and the 
 Mediterranean. 
 
 During half a year that I passed at about two leagues 
 from Genoa, on the prettiest shore in the world, at Ner- 
 vi, I had in that sheltered spot but one little sudden 
 tempest, but while it lasted it raged with a quite won- 
 derful fury. As I could not, quite so well as I wished, 
 watch it from my window, I went out and along the 
 
70 TEMPESTS. 
 
 narrow lanes that separate the palaces, I ventured down, 
 not indeed, to the beach, for in reality, there is none 
 worthy the name, but to a ledge of black, volcanic rock, 
 which forms the shore, a narrow path, often not exceed- 
 ing three feet in width, and as often overhanging the 
 sea at varying heights of from thirty up to sixty feet. 
 One could not see far out ; the spray continually raised 
 by the whirlwind, drew the curtain too closely too al- 
 low of one's seeing far, or seeing much, but all that 
 was to be seen was sufl5ciently frightful. The ragged- 
 ness, the salient and cutting angles, of this iron-bound 
 coast, compelled the tempest to make incredible efforts, 
 to take tremendous leaps, as, foaming and howling, it 
 broke upon the pitiless rocks. The tumult was absurd, 
 mad; there was nothing connected, nothing regular;' 
 discordant thunders were mingled or followed by sharp 
 shrill shrieks, like those of the steam engine ; piercing 
 shrieks, against which one only in vain tried to stop his 
 ars. Stunned by this wild scene, which assailed sight 
 and hearing at once,, I steadied myself against a pro- 
 jecting wall of rock, and thus comparatively sheltered, 
 I was better able to study the grandly furious strife. 
 Short and chopping were the waves, and the fiercest of 
 the strife was on this side where the sea broke on the 
 ragged, yet sharply pointed rocks, as they rose boldly 
 above, and ran out far beneath the waves, in long, 
 shelving, reefs. The -eye, as well as the ear was vexed, 
 
TEMPESTS. 71 
 
 for a blinding snow was falling, its dazzling whiteness 
 heightened by contrast with the dark waves into which 
 it fell. 
 
 On the whole, I felt that the Sea had less to do than 
 the land in rendering the scene terrible ; it is exactly 
 the contrary on the Ocean. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE STORM OP OCTOBER, 1859. 
 
 The storm, which of all storms, I had the best oppor- 
 tunity of observing, was that which swept in fury over 
 the west of France, from the 24th of October 1859, to 
 the 31st of the same month, the implacable and inde- 
 fatigable storm, which, with but few and very short in- 
 tervals, raged fui-iously for six days and six nights, and 
 strewed our whole western coasts with wrecks. Both 
 before and after that storm, the barometer indicated 
 great disturbances, and the telegraphic communications 
 were cut off by the breaking of the wires, or the mag- 
 netic falsifications. Very hot seasons had preceded 
 this tempest, but it brought us a succession of very dif- 
 ferent weather ; rainy, and cold. Even 1860, up to the 
 very day on which I write these lines, is marked by 
 heavy rain storms, and cold winds from the west, and 
 south, which seem to bring us all the rains of the At- 
 lantic, and of the great South Sea. 
 
THE STORM OP OCTOBER, 1859. 73 
 
 I watched this tempest from a spot so smiling and 
 peaceful that tempest was the last thing that one would 
 anticipate there. I speak of the little port of Saint 
 George, nearRoyan, just at the entrance of the Gironde. 
 I had passed an exceedingly quiet five months there, 
 meditating what I should say on the subject which I had 
 treated upon in 1859 ; that subject at once so serious 
 and so delicate. The place and the book are alike 
 filled with memories very agreeable to me. Could I 
 have written that book in any other place ? I know 
 not ; but one thing is quite certain : the wild perfume 
 of that country ; its aspect, at once staid and gentle, 
 and the vivifying odors of its Brooms, that pungent 
 and agreeable shrub of the Landes, had much to do 
 with that book, and will ever be associated with it in 
 my thought. 
 
 The people of the place are well matched with its 
 aspect and its nature. No vulgarity, no coarseness, 
 among them. The farming population are grave in 
 manner, and moral in speech and conduct, and the sea- 
 going population, consists, for the most part, of pilots, 
 a little band of Protestants, escaped from persecution. 
 All around, too, there is an honesty so primitive that 
 locks and bolts are absolutely unknown there. Noise 
 and violence are utterly out of the question among peo- 
 ple who are modest and reserved, as seamen seldom 
 are, and who have a quiet and retiring tact not always 
 ■i 
 
74 THE STORM OF OCTOBER, 1859. 
 
 to be found among a far more pretentious and highly 
 placed people. Though well known to and well re- 
 spected by them, I yet enjoyed all the solitude which 
 study and labor demanded. I was all the more inter- 
 ested in these people and their perils. "Without speak- 
 ing to them, I daily and hourly watched them in their 
 heroic labors, and heartily wished them both safety and 
 success. I was suspicious of the weather, and looking 
 upon the dangerous channel, I often asked myself 
 whether the sea, so long gentle and lovely, would not, 
 sooner or later, show us quite another countenance. 
 
 This really dangerous place has nothing sad or 
 threatening in its aspect. Every morning, from my 
 window, I could watch the white sails, slightly ruddied 
 by the morning beams, of quite a fleet of small coast- 
 ers, that only waited for a wind to leave the little port. 
 At this port, the Girondc is fully nine miles wide. 
 With some of the solemnity of the great rivers of 
 America, it combines the gaiety of Bourdeaux. Eoy- 
 an is a pleasure place, a bathing town which is resort- 
 ed to by all Gascony. Its bay, and the adjoining one 
 of St. George, are gratuitously regaled with the wild 
 pranks of the porpoises, that boldly venture into the 
 river, and into the very midst of the bathers, leaping, 
 at once heavily and gracefully, six feet, and more, 
 above the surface of the water. It would seem that 
 they are profoundly convinced of the fact, that no one 
 
THE STORM OF 0CT03EE, 1859. 75 
 
 thereabout is addicted to fishing ; that at that point of 
 great daring and great labor, where from hour to hour 
 all hands may be called upon to succor some imperilled 
 vessel, folks will scarcely care to slay the poor Por- 
 poise, for his oil. 
 
 To this gaiety of the waters, add the especially har- 
 monious beauty of the two shores, as the abounding 
 vineyards of Medoc look across to the varied cul- 
 ture of the fertile fields of Saintonge. The sky, here, 
 has not the fixed, and sometimes rather monotonous 
 beauty of the Mediterranean, but, on tlie contrary, is 
 very changeable. Prom the mingling waters of sea and 
 river, rise variegated mists, which cast back upon the 
 watery mirror, strange gleamings of gorgeous coloring, 
 rod, blue, deepest orange, and most delicately pale 
 green. Pantastic shapes, " a moment seen, then gone 
 for ever," " appearing only to depart, and seen only to 
 be regretted," adorn the entrance to the Ocean with 
 strange monuments of bold collouades, sublime bridges, 
 and, occasionally, triumphal arches. 
 
 The two crescent-shaped shores of Royan and Saint 
 Georges, with their fine sands afford to the most deli- 
 cate feet a delightful promenade of which one does not 
 easily grow tired, tempted, and regaled as we are by 
 the perfume of the pines which so enliven the downs 
 with their young verdure. The fine promontories 
 which overlook these shores, and the sandy inland 
 
76 THE STOKM OP OCTOBER, 1859. 
 
 downs send near and far their healthful perfumes. That 
 which predominates on the downs has a something of 
 medicinal, a mingled odor, which seems to concentrate 
 all the sun and the warmth of the sands. The inland 
 heaths furnish the more pungent odors which stir the 
 brain and cheer the heart ; thyme, and wild thymOj and 
 marjoram, and sage which our fathers held sacred for 
 its many virtues, and peppermint, and, above aU, the 
 little wild violet, exhale a mingled odor surpassing all 
 the spicy odors of the far East. 
 
 It seems to me that on these heaths the birds sing 
 more beautifully than elsewhere. Never have I heard 
 elsewhere such a lark as I listened to in July on the 
 promontory of Valli^re, as she rose higher and higher, 
 her dark wings gilded and glinting in the rays of the 
 fast setting sun. Her notes coming from a height of 
 probably a thousand feet were as sweet as they must 
 needs have been powerful. It was to her humble nest, 
 to her upward gazing and listening nestlings that she 
 evidently sang her " wood notes wild," her song at 
 once so rustic and so sublime, in \^ich one might fancy 
 that she translated into harmony that glorious sunlight 
 in which she hovered, and called to her nestlings — 
 " Come up hither my little ones, come ! " 
 
 Out of all these, perfumes and song, soft air, and sea 
 made mild by the waters of the beautiful river, proceed- 
 ed an infinitely agreeable, though not very brilliant 
 
THE STORM OP OCTOBER, 1859. 77 
 
 harfittony. The moon' shone with a Softened light, the 
 stafs were quite visible, but not very bright, and the- at- 
 mosphere so mild and pleasant, that it would have 
 been voluptuous, that whole scene and its accessaries 
 had there tiot mingled with all a something, which 
 made one reflect, and substituted active thought for 
 luxuriously idle reverie. 
 
 And why so ? Do those shifting sands, those many 
 colored and varying hues of the dowhs, and that crum- 
 bling and fossiliferous limestone remind you Of the 
 eternal change, that one only rule which here on earth 
 has no exception ? Or^ is it the silent but undying mem- 
 ory of the persecuted Protestants ? It is also, and in 
 still greater power, the solemnity of the roadstead, the 
 frequency of wrecks, the near neighborhood of tho most 
 terrible of seas, by which the interior becomes so 
 serious, so suggestive of great and solemn thought. 
 
 A great mystery is being enacted here, a treaty, a 
 marriage infinitely more important than any human and 
 royal nuptials ; a marriage of interest between ill 
 matched spouses. The lady of the waters of the south- 
 west, swelled and quickened by Tarn and Dordogne 
 and by those fierce brethren the torrents of the Pyr- 
 enees, hastens, that amiable and sovereign Gironde, to 
 present herself to her giant spouse, old Ocean, here, 
 more than elsewhere, stern and repulsive. The mud 
 banks of the Charente and the long line of sands which, 
 
78 THE STORM OP OCTOBER, 1859. 
 
 for fifty leagues, oppose liim, put him in bad humor ; 
 and when he cannot hurtle fiercely against Bayonne 
 and Saint Jean de Luz, he pitilessly assaults the poor 
 Gironde. Her outlet is not liite that of the Seine, be- 
 tween sheltering shores ; she falls at once into the pres- 
 ence of the open and limitless ocean. Generally, he 
 repels her ; she recoils to the right and to the left, and 
 seeks shelter in the marshes of Saintonge, or among 
 the Medoc vineyards to whose vines she imparts the 
 cool and sober qualities of her own waters. 
 
 And now imagine the boldness of the men who throw 
 themselves headlong into 'the strife between two such 
 spouses ; who go in the frail boat to the aid of the tim- 
 orous craft who wait at the mouth of the pass afraid to 
 venture in. Such is the boldness of my pilots here; 
 a boldness at once so modest, so heroic, so glorious, 
 could it but be .fully described. 
 
 It is easy to understand that the old monarch of ship- 
 wrecks, the antique treasurer and guardian of so much 
 submerged wealth bears no great good will towards the 
 bold ones who venture to dispute with him his prey. 
 If he sometimes allows them to succeed, sometimes 
 also he avenges himself upon them — more malignantly 
 delighted to drown one pilot than to wreck two ships. 
 
 But for sometime past no such accident had been 
 spoken of. The exceedingly hot summer of 1859, pro- 
 duced only one wreck in this neighborhood; but I 
 
THE STORM OF OCTOBKR, 1859. 79 
 
 knew not what agitation even then foretold greater dis- 
 asters. September came, then October, and the bril- 
 liant crowd of visitors, loving the sea only when it is 
 calm and smiling, already took its departure. I still 
 remained, partly kept there by my unfinished work, 
 partly by the strange attraction wjiich that season of 
 the year has for me. 
 
 In October we had strange eccentric winas, such as 
 seldom blow there ; a burning storm-wind from the 
 East, that quarter usually so peaceable. The nights 
 were occasionally very hot, even more so in October 
 than in August ; sleepless, agitated, nervous nights ; 
 nights to quicken the pulse to the fever pace, and with- 
 out apparent cause to render one excited and peevish. 
 
 One day as we sat among the pines, beaten by the 
 wind though somewhat sheltered by the downs, we 
 heard a young voice, singularly clear, piercing, reso- 
 nant, and, so to speak, metallic. It was the voice of a 
 very young girl, small in figure, but austere in counte- 
 nance. She was walking with her mother and singing 
 snatches of an old ballad. We invited her to sit down 
 and sing us the whole of it. This old ballad, this rus- 
 tic little poem admirably expressed the double spirit of 
 the country. Saintonge is, in the first place, essentially 
 rustic and home-loving, with none of the wild adven- 
 turous impulses of the Basques. And yet in spite of 
 her sedentary tastes Saintonge turns sailor and goes forth 
 
80 THE STORM OP OCTOBER, 1859. 
 
 into not unfrequent dangers. And why? The old 
 ballad explains : 
 
 The lovely daughter of a king while washing, like 
 Nausica of the Odyssey, loses her ring in the sea * a 
 young lover dives in search of it, and is drowned. She 
 weeps his loss so bitterly that she is changed into the 
 rosemary of the shore, at once so bitter and so odorous. 
 This ballad, heard in that pine wood already shudder- 
 ing and moaning at the threatening storm, touched and 
 delighted me, but at the same time strengthened my 
 secret presentiments. 
 
 "Whenever I went to Roy an, I might calculate upon 
 being overtaken, unsheltered, in a storm, before I could 
 accomplish that short journey of only a few hours. It 
 pressed upon me in the vineyards of Saint George and 
 the heathy table land of the promontory which I first 
 ascended ; and it pressed upon me more heavily still as 
 I traversed the great semi-circular shore of Royan. 
 Even now, in October, the heath exhaled all its per- 
 fumes of wild flowers and shrubs, and their perfumes 
 seemed to me more pungent now than ever. On the 
 still unvexed shore, the wind, warmly and gently 
 fanned my cheek, and the no less gentle sea in murmur- 
 ing ripples strove to kiss ray feet. But for both 
 caressing wind and gently murmuring wave, I was too 
 well prepared, too suspicious, to be deceived by them. 
 3y way of prelude to the great change, after so many 
 
THE STORM OP OCTOBER, 1859. 81 
 
 beautiful and almost effeminating evenings, suddenly, in 
 the very middle of the night, burst forth a frightful 
 gale of wind. Again and again this occurred, but 
 especially on the night of the 26th. On that night I 
 felt sure that some great damage must needs be done. 
 Onr pilots had gone out on their generous and perilous 
 errand. During those long fluctuations of the equinoc- 
 tial weather they had hesitated somewhat, delayed 
 some little, then they grew impatient of delay, duty 
 and business called to them aloud, and they resolved to 
 put out, at the risk of some sudden and ruinous gust. 
 I felt that there would be some such ; I whispered to 
 myself, "some one perishes now." And too truly was 
 it so. 
 
 From a pilot boat, which, in face of the bad weather, 
 put out to rescue a vessel imperilled in the pass, an un- 
 fortunate man was swept from the deck, and the boat, 
 herself in utmost peril was unable to lie-to for him. He 
 left three young children and a pregnant wife. Wiiat 
 rendered this calamity especially to be regretted, was 
 the fact that this excellent young man, with the gener- 
 ous affection so common among sailors, had married a 
 poor gii-1 rendered incapable of earning her bread by 
 an accident which had mutilated her hands. Alas ! 
 How much was she to be pitied, helpless, pregnant, 
 burdened with a young family — and thus suddenly 
 widowed ! 
 
82 THE STOEM OP OCTOBER, 1859. 
 
 * 
 
 A subscription was made for her, and I went to Roy- 
 an, with my mite towards it. A pilot whom I met 
 there, spol^e to me, with real grief and emotion, of the 
 sad accident. " Ah, Sir," said he, " such is our hard 
 profession ; it is precisely when wind and sea are most 
 angry, and most threatening, that it is especially incum- 
 bent upon us to go forth." The marine commissioner, 
 who keeps the register of the living and the dead of 
 that little community, and who, better than any one 
 else, knows the history and the circumstances of every 
 family there, appeared to me to be exceedingly sadden- 
 ed and anxious. It was plain that he thought, as I 
 did, that this was only the beginning of calamity. 
 
 I resumed my journey along the shore, and in the 
 course of it, I had the opportunity to notice and study 
 the dark zone of clouds which hemmed me in on every 
 side, to the extent of, I should judge, not less than 
 eight or ten leagues. On my left was Saintonge, ex- 
 pectant, dull, passive ; ou my right, Medoc, from which 
 I was separated by the river, lay in a gloomy and misty 
 stillness. Behind me, coming from the west and brooci- 
 ing over the Ocean, was a whole world of cloud and 
 mist, but in my face, and opposing that world of cloud, 
 blew the fresh land-breeze. Sweeping down the course 
 of the Gironde, it seemed that the funereal pall that rose 
 above the Ocean, might be repulsed and dispelled. Still 
 uncertain. I looked behind me to the shoal of Cordo 
 
THE STOnM OF OCTOBER, 1859. 83 
 
 van, from which, pale, fantastic, weird, its tower rose 
 like some spectre that said — " Woe, woe, woe ! " 
 
 I was not mistaken. I saw quite plainly that the 
 land breeze not only would be conquered, but that it 
 would be compelled to become the help-mate of its 
 seeming foe. That land-breeze blew quite low over the 
 Gironde, swept away from before it all dwarfish ob- 
 stacles, but still hovered beneath the high pitched and 
 inky clouds that swept in from the Ocean, and formed 
 for those clouds, as it were, a slippery inclined plane 
 over which they would glide only the more easily and 
 the more swiftly. In a brief space all was still from 
 the landward, every breath died away beneath the thick 
 grey mists ; and, unopposed, the upper winds swept the 
 ominous storm-clouds shoreward. 
 
 When I reached the vineyards of Valli^re, near St. 
 George, hosts of people were busily at work, striving 
 to improve the brief time during which they could hope 
 to labor. The first heavy drops of rain came down, 
 solid and smiting as so much molten lead, and in an- 
 other instant, one was right glad to find a sheltering 
 roof. 
 
 I had seen my full share of tempests. I had read 
 ray full share of descriptions of them ; and I was pre- 
 pared to expect anything and everything from their fu- 
 ry and from their power. But nothing that I had eith- 
 er seen or read, had prepared me for the effects of this 
 
84 THE 8T0KM OP OCTOBER, 1859. 
 
 tempest, so fierce, so long-enduring, so implacable in its 
 unceasing and uniform fury. When, from time to time, 
 ■we have a pause, even the slightest mitigation, even a 
 change, however slight, in the Tempest's moods and 
 manifestations, our over-distended senses also relax, re- 
 cuperate, prepare themselves for the next assault. But 
 in this case, night after night, day after day, for six 
 weary and wearying nights and days, the storm-fiend 
 never winked an eye or spared a blow. Pierce, strong, 
 angry, implacable; still the storm-fiend raged, untir- 
 ing, and unsparing. On mine honor, see ye ! it was 
 something to daunt the boldest, to suggest despair to 
 the most hopeful. No thunder, no crashing combat of 
 the positive and negative storm-clouds, no loud and an- 
 imating crash of the meeting and contending waves. 
 All around was one dark, leaden, sinister, ominous, and 
 mysterious pall of cloud and mist, all above us one 
 black sky, terminated in the horizon by a sickly and 
 leaden line brooding over a slowly heaving and mighty 
 mass of leaden looking sea ; — so slowly and monoto- 
 nously heaving that one almost wished for the coming 
 storm-blast to rouse them into a fierce fury, less terri- 
 ble, less oppressive, than their horribly oppressive mo- 
 notony. No poetry of a great terror could oppress one 
 like this most prosaic and dark monotony. Still, still 
 and ever, came from the deep bosom of the coming 
 storm the same terribly monotonous — " Woe, woe ! 
 
THE STORM OP OCTOBER, 1859. 85 
 
 Alas, alas, alas ! " Our abode was close upon the 
 shore. We were no mere spectators of that scene ; we 
 were in it, of it, sharers, actors, thrilled actors in that 
 sublime scene. Every now and then the wild sea came 
 within twenty feet of us ; at every rush, she made 
 our very hearth stone quiver beneath our feet. Happi- 
 ly, the ever-rising and terrible sou' west wind struck 
 our windows only obliquely, or we should have been 
 drowned as we gazed, so vast was the torrent, nay the 
 deluge, which every blast bore upon its mighty bosom, 
 alike from the clouds above, and from the vexed and 
 upheaving Ocean below. In haste, and with no small 
 difficulty, we fastened the shutters, and lighted lamps, 
 that we might at least look coming fate in the face. In 
 those apartments which looked out upon the landward, 
 the noise and the perturbation were no jot or tittle in- 
 ferior. I wrote on, curious to ascertain whether this 
 wild outburst of nature could in reality oppress and 
 fetter a free intellect, and I thus kept my intellect ac- 
 tive, agile, cool, thoroughly in self-command. I wrote, 
 I noted, I compared, I drew mine own conclusions. At 
 length, worn out solely by fatigue, and abstinence, and 
 the want of 
 
 " Tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy deep," 
 
 I felt myself deprived of that which I believe to be one 
 of the most important of the writer's powers, the quick, 
 
86 THE STORM OP OCTOBER, 1859. 
 
 sure, delicate sense of rythra ; I felt that my sentences 
 became inharmonious. That sense of rythm was the 
 first cord in my being to snap, broken, inharmonious, 
 over-strained, — ruined. 
 
 The mighty howling of the Tempest had but one va- 
 riation, in the weird and strange tones of the winds that 
 pitilessly yet mournfully assailed us. The house in 
 which I was seated was directly in their path ; and they 
 they therefore assaulted it in utmost fury and apparent- 
 ly on every side at once. Now it was the strong, stern 
 blow of the master, impatient to enter his own house ; 
 anon some strong hand tried to dash open the shutters ; 
 and again came shrill shrieks down the wide chimneys, 
 wailing for the master's exclusion, fiercely threatening, 
 if we did not admit him, and, at length, furious and 
 mighty attempts to force an entry by dislodging the very 
 roof from its rafters. And all these sounds were occa- 
 sionally dominated by the sad, deep, melancholy, Heu, 
 heu ! Alas, alas ! Woe, woe, and Desolation. So im- 
 mense, so potent, so terrible was that Heu, heu ! of 
 chorusing wind and sky, that even the voice of the bold 
 storm-blast seemed to us, in comparison, secondary and 
 mild. At length, the wind managed to clear a way for 
 the rain ; our house — I had almost said our craft — be- 
 gan to leak ; the roof, opening its seams here and there, 
 admitted the rain in torrents. 
 
 Still worse, the fury of the Tempest, by a desperate 
 
THE STOKM OP OCTOBEB, 1859. 87 
 
 effort, loosened one of the hinges of a shutter, which 
 still remained closed, but from that moment shook, 
 creaked, shrieked, in the most dismal fashion that you 
 can imagine. To make it fast I had to open the win- 
 dow, and that moment that I did so, though sheltered 
 by the shutter, I felt myself in the very centre of the 
 whirlwind, half-deafened by the frightful force of a 
 sound equal to that of a cannon fired close to one's ear. 
 Through the cracks of the shutter I perceived what 
 gave me a clear notion of the tremendous power that 
 was raging landward, skyward, seaward, horizontally, 
 upward, and downward. The waves, meeting and bat- 
 tling, smote each other so fiercely that they could not' 
 descend again. Gust after gust from beneath them, 
 carried them landward ; mighty and vast as they were, 
 they were borne landward as though so many feathers, 
 by the upheaving force of those mighty blasts. 
 
 How would it have been, if, shutters and windows 
 being driven in, our poor room had shipped one of those 
 vast billows which the storm-wind thus hurled upon the 
 adjacent heaths ? We were, in fact, exposed to the 
 strange chance of being shipwrecked on the land. Our 
 house, so close to the shore, might at any moment have 
 its roof or even its upper story carried right away by 
 wind and wave. The villagers often told us that that 
 was, in fact, their nightly thought and their nightly ter- 
 ror, and they advised us to seek a more inland shelter. 
 
88 THE STORM OF OCTOBER, 1859. 
 
 But we still comforted ourselves with the thought that 
 the longer this tempest had lasted, the sooner it must 
 come to an end ; and, to the undoubtedly reasonable 
 advice thus given to us, our reply was, still, "To- 
 morrow, to-morrow." 
 
 The overland news that came to us, told of noth- 
 ing but wrecks, still wrecks. Close by us, on the 30th 
 of October, a vessel from the South Sea, with a crew of 
 thirty hands, foundered, with a loss of all hands and 
 her rich cargo — and this at the very entrance of the 
 roadstead. After having passed through so many 
 storms and calms, after having safely weathered so 
 many rocks and shoals, she had arrived within sight, 
 within hail, almost within touch of a little beach of fine 
 sand, the fine-weather bathing place of delicate and 
 timid women. Well ! That seemingly gentle little 
 sandy beach, upheaved into a huge and impassable sand- 
 bar — was the grave of the good ship, which ran upon 
 it with frightful force, and was crushed, shivered into 
 small pieces — converted from a " thing of life," into a 
 mutilated corpse. What became of the crew ? Not a 
 trace of them has ever been found ; they were proba- 
 bly swept, vainly struggling, from the deck, and swal- 
 lowed up by the sands. 
 
 This tragical event very naturally led us to suspect 
 that many similar ones had occurred, elsewhere, and 
 nothing was thought of or talked of but probable calam 
 
THE STORM OP OCTOBER, 1860. 89 
 
 aties. But the sea seempd by, no means at the end of 
 her work. "We on shore had had quite enough of it. 
 Not so our enraged sea. I saw our pilots, sheltering 
 themselves behind a rocky wall from south-west, keep 
 an anxious lookout seaward, and shake; their heads in 
 ominous doubt of what was even yet to come. Happily 
 for them, no craft made her appearance in the offing — 
 or they were there to risk, most probably to lose, their 
 lives. And I, also, looked anxiously out upon that sea, 
 on which I looked no less in hate than in anxiety. 
 True, I was in no real danger, but for that very reason 
 I was all the more despairingly the victim of ennui. 
 That sea had a look at once hideous and terrible ; her 
 vagaries were as absurd as her strength was irresistible. 
 Nothing there reminded one of the fanciful descriptions 
 of the poets. By a strange contrast, the more I felt 
 myself depressed, and as it were, lifeless, the more vig- 
 orously and vehemently did she seem to feel and mani- 
 fest her life ; as though, galvanized by her own furious 
 motion, she had become animated by some strange, fan- 
 tastic soul. In the general rage, each wave seemed an- 
 imated by its own special and sentient rage ; in the 
 whole uniformity, (paradoxical as it may seem, it, yet, 
 is quite true) there was, as it were some diabolical 
 swarming. Was all this attributable to my worn brain 
 and wearied eyes ? Or were the reality and the impres- 
 sion alike true ? Those waves reminded me of some 
 
90 THE STORM OP OCTOBER, 1859. 
 
 terrible Tnob, some horrid rabblement, not of men, but 
 of howling dogs, a myriad of howling and eager dogs, 
 wolves — maddened and furious dogs and wolves. Dogs 
 and wolves, do I say ? Let me rather say, a dread con- 
 course of nameless, and detestable, and spectral beasts, 
 eyeless and earless, but with hugely yawning jaws, foam- 
 ing and eager for blood, blood, still more blood ! 
 
 Monsters ! what more do ye require ? Are ye not 
 surfeited with wrecked ships and slain men ? Do we 
 not from all sides hear of your horrid triumphs ? What 
 more, I ask, do ye demand ? And the horrid phantoms 
 answer — " Thy death, universal Death, the destruction 
 of the Earth, a return to black Night and ancient 
 Chaos." 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE BEACONS. 
 
 Impetuous is the channel where her strait receives the 
 full rush of the North sea, and very turbulent is the 
 sea of Brittany, rushing over basaltic shoals in swift 
 and furious rapids. But the gulf of Gascony, from 
 Cordouan to Biarritz, is just one long maritime con- 
 tradiction, one enigma of mighty strifes. As she goes 
 to the southward, she suddenly becomes extraordinarily 
 deep, as though her waters sank, on the instant into 
 some vast and fathomless abyss. Passing over that 
 sudden and immense depth, the onward wave under the 
 impulse of the terrible pressure leaps upward to a 
 height and onward with a velocity unequalled by any 
 other of our seas. The great surge from the north- 
 west is the motive-power of this huge liquid machinery ; 
 from a little more north it threatens to crush Saint- 
 Jean-de-Luz ; farther west it repels the Gironde, and 
 crowns witli her terrible billows the luckless Cordouan. 
 
92 THE BEACONS. 
 
 That poor Cordouan, that respectable martyr of the 
 seas and victim of the tempests, is only too little known, 
 I believe it is the oldest of all the European beacons. 
 At all events, only one, the celebrated Genoese lantern, 
 can rival it in antiquity. But there is a vast difference 
 between them. The Genoese, crowning a fort and sol- 
 idly seated upon solid rock, looks smilingly, almost 
 scornfully, down upon the impotently furious storms. 
 But Cordouan is upon a shpal which the water never 
 wholly leaves. And, in truth, he was a bold man who 
 conceived the notion of erecting a beacon here, amidst 
 the waters ; what say I ? in the eternal wave-combst 
 between such a river and such a sea. Prom one or the 
 other, it, at every instant, receives tremendous blows. 
 Yes, even the Gironde urged on the one hand by the 
 winds, and on the other by the rude torrents from the 
 Pyrenees, assails this stern calm guardian j as thbugh it 
 were responsible for the assailing and repelling fury cif 
 the ocean. ' , . , ; 
 
 Yet, Cordouan is the only saving and consoling light 
 that gleams over this stormy sea. Rim before the 
 north wind, and miss Cordouan, and verily, my storni- 
 tbssed brother, you are in very real danger; you, likely 
 enough, will fail to sight Arrachon. This sea, most 
 stormy among seas, is also the darkest. At night, 
 storm-driven upon that sea, there is no guiding mark; if 
 you miss the beneficent light. 
 
THE BEACONS. 93 
 
 During our whole six months stay upon this coast, 
 our usual contemplation, I had almost said, our almost 
 sole companion, was the beacon of Cordouan. We, felt 
 that this guardian of the sea, this constant watchman 
 over the strait became less a mere building than an ac- 
 tually living and intelligent person. Standing erect 
 over the vast western horizon, it shows itself under 
 a hundred various aspects. Now it is gilded, glorified 
 by the setting sun ; anon, pale and indistinct amidst the 
 shifting mists, it tells us nothing of good augury. At 
 evening, when suddenly it flashes its ruddy and glow- 
 ing light athwart the heaving waters, it looks like 
 some zealous inspector impressed and anxious in its 
 conscious and deep responsibility. Whatever happens 
 from the seaward, our Cordouan is held responsible for 
 it. Throwing his ruddy beams into the gloom of the 
 tempest, he, the preserver, is held to be the cause of 
 that which he only, and savingly, exhibits. Thus, only 
 too often, it is that genius is accused of evoking the 
 evils which it exposes only that it may reform them. 
 We, also, were ourselves thus unjust towards Cordouan. 
 Was he late in displaying his guiding light? How 
 ready we were to exclaim: "Cordouan, Cordouan, 
 pale phantom, can you ,show yourself only to conjure up 
 the storm, and the storm fiend ? " , , 
 
 And yet I believe, quite firmly, that to Cordouan 
 thirty of our fellows owed their lives in the groat storm 
 
94 THE BEACONS. 
 
 of October. Their vessel was a total wreck, but they 
 escaped with their lives. • 
 
 It is much that we can see our shipwrecking, to go 
 down in full light, knowing exactly where we are, what 
 are pur perils, and what chances we have of evading or 
 overcoming them. " Great God ! If we must perish, 
 give us to perish in the broad, bright light of day ! " 
 
 When the ship of which I speak, driven by the 
 strong surge from the open sea, reached this shore in 
 the deep night, there were a thousand chances to one 
 against her making her way into the Gironde. On her 
 starboard the bright point of the Grave warned her off 
 from Medoc ; on her larboard the little beacon of Saint- 
 Palais showed her the dangerous rock of the grand 
 caute on the Saintonge side ; and between those fixed 
 white lights, high over the central shoal flashed the 
 ruddy Cordouan, showing, from moment to moment the 
 only safe channel. 
 
 By a desperate effort she got through, but only, and 
 barely ; wind, wave, and current conspired to drive her 
 on Saint-Palais. The saving light showed tlie much har- 
 rassed, but still undaunted crew, where only lay their 
 chance of safety from the driving sea behind and the 
 terrible sands in front. Fearing, yet daring, they 
 leaped, fell, I know not how or where, and were saved, 
 bruised, fainting, — but still living. 
 
 Who can even imagine how many ships and how 
 
THE BEACONS. • 95 
 
 many men are saved by these beneficent beacons ? 
 Light, suddenly dispelling the dense shadows of those 
 horrible nights when the bravest lose their courage and 
 their presence of mind, not only points the path, but 
 clears the head and strengthens the heart. It is a 
 great moral support to be able to say in some mortal 
 peril, " Again ! Again ! Haul away my brothers, be 
 bold ! Though wind and wave are both against us, we 
 are not alone. See, yonder ! Humanity is still watch- 
 ing over us, and guiding us from yonder lofty tower! " 
 
 The seamen of the old times, ever hugging the shore, 
 and anxiously marking every headland, were still more 
 in need than we are of the friendly beacon light. The 
 Etruscans, we are told, first kept the night-fires burning 
 upon their sacred stones ; the beacon was at once an 
 altar, a temple, a column, and a watch tower. The 
 Celts, too, had their round towers which were beacons 
 also ; the most important of them were built on 
 precisely those points where the friendly light could 
 most widely flash over the dark waters ; and the Ro- 
 mans lit up watch fires from height to height and prom- 
 ontory to promontory along their whole shores of the 
 Mediterranean. 
 
 The great terror of the Northern sea kings, and the 
 perilled and trembling life of the dark middle age, put 
 out all those guiding and saving lights. The people 
 
96 THE BEACONS, 
 
 cired not to' favor the inroad of the sea rover; the sea 
 was an object of dread, almost of hatred. Every ship 
 was an enemy, and, if it ran aground, was deemed law- 
 ful as well as unpitied prey. The pillage of a wreck 
 was the gain of the noble ; the noble and the wrecker 
 were one I The Count de Leon, made wealthy by the 
 fatal shoal upon his County's shore, said of that mur- 
 derous rock, that it was " a precious stone, far more 
 precious than any that glitters in a kingly crown." 
 
 Even in our own time, innocently, the poor fishermen 
 have, again and again, by those fires which they have 
 kindled upon the beach, seduced our poor seamen into' 
 shipwreck and death. The very beacons themselves 
 have, not seldom, played the bad part of the false 
 hearted wrecker, alluring, only to betray ; so easy is it 
 to mistake on& light for another. Now and then, that 
 mistake, so readily made, leads to very horrible conse- 
 quences. 
 
 It was France, who, at the close of her great wars, 
 took the lead in making the lighthouse the great saviour 
 of th« benighted and well nigh wrecked seamen. Pro- 
 vided with that great refracting lamp of Fresnd, (a 
 lantern equal to four thousand common ones, and 
 throwing its ruddy gleam over a dozen, or so, of 
 leagues), it can cast, that good modern beacon, its di- 
 recting and saving light, hither and thither so that 
 
THE BEACONS. 97 
 
 strait and shoal are made visible and safe in the deep 
 midnight as in the full broad glow of the bright noon. 
 To the sailor, who steers by the stars, this invention 
 gave him, as it were, a new heaven and added constel- 
 lations. Planets, fixed stars, all were created anew for 
 hira, and in those newly invented constellations there 
 was even an improvement upon the celestial lights, in 
 the variety of color, intensity and duration, of their 
 glow and of their flashing. To some, we gave the calm, 
 fixed, pale and steady gleaming which sufficed for the 
 tranquil night and the comparatively safe sea ; to 
 others, the revolving and flashing, and ■fierce and ruddy 
 glow that shone to every point of the compass. These 
 latter, like the phosphoric creatures of the deep, palpi- 
 tate and flash fitfully, now gleaming and anon paleing, 
 now leaping into dazzling glow, and anon dying into 
 deepest darkness. In the darkest and most tempestu- 
 ous nights, they are ever restless as Ocean's self, and 
 seem to give him back motion for motion, and gleam for 
 gleam to the lurid and fitful lightnings. 
 
 Let us remember that in 1826, and even as late as 
 1830, our seas were still terrible in their drear dark- 
 ness. In all Europe there were but few lighthouses ; in 
 Africa, there was but the single one on the Cape, and, in 
 all vast Asia there were only those of Bombay, Calcutta, 
 
 « 
 
 and Madras, while the whole vast extent of South 
 5 
 
98 THE BEACONS. 
 
 America displayed not even one. Since the latter date 
 all nations following, imitating, even rivaling, France, 
 have said, on every bold headland that overlooks every 
 dangerous shoal and strait has said " Let there be 
 light ! " and every where the friendly light, gleams 
 tranquilly, or fitfully flashes. 
 
 Just here I should like you to make with me the cir- 
 cumnavigation of our seas from Dunkirk to Biarrity, 
 and to take a survey of our lighthouses. But, it would 
 occupy us too long. Calais, with her four lights of 
 different colors, throws out her friendly warnings and 
 hospitable imitations even to distant Dover; and the 
 noble gulf of the Seine, between Heve and Barfleur, 
 lights the American seaman on his otherwise perilous 
 passage to Havre and thence to the very home, the very 
 heart of Prance. 
 
 And the good heart of France goes to her very 
 threshold to welcome the coming and sea borne guest ; 
 lighting up, as, with an admirable skill and hospitality 
 she does, every bold point of Brittany. At the outpost 
 of Brest, at Saint Matthew, at Penmark, at the isle of 
 Pen, every headland has its warning and guiding light, 
 now flashing, now darkening, from minute to minute, or 
 from second to second, and saying by sudden flash or 
 momentary gloom, " Seamen ! Beware I Luff it is ! 
 give that rock a wide berth ! Keep off that shoal ! 
 
THE BEACONS. 99 
 
 Port ! Hard aport ! — Weather, — it is ! Midship 
 helm! So! Steady! Safe you are, — at your moor- 
 ings ! 
 
 And observe, all these watch towers over the perilous 
 deep, often built as they are among the breakers, and 
 as it were in the very bosom of the tempest, solve for 
 art the difficult problem of absolute solidity or seem- 
 ingly treacherous and unsafe foundation. Many of 
 thera are quite enormously high. The architecture of 
 the middle ages, about which so much is as boastfully 
 as untruly said and sung, never ventured to build so 
 high, save on condition of giving their edifices clumsy 
 buttresses and of clamping with clumsy and costly 
 clamps of iron, the peaked summits of their towers. A 
 glance at the much boasted, though really anything but 
 artistic steeple of Strasbourg, will convince you of this. 
 Our modern builders resort to no such rude expedients. 
 The Heaux beacon, i-ecently erected by M. Reynaud on 
 the dangerous shoal of the Epees de Treguier, displays 
 all the sublime simplicity of some gigantic ocean tree. 
 It has no buttresses, and it needs none ; its foundation 
 is sunk boldly and bodily into the living rock ; from its 
 base of sixty feet, it rears its tall column of twenty-four 
 feet in diameter, and each of its huge granites is, neatly 
 as firmly, dovetailed into the other, so neatly, so close- 
 ly, so firmly, that cement is a sheer superfluity ; and so 
 
100 THE BEACONS. 
 
 solidly is all built that from base to summit the tall 
 tower is solid as, nay, we may almost venture to say, 
 more solid than, the old rock from which science, and 
 art, and perseverance and what the American so graph- 
 ically calls pluck have hewn each separate stone. 
 Your wild wave knows not where to find a rent in the 
 armor of this tall ocean-espying giant. She may smite, 
 she may rage, but her blows will not harm, her rage 
 will be spent in vain ; from that rounded and great 
 mass the giant blow glances harmlessly off; the mighti- 
 est thunder strokes of the ever enraged and ever baffled 
 ocean have only succeeded in . giving to this grand 
 edifice a far slighter inclination than that of the pur- 
 posely inclined " leaning tower " of Pisa. 
 
 Behold, then, instead of those sad bastions which, in 
 the olden day, overlooked and threatened old ocean, 
 like those M'ith which Spain threatened the Moor, oar 
 modern civilization erects peaceful towers of most be- 
 nevolent and beneficent hospitality ; beautiful and noble 
 monuments, often sublime as they appeal to art, always 
 touching as they appeal to sentiment ; those towers 
 which, flashing forth their ruddy or gleaming with their 
 silvery fires, make upon the confines of our living, 
 swarming, and much imperilled earth, a new firmament, 
 saving, and guiding, blessing and blessed, as the firma- 
 ment above us. When no star shines upon us from that 
 
THE BEACONS. 101 
 
 firmament above, the seaman hails this art-created light 
 as the star of brotherhood ; 
 
 " Bids its ruddy lustre hail 
 And scorns to strike his timorous sail." 
 
 Pleasant it is to seat oneself below one of these 
 noble beacons, those friendly fires, those true and wel- 
 coming homes of the storm tried mariner. Even the 
 most modern of them is a venerable thing to all who, 
 for one moment, reflect how many lives the most mod- 
 ern of them has already saved. With even the most 
 modern, many a touching memory, many a wild and 
 beautiful, and no less authentic story is connected. 
 Two generations, merely, are enough to make your 
 beacon already ancient, linked with old memories, con- 
 secrated, honorable, hallowed. Often, oh often does 
 the mother say to her little ones — "Behold! That 
 friendly beacon saved your grandfather ; but for it you 
 would never have been born." 
 
 And how often does our brave beacon receive the lov- 
 ing, and tender, and pure visits of the anxious wife or 
 brother who watches for the return of the far husband 
 or son ! In the darkening evening, and even far into 
 the dark night, the one or the other gazes anxiously up 
 to the lofty tower, wishing, begging, imploring, for the 
 first gleaming of the blessed and blessing light that 
 shall guide the absent one safely back into port. 
 
102 THE BEACONS. 
 
 Oh ! Very justly did the men of the old day, con- 
 found these honored stones with the altars of the man 
 guiding and man saving gods ; to the heart that weeps, 
 and hopes, and prays and battles amidst the howlings 
 of the tempest, see ye ! they are still one and the 
 same ; they are still the saving guides, the very altars 
 of the saving and the guiding Deity, For, in very 
 truth, what are man's best works, but the realization 
 of the Almighty will and the great directing mercy ? 
 
BOOK SECOND. 
 
 THE GENESIS OP THE SEA. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 FECUNDITY. 
 
 Five minutes after midnight of St. John's — 24th to 
 25th of June, commences the great Herring Fishery, in 
 the North Seas. Phosphoric lights gleam and flash up- 
 on the waters, and from deck to deck is heard the 
 hearty hail, " Look out, there ! The Herring light- 
 ning '. " And a real, and a vast lightning that is, as 
 from the depths that vast mass of life springs upward in 
 eager quest of heat, light, and dalliance. The soft, 
 pale, silvery light of the Moon is well pleasing to 'that 
 timorous host ; a beacon to guide them to their great 
 banquet of Love. Upward they spring, one and all ; 
 not one idler or straggler remains behind. Gregarions- 
 ness is the fixed rule, the indefeasible law of that race ; 
 ' you never see them but in shoals. In shoals they lie 
 buried in the vast dark depths, and in shoals they come 
 to the surface to take their summer part in the univer- 
 sal joy, to see the light, to revel — and to die. Pack- 
 
106 FECUNDITY. 
 
 ed, squeezed, crushed, layer on layer, it seems that they 
 never can be close enough, they swim in such compact 
 masses that the Dutch fishermen compare them to their 
 own Dykes — afloat ! Between Scotland, Holland and 
 Norway, one might fancy that an immense island had 
 suddenly risen, and that a whole continent was about 
 to arise. One division detaches itself eastward, and 
 chokes up the Baltic sound. In some of the narrower 
 straits you actually cannot row, so dense and solid is 
 the mass of fish. Millions, tens of millions, tens of 
 thousands of millions ; — who can even guess at the 
 number of those hosts upon hosts ? It is on record that 
 on one occasion, near Havre, onefisherman, on one morn- 
 ing, found in his nets no fewer than eight hundred thou- 
 sand ; and in Scotland, the mighty mass of eleven thou- 
 sand barrels was taken in a single night ! 
 
 They come as a blinded and doomed prey ; no 
 amount of destruction can discourage them. Constantr 
 ly preyed upon alike by fish and by men, they still come 
 on in myriad shoals. And no marvel either ; for they 
 love and multiply, even as they move. Kill them as 
 fast as we may, they just as fast reproduce ; their vast, 
 deep columns, even as they float along, give themselves 
 wholly up to the great work of reproduction. The 
 wave of the sea and the electric wave impel that whole 
 vast mass at every instant. No weariness, no satiety, 
 no weakness, not even a pause, take one where you will 
 
FECUNDITY. 107 
 
 and it either has just propagated, is propagating, or is 
 about to propagate. In that vast polygamous host, 
 pleasure is an adventure and love a navigation. Over 
 every league of its passage it pours out its torrents of 
 fecundity. 
 
 At some two or three fathoms deep the water is com- 
 pletely discolored by the incredible abundance of the 
 Herring-spawn ; and at sunrise, far as the eye can 
 reach, you may see the water whitened with tlie marvel- 
 lous abundance of the thick, fat, viscuous billows in 
 which life is fermenting into new life. Over hundreds 
 of square leagues it seems as though a volcano of teem- 
 ing and fecund milk had burst forth and overwhelmed 
 the sea. 
 
 Pull of life as it is at the surface, the Sea would be 
 actually choked up with it but for the fierce and eager 
 union of all sorts of destructions. Let us remember 
 that each Herring has forty, fifty, or even seventy thou- 
 sand eggs. But for the thinning process, each of them 
 giving the average increase of fifty thousand, and as each 
 of these in its turn giving the same average increase, a 
 very few generations would suffice to solidify the Ocean 
 into a stagnant and putrid mass, and make our whole 
 globe a desert. Here we see the imperative necessity 
 to Life, of life's twin sister. Death ; in their immense 
 strife there is harmony ; destruction is the handmaiden 
 of preservation. 
 
108 FECUNDITY. 
 
 In the universal war carried on against the doomed 
 race, it is the fierce giants of the deep that prevent the 
 mass from dispersing, and drive it in dense shoals to 
 our shores. The whale, and the other cetaceae, plunge 
 into the living mass, swallow down whole tons, and 
 drive shoreward the still vast, the seemingly undimin- 
 ished, host. And at the shore commences quite another 
 and more vast destruction. In the first place, the small- 
 est of fish devour the spawn of the Herring, swallow- 
 ing, like any human spendthrift, the great future for the 
 small present. And for the present, for the full-grown 
 Herring, nature has provided a very efficiently glutton- 
 ous foe, dull-eyed, huge appetited, eager, insatiable, — 
 the whole tribe of fish-devouring fish, Cod, Whiting, 
 &c. The Whiting gloats, devours, crams itself so with 
 Herring that it becomes one luscious mass of fat. The 
 Cod similarly stuffs itself with Whitings, and becomes 
 fat, fecund, overflowing with fecundity — with a really 
 threatening superabundance of fecundity. Just consid- 
 er ! What we have seen of the fecundity of the Her- 
 ring is a mere nothing when compared to the fecundity 
 of the Cod, which not seldom has nine millions of eggs ! 
 A cod weighing fifty pounds has fourteen pounds of 
 eggs ; and its breeding season is nine months of every 
 year. This is the creature that, unchecked, would soon 
 solidify the Ocean and destroy the world. And accor- 
 dingly we cry " Help ! To arms ! Launch ships and 
 
FECUNDITY. 109 
 
 away, to check this too vigorous fecundity." England 
 alone sends some twenty or thirty thousand seamen to 
 the Cod Fisheries. And how many are sent from Amer- 
 ica, from France, from Holland — from everywhere ? 
 The Cod alone has caused the foundation of whole 
 towns — of whole colonies ! The catching and curing 
 of the Cod form an art, and that art has its own idi- 
 om — the patois of the Cod fishery. 
 
 But \i'hat could man do against the enormous fecun- 
 dity of the cod ? Nature knows well that our petty 
 efforts of fleets and fisheries would be insufficient and 
 that the Cod would conquer us ; and nature evokes 
 another and a more efficient destroyer of the superfluous 
 life that would produce universal death. Down from 
 its spawning bed in the river, thin, famishing, eager, 
 fierce with hunger, comes the Sturgeon, that great de- 
 vourer. Real rapture it is to the famishing glutton to 
 find, on his return to the sea, ready fattened for him, the 
 succulent and unctuous Cod, the concentrated substance 
 of whole shoals of Herrings ! This great devourer of 
 the cod, though less fecund than its prey, is fecund, pro- 
 ducing fifteen hundred thousand eggs. The danger 
 reappears. The Herring threatened with its terrible 
 fecundity, the Cod threatened, the sturgeon threatens 
 still. Nature, therefore, produced a creature superb in 
 destroying, almost powerless to reproduce, a monster at 
 once terrible and serviceable that could cut through 
 
110 FECUNDITY. 
 
 this otherwise invincible and ruinous fecundity, an om- 
 nivorous monster, huge of jaw and constant in appetite, 
 ready for all prey, living or dead, the. great, the perfec- 
 tionated, the matchless devourer — the Shark. 
 
 But these furious devourers are anticipatively kept 
 down ; mighty in destroying, they are very slow in re- 
 producing. The Sturgeon, as we have seen is less pro- 
 lific than the Cod, and the Shark is actually sterile, if 
 compared to any other fish. Not like them does it 
 overspread and discolor the sea. Viviparous, it sends 
 forth its rare youngling, fierce, fully armed, savage and 
 terrible. 
 
 In her dark and teeming depths, the Sea can smile in 
 scorn at the destroyers to which she gives birth, well 
 knowing, as the great proud fertile Sea does, that no 
 might of destruction can surpass her might of repro- 
 duction. Her chief wealth, her most vast and count- 
 less produce, defies all the fury of the devourers, is 
 inaccessible to their attacks. I speak of the infinite 
 world of living atoms, of the microscopic atomies that 
 live and love, enjoy, struggle, sufier and die from the 
 surface to the utmost depths of the sea. It has been 
 affirmed that, in the absence of solar light, life, also, 
 must be absent ; yet the darkest depths of the sea are 
 studded with sea stars, living, moving, microscopic in- 
 fusoriae and molluscs. The dark crab, the phosphores- 
 cent seaworm, and a thousand strange and nameless 
 
FECUNDITY. Ill 
 
 creatures swarm in those uttermost depths and rise only 
 now and then, describing long lines of "variegated light 
 upon the heaving surface. In its semi-transparent 
 density, the sea has its own lucidity, its own glowing 
 gleam, like that which fish, living or dead, reflect. The 
 Sea! glorious Sea, hath her own lights, her own Sun, 
 Moon, and Stars. 
 
 Gaze inquisitively and intelligently on a mere salt 
 well and you at once perceive how prolific the ocean 
 depths must be ; that seeming deposit of dead and inert 
 matter hath its real life ; it is a mass of infusoriae, mi- 
 croscopic, but organized and sentient. All voyagers on 
 the wide Ocean concur in telling us that in their far 
 wanderings they still and ever traverse living waters. 
 Freynel saw millions of square yards covered by a 
 crimson glow — that glow, consisting of living animal- 
 culae so minute that a myriad is packed into every 
 square inch. In the bay of Bengal, in 1854, Captain 
 Kingman sailed for thirty miles through one vast white 
 blotch which made the sea look like a great snow 
 field. Not a cloud above, but one unbroken leaden 
 grey, in strange contrast with the brilliant whiteness 
 beneath. Look closely and you sec that that seeming 
 snow is gelatinous ; bring your microscope into play and 
 you see that that seeming jelly is a mass of living, mov- 
 ing, phosphoric animalculae, flashing forth strange and 
 marvellous lights. 
 
112 FECUXDITT. 
 
 Peron, too, tells us that for thirty leagues his good 
 ship ploughed her way through what seemed a sort of 
 greyish dust ; examiaed with the microscope, this seem- 
 ing dust was seen to be the eggs of some unknown spe- 
 cies, covering and concealing the waters over all that 
 immense space. 
 
 Even along the desolate shores of Greenland, where 
 we vainly fancy that prolific nature must needs expire, 
 the sea is enormously populous. Through waves two 
 hundred miles by fifteen you sail through deep brown 
 waters, colored by microscopic medusae, of which, de 
 Schleiden tells us, more than a hundred and ten thous- 
 and live and love, battle, and die in every cubic 
 foot. These productive and nourishing waters are su- 
 persaturated with all sorts of fatty atoms adapted to the 
 delicate nature of the fish which lazily drink in the 
 nourishment provided for them by the fertile and gen- 
 erous common mother. Do they know what they thus 
 swallow ? Scarcely. Its minute but abounding nur- 
 ture, its nourishing mother's-milk, comes to it without its 
 care, and is received without its gratitude. Onr great 
 fatality, our sad calamity, fierce and terrible hunger, is 
 known only on the land. Exertion and want of food 
 are unknown in the great world of waters. There, life 
 must glide away like a glad dream. What can the 
 creature there do with his strength ? All use of it is 
 
FECUNDITY. 113 
 
 superfluous, impossible ; — all save only one ; all strength, 
 all energy, are resei'ved for the great work of love. 
 
 The one great law, the one great work of the seas, is 
 to increase and multiply. Love fills up the whole of 
 its fecund depths, and is wealthiest in reproduction 
 among those which are so small that to our unassisted 
 eye they are invisible, unknown as though they were 
 non-existent. "We have spoken of mere atomies ; but 
 are there, in reality, any such ? When we imagine that 
 we have got the lowest, the utterly indivisible, we have 
 but to examine with more earnest and penetrating gaze 
 and we see that this seemingly frail atomy still loves, 
 still reproduces itself in miniature. At the very lowest 
 stages of life you find all the forms of life and repro- 
 duction. 
 
 Such is the Sea, such the great Female of the Globe, 
 whose ceaseless yearning, whose permanent conception, 
 whose production and reproduction, never end. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE MILKY SEA. 
 
 The water of the Sea, even the purest, examined when 
 you are far away from land, and from all possible ad- 
 mixture, is somewhat yiscuous ; take some between 
 your fingers, and you find it somewhat ropy and tena- 
 cious. Chemical analysis has not yet explained this pe- 
 culiarity ; there is in that an organic substance which 
 Chemistry touches only to destroy, taking from it all 
 that it has of special, and violently reducing it back.to 
 general elements. 
 
 The marine plants and animals are covered with this 
 substance, whose raucousnoss gives them the appear- 
 ance of a coating of jelly, now fixed, anon trembling, 
 and always semi-transparent. And nothing more than 
 this contributes to the fanciful illusions presented to us 
 by the world of waters. Its reflections are irregular, 
 often strangely variegated, as, for instance, on the 
 
THE MILKY SEA. 115 
 
 scales of fish and on the moUuscse, which seem to owe 
 to it the exquisite beauty of their pearly shells. 
 
 It is that which most attracts and enchain s^ the inter- 
 est of the child when he first sees a fish. I was very 
 young when I first saw one, but I still remember how 
 vividly 1 felt the impression. That creature with vari- 
 ously colored lights flashing from its silvery scales, 
 threw me into an astonishment, a fascination, a rapture, 
 which no words can describe. I endeavored to catch 
 it, but found that it could no more be held than the 
 water which glided through my small weak hand. That 
 fish seemed to me to be identical with the element in 
 which it swam, and gave me a confused idea of anima- 
 ted, organized and surpassingly beautiful water. 
 
 A long time after, in my maturity, I was scarcely less 
 impressed when on a sea beach I saw, I know not what 
 of shining and transparent substance, through which I 
 could clearly see the sand and pebbles. Colorless as 
 crystal, slightly, very slightly solid, tremulous when ev- 
 er so slightly touched, it seemed to me as to the an- 
 cients and to Reaumur, that which Reaumur so graphi- 
 cally named it — gelatinised water. 
 
 Still more forcibly do we feel this impression when 
 we discover in the early stage of their formation the 
 yellowish white threads in which the sea makes her 
 first outlines of the fuci and algas which are to harden 
 and darken to the strength and color of hides and leath- 
 
116 THE MILKY SEA. 
 
 er. But when quite young, in their viscuous state, and 
 in their elasticity, they have the consistence of a sohd- 
 ified wave, all the stronger because it is soft. What 
 we now know of the generation and the complex or- 
 ganization of the inferior creatures, animal or vegeta- 
 ble, contradicts the explanation of Reaumur and (he 
 ancients. But all this does not forbid us to return to 
 the question which was first put by Borg. de Saint Vin- 
 cent ; viz : What is the mucus of the Sea ? That vis- 
 cuousness which water in general presents ? Is it not 
 the universal element of life ? 
 
 Much engaged with these and the like reflections, I 
 called upon an illustrious chemist, a man at once posi- 
 tive and sound, an innovator no less prudent than bold, 
 and I abruptly asked him this plain question — " What, 
 in your opinion, is that whitish, viscuous matter which 
 we find in sea water ? " " Nothing else than life," was 
 his reply, then retracting, or rather explaining his some- 
 what too simple and too absolute dictum, he added, 
 " I should rather say a half organized and wholly or- 
 ganizable matter. In certain waters it is a dense mass 
 of infusoriae, in others a nmtter which is not yet, but 
 which is to become infusoriae. In fact, we have yet to 
 begin, at all seriously, the study of this matter." 
 
 This was spoken on the 17th of May, 1860. 
 
 On leaving our great Chemist, I went to a Physiolo- 
 gist, whose opinion has no less weight with me, and to 
 
THE MILKY SEA. 117 
 
 him I put the same question. His reply was very long 
 and very beautiful. In substance it ran thus : " We 
 know in reality no more about the composition of wa- 
 ter than we know about that of blood. "What we best 
 know and can most safely affirm about the mucvs of sea 
 water, is that it is at once an Alpha and an Omega, a 
 beginning and an end. Is it the result of the number- 
 less deaths which furnish forth materials for new lives ? 
 No doubt, that is the general law ; but in the case of 
 the sea, that world of rapid absorption, the majority of 
 the creatures there are absorbed while in full life ; they 
 do not slowly linger on towards death, as we on land 
 do. The sea is a very pure element ; war and death 
 purvey to it. But life, without arriving at its final dis- 
 solution, is incessantly approaching it, exuding and ex- 
 haling all that is superfluous. With us, the animals of 
 the earth, the epidermis, through its millions of pores, 
 wastes the body at every instant ; we suflfer, as it were, 
 a partial death at every breath we draw. Now this 
 partial death, this vast exudation, in the case of the ma- 
 rine world, fills that vast world of waters with a gela- 
 tinous wealth of which the young world has the instant 
 benefit. It finds in suspension the oily superabundance 
 of this common exudation, the still living atoms and 
 liquids which have not had time to die. All this does 
 not fall back into the inorganic, but enters quickly into 
 new organisms. Of all the theories on the subject, this 
 
118 THE MILKY SEA. 
 
 seems the most reasonable ; rejecting this theory, we 
 plunge into a sea of extreme difficulties." 
 
 These ideas of the most enlightened and earnest 
 thinkers of the present day, are not irreconcilable with 
 those which, nearly thirty years ago were promulgated 
 by Geoffrey Saint Hilaire, upon that general mucus 
 in which nature seems to find all life. He calls it " the 
 animalisible substance, the raw material of organic 
 bodies. Not a creature, whether animal or vegetable, 
 but both absorbs and produces it from the earliest to 
 the latest breath ; indeed, the weaker the creature, the 
 more abundant that is." 
 
 This remark suggests a broad and bright light upon 
 the life of the* seas. Their tenants seem, for the most 
 part, foetuses in the gelatinous stage, which absorb and 
 produce the mucous substance, permeate and saturate 
 with it all the waters, and give to them the fecund and 
 nourishing powers of a vast womb, in whose depths an 
 infinite succession of generations, perpetually float, as 
 in warm milk. 
 
 Let us make ourselves present in this divine work. 
 Let us take a drop from the sea ; in it we shall be able 
 to espy the very process of the primitive creation. Na- 
 ture's God is ever consistent ; he does not work in one 
 fashion to-day, and in another to-morrow. This drop 
 of water, I doubt not, will tell us in its transformations, 
 the tale of the Universe. Let us be patient, and ob- 
 
THE MILKY SEA. 119 
 
 serve. Who can foresee or guess the history of this 
 drop of water ? "Which will it first produce, the vege- 
 table-animal, or the animal-vegetable ? Will this drop 
 be the infusorise, the primitive monad, which, vibrat- 
 ing, shall shortly become vibrion, and ascending step 
 by step, from rank to rank, polypus, coral, or pearl, 
 may perchance in ten thousand years reach the dignity 
 of insect? Will it produce the vegetable thread, so 
 slight and silken that one would scarcely discern it, and 
 yet already is no less than the first born hair, amorous 
 and sensitive, which is so well known as Venus' s hair ? 
 This is no fable — it is true natural history. This 
 hair, of double nature, at once animal and vegetable, 
 is, in fact, the commencement of life. 
 
 Look quite down into the depths of a vessel of water; at 
 first you discover nothing ; patience for a 'few moments 
 and you perceive drops, atomics, that are moving. 
 Bring a good glass into the service, and you see a whole 
 cloud of these atomies. Are they gelatinous or fleecy ? 
 Under the microscope this seeming fleece becomes a 
 group of filaments, of finest and silkiest threads ; a 
 thousand times finer, it is believed, than the finest hair 
 that adorns the head of woman. You are now looking 
 upon the first timid attempt of life that is struggling to 
 achieve organization. These confervae, these hair- 
 weeds, are to be found wherever there is stagnant wa- 
 
120 THE MILKY SEA. 
 
 tor, whether fresh or salt. They are the commence- 
 ment of that double series of the primary vegetation 
 of the sea which became terrestrial when the earth 
 emerged from the watery depths. Once above and be- 
 yond the waters, they become the vast, the numberless 
 Tungus-faraily ; in the water, they are the hair-weeds, 
 the many-formed and many-named Algas. 
 
 This is the primitive, the indispensable element of or- 
 .ganized vitality, and we find it even where we should, 
 at the first glance deem it to be impossible. Even in 
 the dark depths of the ferruginous waters, supersatura- 
 ted with iron ; even in the all but boiling hot springs, 
 you find this mucus, this aboundiBg mass of little crear 
 tures, moving, writhing, agitated ever, which to your 
 first glance, seem only so many lifeless specks. You 
 need not greatly care into what class our finite and dim 
 science consigns them. If Candolle honors them with 
 the title of animals, if Dujardin, on the other hand, de- 
 grades them into the low rank of the lowest vegetation 
 — let us not stay to heed these mere names. Such as 
 tliey are, all that they ask is that they may live and that 
 their humble existence may open up the long series of 
 beings wliich, but for them, would never be. These 
 atomies, whether we call them living or dead, or pass- 
 ing from life to death, or vigorously struggling from 
 death into organic life, are self-supporting, independeiifc- 
 
THE MILKY SEA. 121 
 
 ly struggling, aud ever taking and giving from and to 
 the maternal waters, the life creating and the life sup- 
 porting gelatine. 
 
 It really is without any approach, even, to probabili- 
 ty, that they show us, as specimens of the first creation, 
 the primitive organization, the fossil imprints, more or 
 less complex, whether of animal or vegetable — of the 
 Trilobites, for instance, already furnished with the su- 
 perior organs — eyes, &c., — or gigantic vegetation, 
 widely branched and richly foliaged. It is beyond all 
 computation more probable that these were preceded 
 and heralded, and prepared, by species far more simple, 
 but of such yielding and destructible matter that it could 
 make no impress, leave no mark behind. How can we 
 expect that those gelatinous, those almost liquid crea- 
 tures should not " die and make no sign " when we see 
 that the bard shells are ground into very dust ? In the 
 South Seas we see fish with teeth so sharp, at once, and 
 of such iron strength that they browse on the tough 
 coral, even as the timid- sheep browses on the tender 
 grass-blades. Oh ! Depend upon it, generation after 
 generation of the soft gelatinous germs of life have 
 breathed before nature put forth its robust Trilobite 
 and its imperishable ferns. 
 
 Let us be just to these conservse ; let us restore to 
 them their pretty obvious right to eldership in this glad 
 
 6 
 
122 
 
 THE MILKY SEA. 
 
 and various world of ours. Be they animal or be they 
 vegetable, or do they vibrate and struggle between 
 both — let us at least do them justice, let us speak about 
 them all that is evidently true. 
 
 Upon them, and at their expense, arose the immense, 
 the really marvellous marine Flora. 
 
 At that starting point I will not hesitate to express 
 my tender sympathy. For three very sound and suffi- 
 cient reasons I love and I bless that vast vegetation ; 
 small or large, that vegetation has three lovely quali- 
 ties : — 
 
 Firstly, how innocent are all its members. Not one 
 of them all is poisonous. Vainly in the whole marine 
 vegetation shall you search for one poisonous plant. 
 Seek in every sea, and in every latitude, you will find 
 the vegetation wholesome, genial, a blessing and a 
 mercy. 
 
 Those innocent plants ask for nothing more than to 
 nourish or to heal animality. Many of them, the Lam- 
 inaires, for instance, contain a luscious sugar ; and oth- 
 ers, as, for instance, the Corsican or Irish Moss, have a 
 health-restoring bitter ; and all, without exception, 
 contain a concentrated and most nourishing mucilage, 
 not a few of them saviours to the weak, worn, perish- 
 ing lungs of presumptuous and ungrateful man. Where 
 we now exhibit iodide, the English formerly used noth- 
 
THE MILKY SEA. 123 
 
 ing but a confection of that same Corsican, or Irish, 
 Moss. 
 
 The third characteristic of that vegetation is its mar- 
 vellous amorousness. We cannot doubt that if we pay 
 the slightest attention to its strange hymeneial metamor- 
 phoses, here is the striving to be, beyond being, to bo 
 potent beyond power. We see it in the fire flies and 
 the like small things, and we see it no less, if we will 
 only look for it, in the sea weeds which, at the consecra- 
 ted moment, seem to quit their merely vegetable life and 
 leap into animality. 
 
 Where do these wonders commence ? Where are 
 these first sketches of animality made ? Where are 
 we to look for the primitive scene of organization ? 
 
 Formerly these things were hotly disputed ; in our 
 own day there seems to be a certain agreement in the 
 learned world of Europe. I can find the reply to these 
 questions in many recognized and authorized volumes, 
 but I prefer to borrow it from an Essay recently crown- 
 ed by the Academy of Sciences, and, consequently, 
 shielded by its high, unquestionable authority. 
 
 Living creatures are found in the hot waters of eighty, 
 even up to ninety, degrees. It is when the cooled globe 
 gets down to that temperature that life becomes possi- 
 ble. The water has then absorbed, at least in part, 
 that terrible element of death — carbonic acid gas. It 
 becomes possible to breathe. 
 
124 
 
 THE MILKY SEA. 
 
 All the seas were at first like those parts of the great 
 Pacific Ocean, which are comparatively shallow, and 
 are studded with small, low islets. These islets are ex- 
 tinct craters of by-gone volcanoes ; the seaman knows 
 them only by the summits which the slow hut stead- 
 fast toil of the coral insect has upheaved from the depths. 
 But the depths between these volcanoes are probably 
 themselves no less volcanic, and must have been, for the 
 first essays of primitive creation, so many receptacles 
 of life. 
 
 Popular tradition has, for ages past, attributed to 
 volcanoes the guardianship of buried treasures, which 
 from time to time give out to our upper world the gold 
 that lies buried in the depths. — Poetic fiction, which yet 
 has its firm foundation in fact. The volcanic regions 
 have within themselves the treasure of our glpbe, po- 
 tent virtues of fecundity. It is they that most largely 
 dower the otherwise sterile earth ; from the dust of their 
 lavas, from their still warm ashes, life springs, expands, 
 glows, and creates new life. "We recognize the wealth 
 of Vesuvius, and of Etna in the long ofl'shoots that they 
 send far into the Sea, and we know what a lovely para- 
 dise is formed under the Himalayas, by the volcanic 
 circle of the vale of Cachemire. And the same thing 
 is repeated in the lovely isles of the far South Sea. 
 
 Even under the least favorable circumstances, the vi- 
 
THE MILKY SEA. 125 
 
 cinity of volcanoes, and the warm currents which are 
 their concomitants, create and preserve animal life, 
 even in the most desolate and dreary places. Amidst 
 all the freezing horrors of the Antartic pole, not far 
 from the volcanic Erebus, Captain James Ross found 
 living coral insects at the depth of a thousand fathoms 
 below the surface of the frozen sea. 
 
 In the early ages of our world, innumerable volcanoes 
 exerted a submarine action far more powerful than they 
 exhibit now. Their clefts and their intermediate val- 
 leys allowed the marine mucus to accumulate in places, 
 and to be electrified into life by the warm currents. 
 No doubt the mucus affected those parts, fixed itself 
 there and worked and fermented to the utmost of its 
 young power. Its leaven was the attraction of the sub- 
 stance for itself. The creative elements, originally 
 dissolved in the sea formed combinations, leagues, I had 
 well nigh written marriages. First appeared, merely 
 elementary lives — death following almost inseparably, 
 indistinguishably, upon young life ; and other lives fol- 
 lowing close upon, and nourished by, those wrecks and 
 spoils, had firmer hold on life, became preparatory be- 
 ings, slow but sure creators, which, thenceforth, began 
 beneath the waters that eternal labor which, even in our 
 own day and beneath our own scrutiny, they still con- 
 tinue. 
 
126 
 
 THE MILKY SEA. 
 
 The sea nourishing them all, gives to each that which 
 best suits it. Each draws from that great nursinc. 
 mother, in its own fashion, and for its own especial be- 
 hoof, that which it most needs, must have, to malje it 
 what we see of naked, or of shelled, of seeming vege- 
 table, or of fierce, vigorous, and pugnacious life. And 
 whether in life or in death, whether building actively 
 or passively decomposing, they clothe the sad nudity 
 of the virgin rocks, those daughters of the volcanic fires 
 from which flaming and sterile, they were hurled from 
 the planetary nucleus. 
 
 Quartz, basalt, porphyry, and semi-vitrified flints, each 
 and all receive from these minute laborers a new, a 
 more graceful, and a more fecund garb ; from the fe- 
 cund maternal milk (for such we must call the mucus 
 of the Sea) they absorb and restore, and thus build up, 
 and secure, and fructify, and beautify, this, our habita- 
 ble earth. It is from these more favoring localities that 
 have arisen our primal species. 
 
 These works must have been commenced among the 
 volcanic isles and islets, in the depths of their Archi- 
 pelagoes, in those sinuous windings, those peaceful lab- 
 yrinths where the tides enter timidly and gently, warm 
 and sheltered cradles for the newly-born. 
 
 But the bolder strength of the fully- expanded flow- 
 er, is to be sought for in, for instance, the vast depths 
 
THE MILKY SEA. 127 
 
 of the Indian Gulfs. There, the Sea is veritably a 
 great artist. There she gives to the earth its most 
 adorable forms, lively, loving, and lovable. With her 
 assiduous caresses she rounds or slopes the shore, and 
 gives it those maternal outlines, and I had almost said 
 the visible tenderness of that feminine bosom on which 
 the pleased child finds so softly safe a shelter, such 
 warmth, such saving warmth, and rest. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE ATOM. 
 
 From the bottom of his nets a fisherman one day gave 
 me three almost dying creatures, a sea hedgehog, a sea 
 star, and another star, a pretty ophiure, which still 
 moved and soon lost its delicate arms. I gave them 
 some sea' water, but forgot them for two days, and when 
 I again saw them, all were dead. On the surface of the 
 water a thick gelatinous film had formed. I took an 
 atom of this on the point of a needle ; that atom, when 
 placed under the microscope, showed me the following 
 scene. A whirling crowd of short, thick, strongly built 
 animals — Kolpodes — rushed to and fro as though in- 
 toxicated with their sense of life, delighted, I may say, 
 that they were born and keeping their birthday with a 
 perfectly bacchanalian joy, while microscopic eels — 
 Vibrions — swam less than vibrated to spring forward. 
 Wearied with tlie contemplation of such movement, 
 
THE ATOM. 129 
 
 the eye, however, soon remarked, that all was not in 
 motion, there were some vibrions yet stiff and still, and 
 there were some intertwined in heaps which had not yet 
 detached themselves and which looked as though ex- 
 pecting the moment of their deliverance. 
 
 In that living fermentation of still motionless crea- 
 tures, the disorderly Kolpodes rushed and raged, 
 hither and thither, regaling and fattening themselves at 
 will. 
 
 And this grand spectacle was displayed within the 
 compass of an atom of film taken on the point of a 
 needle ! How many such scenes would be enacted in 
 the whole of the gelatinous film which had so promptly 
 formed on the surface of the .water containing three 
 dead creatures ! The time had been wonderfully put 
 to profit. In two days the dead had made a world ; for 
 three animals that I had lost I had gained millions, 
 abounding in youth, absorbed in a real fury of new life ! 
 
 That infinite world of life which every where sur- 
 rounds us was almost unknown until lately. Swam- 
 mcrdamand others, who formerly recognized it, were 
 stopped at their first step ; and it was as lately as tlie 
 year 1830, that the magician Uhrenberg looked, re- 
 vealed, and classified it. He studied the figure of 
 these invisibles, their organization, their manners ; he 
 saw them absorb, digest, chase, and fiercely battle. 
 Their generation remained a mystery to him. What is 
 6* 
 
130 THE ATOM. 
 
 tlie nature of tlieir amours ? Have they any amours ? 
 For creatures so elementary, would nature go to the 
 expence of a complicated generation ? Or do they 
 spring up spontaneously, and, in vulgar phrase, :" like 
 mushrooms ? " 
 
 A great question ! at which more than one naturalist 
 smiles and shakes his head. One is so certain of hav- 
 ing solved the great mystery of the world and secured, 
 laid down, once and forever, the true laws of life ! It 
 is for Nature to obey ! When, a hundred years ago, 
 Reamur was told that the female silk worm could pro- 
 duce alone and without the male, he denied it in the 
 brief phrase — " Out of nothing, nothing comes." But 
 the fact, often denied but always proved, is now thor- 
 oughly established and admitted, not only as to the silk 
 worm, but as to the bee, certain butterflies, and still 
 other creatures. 
 
 In all times, in every nation, both the learned and 
 unlearned have said, " Out of death cometh life." It 
 was especially supposed that the imperceptible animal- 
 culae immediately sprang up from the wrecks of death. 
 Even Harvey, who first laid down the law of genera- 
 tion, did not venture to contradict that ancient belief, 
 for though he said every body comes from the egg, he 
 immediately added — or from the dissolved body of a 
 preceding life. 
 
 It is precisely the theory which has been so bril- 
 
THE ATOM. 131 
 
 liantly reviyed by the experiments of M. Ponchet. He 
 has established the fact that from the remains of the 
 iufusorise and other creatures, there proceeds a fecund 
 jelly, the " prolific membrane " from which spring, not 
 new beings, indeed, but the germs, the eggs from which 
 new creatures will spring. 
 
 We live in an age of miracles. This is not to aston- 
 ish us. Any one would formerly have been laughed at 
 who had ventured to say that some animals, disobe- 
 dient to the general laws of nature, take the liberty to 
 breathe through their paws. The noble labors of 
 Milne Edwards have brought this to light. And Cuvier 
 and Blainville had observed, it is said, that other crea- 
 tures, destitute of the regular organs of circulation, 
 supply their place by the intestines, but those great 
 naturalists deemed the fact so enormous and so incredi- 
 ble, that they did not venture to publish it. It is now 
 perfectly established by Milne Edwards, M. de Quatre- 
 fages, <fec. 
 
 Whatever may be thought of their birth, our atoms, 
 when once born, present a world infinitely and admira- 
 bly varied. All forms of life are there honorably rep- 
 resented. If they know themselves, they must consider 
 that they compose among themselves a harmony so 
 complete as to leave but little to desire. 
 
 They are not dispersed species, created apart ; they 
 clearly form a kingdom in which the various species 
 
132 THE ATOM. 
 
 have organized a great division of the vital labor. They 
 have collective beings like our polypus or coral insect, 
 engaged in the servitude of a common life ; and they 
 liave their minute molluscs which already display their 
 minute and delicate shells ; they have their swiftly 
 swimming fish and whirling insects, proud crustaceae, 
 miniatures of the future crabs, armed, like them, to the 
 teeth ; warrior, atoms that chase and devour inoffensive 
 atoms. 
 
 And all this in an enormous and marvellous abund- 
 ance, which shows the comparative poverty of our visi- 
 ble world. Without speaking of those Rhizopodes 
 which have made their part of the Apennines and the 
 Cordilleras, — the Foramineferes, alone, that numerous 
 tribe of shelled atoms, amount, according to Charles 
 d'Orbigny, to two thousand species. They are contem- 
 porary with every age of the earth ; they present them- 
 selves at all the various depths of our thirty crises of 
 tlie globe ; sometimes varying a little in form, buf 
 always existing as species ; identical witnesses of the 
 life of the earth. In the present day tiie cold current 
 from the south pole which the point of America cuts in 
 two, sends forty species towards La Plata and forty 
 towards Chili. But the great scene of their creation 
 and organization appears to be the warm stream of the 
 sea which flows from the Antilles. The northern cur- 
 rents kill them. The great paternal torrent drifts 
 
THE ATOM. 133 
 
 myriads of their dead to Newfoundland in our ocean, 
 whose bottom is paved with them. 
 
 When the illustrious godfather of the atoms, Ehren- 
 berg, baptised them and introduced them to the scien- 
 tific world, he was accused of being too favorable to 
 them, and of exaggerating the character of those little 
 creatures. He declared them to be a complicated and 
 elevated organization. So liberally did he endow 
 them, that he gave them a hundred and twenty stomachs. 
 The visible world became jealous of these invisibles, and, 
 by a violent reaction, Dujardin reduced them to the 
 lowest degrees of simplicity. The asserted organs he 
 treated as mere appearances ; but, as he could not deny 
 their obvious and great powers of absorption, he grant- 
 ed them the gift of being able to improvise stomachs 
 proportioned to what they had to swallow. M. Ponchet 
 does not coincide with this opinion, but rather inclines 
 to that of Ehrenberg. 
 
 What is incontestable and admirable in these atoms 
 is the vigor of movement. 
 
 Many have all the appearance of a precocious indi- 
 viduality. They do not long remain subject to the 
 communistic life led by their i'ramediate superioi's, the 
 true Polypes. Very many of these invisibles are indi- 
 viduals at the first leap ; that is to say, that, at the first 
 moment of their existence, they can come and go alone 
 
134 THE ATOM. 
 
 and at their own will ; true citizens of the world whose 
 raoveinents depend only upon themselves. 
 
 Whatever can be seen or imagined of various modes 
 of locomotion in the visible world, is equalled, even sur- 
 passed, among these invisibles. The impetuous whirl 
 of a potent star, of a sun which attracts around him, as 
 his planets, the weaker one which he meets, the more 
 irregular course of the eccentric comet, the graceful 
 undulation of the slender one in the water or upon 
 the land, the rocking barque that veers right round in 
 an instant, the rush of the swift shark and the slow 
 crawl of the wretched sloth — all and every movement, 
 clumsy or graceful, slow or swift, is to be found in the 
 various species of atoms. And with what a marvellous 
 simplicity of machinery ! Here you see one, a mere 
 thread, advancing, twisting, a veritable elastic cork- 
 screw ; there you see one that for oar and rudder has 
 only an undulating tail or a pair of little vibrating eye- 
 lashes. The beautiful little polypus- worms, like flowers 
 in a vase, anchor together upon an isle — a little plant, 
 or a miniature crab, and then separate and cast off by 
 detaching their delicate peduncle. 
 
 What is even more surprising than the organs of mo- 
 tion, is what we may term the expression, the attitudes, 
 the original signs of character and temper. You may 
 recognize here the apathetic, there the vivacious and 
 
THE ATOM. 135 
 
 fantastic, some all alert for war, and others, as it would 
 seem, fretful and agitated without any apparent cause. 
 Again, you will occasionally see a whole crowd of re- 
 markably quiet and peaceable atoms suddenly dispersed 
 and knocked over by some scapegrace atom, conscious 
 of superior strength, and spoiling for a fight. 
 
 A prodigious comedy is that of our atoms ! They 
 seem to be satirically rehearsing the various farces 
 which are played in our own noble and serious world, 
 of atoms of larger growth ! 
 
 At the head of the infusorise, we must make respect- 
 fnl mention of the majestic giants, the highest type of 
 motion and of strength, slow, but terrible and great. 
 
 Take some moss from a roof, steep it for a few 
 hours in water, then place it under the microscopic in- 
 spection, and you behold a vast, a mighty animal, the 
 elephant or the whale of the invisibles, moving with a 
 youthful grace which those large animals do not always 
 display. Respect this king of all the atoms, this roti- 
 fer, so called because on either side of his head he has 
 a wheel ; these wheels are his organs of locomotion, 
 like the paddle-wheels of a steamship, or perhaps they 
 also serve him as his arms of chase to catch his small 
 game, the inferior and peaceable atoms ! All fly, all 
 yield to the rotifer, save one ; one atom only fears 
 nothing, yields nothing, but trusts to his superior 
 weapons. He is a monster, but he is provided 
 
136 THE ATOJI. 
 
 with superior senses. He lias two great gleaming, pur- 
 plish eyes. He is slow, but he can see, and he is ad- 
 mirably armed. To his strong paws lie adds strong, 
 sharp talons, which serve him to hold on with, and, at 
 need, to serve him in the fight. 
 
 Potent initial essays of Nature, that with such small 
 expenditure of matter, can create in such majestic fash- 
 ion ! Sublime first note of the sublime overture. These, 
 — of what consequence is mere size ? — have a colossal 
 power of absorption and of movement, far beyond that 
 which will be given to the enormous animals that are 
 classed so much higher in the animal scale. 
 
 The oyster fixed upon its rock, the crawling slug, 
 are to the rotifers creatures as disproportioned as man 
 to the Alps or Cordilleras — so disproportioned that 
 one cannot compare them by glance, hardly by reflec- 
 tion and calculation. Yet among those animal moun- 
 tains, where will you find the vivacity, the ardor of vitali- 
 ty, displayed by the rotifer ? What a fall we have as 
 we ascend ! Our atoms are too vivacious, dazzlingly 
 agile, and these gigantic beasts are smitten with paral- 
 ysis. What if the rotifer could conceive, for instance, 
 the superb, the colossal starred sponge, which one may 
 see in the Museum at Paris ? It is to the rotifer what 
 this globe, with its twenty seven-thousand miles of cir- 
 cumfei'ence is to man. Well ! If the rotifer could com- 
 pare himself to the huge sponge, rely upon it that the 
 
THE ATOM. 137 
 
 rotifer would move his wheels in utmost excitement, 
 and exclaim — " I am great." 
 
 Ah ! Rotifer, rotifer ! we should despise no one, and 
 nothing. 
 
 I am well convinced of your advantages and your su- 
 periority. But who knows if the captive and slumber- 
 ing life which you, for instance, despise in the oyster 
 or the snail, or the slug, be not in truth a progress ? 
 Your wild vertiginous movement, and vivacity, by no 
 means secure a passage towards higher destinies ; for 
 that passage, nature prefers a motion of less enchant- 
 ment. She enters the dark sepulchre of that melan- 
 choly communism in which element reckons but for lit- 
 tle ; she teaches how to dominate individual anxieties 
 and ambitions, and to concentrate substances for the 
 benefit of superior lives. 
 
 She sleeps there, for a time, like the Sleeping Beau- 
 ty in the Wood. But sleep, captivity, enchantment, be 
 it what it may, it is not Death. In the sponge, seem- 
 ingly so dead, what life there is ! It moves not, breathes 
 not, has no organs of circulation, or of sense, — and 
 yet it lives. How know we that, do you ask ? Twice 
 in every year the sponge reproduces. She lives after 
 her fashion, and even more richly than many others. 
 At the proper day, small spheres leave the mother 
 sponge, arnied with minute fins, which enable them for 
 a short time to float about in full liberty, but soon com- 
 
138 THE ATOM. 
 
 ing to anchor, they remain there, growing, reproducing, 
 till the sponge-hunter carries them to the habitations 
 of man, to the service of the greater enslaver, man, the 
 civilized. 
 
 Thus, in the apparent absence of senses, and of all 
 organization, in that mysterious enigma, at the doubt- 
 ful threshold of life, generation opens up to us the visi- 
 ble world by which we are to ascend. As yet there is 
 nothing, and in the bosom of that nothingness materni- 
 ty already appears. As with the fabled gods of an- 
 tique and mysterious Egypt, as with that old Isis and 
 Osiris, who begat before their birth, here, also, Love 
 exists before Being. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 BLOOD-PLOWEE. 
 
 At the heart of the globe, in the warm waters of tho 
 Line, and upon their volcanic bottoms, the sea so super- 
 abounds in life that it seems impossible for it to balance 
 its multitudinous creations. Overpassing purely vege- 
 table life, its earliest products are organized, sensitive, 
 living. 
 
 But these animals adorn themselves with a singular 
 splendor of botanic beauty, the splendid liveries of an 
 eccentric and most luxuriant Flora. Far as the eye 
 can reach, you see what, judging from the forms and 
 colors, you take • for flowers, and shrubs, and plants. 
 But those plants have their movements, those shrubs are 
 irritable, those flowers shrink and shudder with an in- 
 cipient sensitiveness which promises, perception and 
 will. 
 
 Charming oscillation, fascinating motion, most grace- 
 
140 BLOOD-FLOWER. 
 
 M equivoque ! On the confines of the two kingdoms 
 of animal and vegetable life, Mind, under those faery 
 oscillations gives token of its first awakening, its dawn, 
 its morning twilight, to be followed by a glorious and 
 glowing noon. Those brilliant colors, those pearly and 
 enamelled flashings, tell at once of the past night and 
 the thought of the dawning day. 
 
 Thought ! may we venture to call it so ? No, it is 
 still a Dream, which by degrees will clear up into 
 Thought. 
 
 Already, in the north of Africa, over the other side 
 of the Cape, the vegetable kingdom, which reigns alone 
 in the temperate zone, sees itself rivalled, surpassed. 
 Tlie great enchantment progresses, increases, as we 
 near tlie Equator. On the land, ^- Iree, shrub, flower, 
 weed, are proud and gorgeous, flaming in every bright 
 color, delicate in every soft shade, and beneath the 
 waters' slime and the ruddy corals, Beside parterres, 
 that display rainbow beauties of every color and every 
 tint, commence the stone plants ; the madrepores, whose 
 branches (should we not rather say their hands and 
 fingers?) flourish in a rose-tinted snowj like peach or ap- 
 ple blossoms. Seven hundred leagues on either side of 
 the Equator, you sail through this faery land of magi- 
 cal illusion and wondrous beauty. 
 
 There are doubtful creatures, the Corallines, for in- 
 stance, that are claimed by all the three kingdoms. 
 
BLOOD-FLOWER. 141 
 
 They teud towards the animal, they tend towards the 
 niiaeral, and, finally, are assigned to the vegetable. 
 Perchance they form the real point at which Ljfe ob- 
 scurely and mysteriously rises from the slumber of the 
 stone, without utterly quitting that rude starting-point, 
 as if to remind us, so high placed and so haughty, of 
 the right of even the humble mineral to rise into ani- 
 mation, and of the deep and eternal aspiration that lies 
 buried, but busy, in the bosom of Nature. 
 
 " The fields and forests of our dry land," says Dar- 
 win, " appear sterile and empty, if we compare them 
 with those of the sea." And, in fact, all who traverse 
 the marvellous transparent Indian seas arc thrilled, 
 stirred, startled, by the phantasmagoria that flashes up 
 from their far clear depths. Especially surprising is 
 ihe interchange between animal and vegetable life of 
 their especial and characteristic appearances. The soft 
 impressible gelatinous plants, with rounded organs, 
 that are neither precisely leaves nor precisely stalks, 
 the delicacy of their animal curves — those Hogarthian 
 " lines of beauty," seem to ask us to believe that they 
 are veritable animals, while the real animals, on the 
 other hand, in form, in color, in all, seem to do their 
 utmost to be mistaken for vegetables. Bach kingdom 
 skilfully imitates the other. These have the solidity, 
 the quasi permanence, of the tree ; the others alter- 
 nately expand and fade like the evanescent flower 
 
142 
 
 BLOOD-FLOWER. 
 
 Thus the sea Anemone opens as a roseate and pearly 
 flower, or as a granite star with deep blue eyes ; but 
 when.her corollas have given forth an Anemone daugh- 
 ter, you sec the fair mother droop, fade, die. 
 
 Far otherwise variable, that Proteus of the waters, 
 the Halcyon, takes every form and every color. Now 
 plant, now flower, it spreads itself out into a fanlike 
 beauty, becomes a bushy hedge, or rounds itself into a 
 graceful bouquet. But all this is so ephemeral, so fugi- 
 tive, so timid, so shrinking, that at the slightest touch 
 of the softest breath it disappears, and returns on the 
 instant into the womb of the common mother. In these 
 slight and fugitive forms you at once recognize the twin 
 sisters of the sensitive plants of our earth; closing up, 
 as they close at the first breath of evening. 
 
 When you gaze down upon a coral reef, you see the 
 depths carpeted, many colored flowers with fungi, 
 masses of snosvy brilliancy ; every hill, every valley, 
 of the great deep, is variegated with a thousand forms, 
 and a thousand colors, from the ruddy and outstretched 
 branches of the coral, to the deep, rich, velvety green 
 of the Cariophylles or violets, which seek their food by 
 the gentle motion of the richly golden stamens. Above 
 this lower world, as if to shade them from the too 
 glowing kiss of the ardent sun, waves a whole forest of 
 giant and dwarf trees and shrubs, and from tree to tree 
 feathery spirals stretch and interlace like the loving 
 
BLOOD-FLOWEB. 143 
 
 and embracing tendrils of the vine, but finer in tendril 
 and infinitely more splendid in their variegated and 
 contrasting, yet singularly harmonizing colors. 
 
 This glorious sight inspires, yet agitates us ; it is a 
 dream, a vertigo ; that Fay of the shifting mirage, the 
 Sea, adding to these colors her own prismatic tints, 
 fading, reappearing, now here, now gone, a capricious 
 and fitful inconstancy, a hesitation, a doubt. Have we 
 really seen it, this lovely scene ? No, it was not so. 
 Was it an entity, or a delusion ? Yes, yes, it must be' 
 real, there are certainly very real beings there, for I 
 see whole hosts of them lodged there and sporting 
 there. The molluscs confide in that reality, for there 
 you can see their pearly shells reflecting lights, now 
 flashing and brilliant, and anon of a most tender deli- 
 cacy ; and the crab, too, believes in it, for see how ho 
 hastens on liis sidelong path. Strange fish, vast and 
 curious monsters of the deep, move hither and thither 
 in their many colored vesture q^ purple and gold, and 
 deep azure and delicate pink ; and that delicate star, the 
 Ophiure agitates his delicate and elegant arms. 
 
 In this phantasmagoria the arborescent Madreporo 
 more gravely displays his less brilliant colors. His 
 beauty is chiefly that of form. 
 
 But the chief attraction of the aspect of this vast 
 community is in its entirety ; the individual is humble, 
 but the republic is imposing. Here you have the 
 
144 BLOOD-FLOWEK. 
 
 Strong assoniblago of aloes and cactus ; there you have 
 the superbly branching antlers of the Deer; and anon, 
 you see the vast stretch of the vigorous branches of the 
 giant cedar stretching at first horizontally, but tending 
 to advance upward and upward still. 
 
 Those forms at present despoiled of the thousands 
 and tens of thousands of living flowers, wliich should 
 cover and enliven them have, perhaps, in that stern nu- 
 dity an additional attraction for the mind. I love to 
 look upon the trees in winter, when their bared boughs 
 tell us and show us what they really are. And thus it 
 is with the Madrepores. In their present nudity, when 
 from pictures they have become statues, it seems as 
 though they were about to reveal to us the whole secret 
 of the minute populations of which they are at once 
 the creation and the monument. Many of them seem 
 to write to us in strange characters, to speak to us in 
 strange tones. Their interlacings evidently have a 
 something to tell us,jould we but understand them. 
 But who shall be their interpi-eter ; who shall give us 
 the keynote to their harmony, mysterious harmony — 
 but Harmony doubtless ? 
 
 ' How much less significant is the Bee architecture in 
 its cold, severe, geometry ! That is the produce of life, 
 but here we look upon life itself. The stone was not 
 simply the base and shelter of this people ; it was it- 
 self a previous people, an anterior generation, which, 
 
BLOOD-FLOWER. 145 
 
 gradually overtopped by the younger, assumed its pres- 
 ent consistence. And all the movements of that first 
 community are still strikingly visible, as details of an- 
 other Herculaneum, or Pompeii. But here everything 
 is accomplished without catastrophe, ■without violence, 
 by orderly and natural progress ; all testifies to sereni- 
 ty and peace. 
 
 Every sculptor will here admire the forms of a mar- 
 vellous art which has achieved such infinite variety of 
 forms, improving upon all arts of ornamentation. But 
 we have to reflect upon something far beyond mere 
 form. The arborescent variety on which the activity 
 of these laborious tribes has been so wonderfully em- 
 ployed, is the effort of a thought, of a captive liberty, 
 seeking the guiding thread in the deep and mazy laby- 
 rinth, and timidly feeling its way upward towards the 
 light, and gently and gracefully working out its eman- 
 cipation from communist life. 
 
 I have in my possession two of these little trees dif- 
 fering from each other, but of like species. No vegeta- 
 ble is comparable to thera. One, purely white as the 
 most immaculate alabaster, has an inexhaustible wealth 
 of buds, and blossoms and flowers, on every one of its 
 many spreading branches. The other, less white and 
 less spreading, has also its whole world upon its branch- 
 es. Exquisitely beautiful are they both ; alike yet un- 
 like, twins of innocence and fraternity. Oh who shall 
 7 
 
146 BLOOD-FLOWER. 
 
 explain to us the mystery of the infant soul that created 
 these faery things ! We feel that it must be at work, 
 captive and yet free ; captive in a captivity so beloved 
 that though still tending upward towards freedom, it 
 yet cares not fully to achieve it. 
 
 The arts have not yet seized upon those wonders 
 from which the world has derived so much benefit. 
 The beautiful statue of Nature (at the entrance of the 
 Jardin dcs Plantes) should have been surrounded by 
 them ; Nature should only be exhibited as she ever 
 lives, amidst faery triumphs, enthroning her on a moun- 
 tain of her own beauties. Her first born, the Madre- 
 pores, would have furnished the lower strata with their 
 meanders, their stars and their alabaster branches ; 
 while above, their sisters, with their bodies and their 
 fine hair would have made a living bed, softly to em- 
 brace with caressing love the divine Mother in her 
 dream of eternal maternity. 
 
 Painting has succeeded in these things no better than 
 sculpture. Her animated flowers have neither the ex- 
 pression nor tlie true, pure, delicate coloring of the 
 animated flowers, of the nature of which our colored en- 
 gravings give but a poor and mechanical idea, altogeth- 
 er destitute of the unctuous softness, suppleness, and 
 warm emotion of the flowers of the fields, the woods, the 
 gardens, or animated flowers of the sea?. Enamels, 
 even attempted as by Palissy,are too hard and cold; ad- 
 
BLOOD-FLOWER. 147 
 
 mirable for reptiles and the scales of fish, they are 
 too glaring to resemble these tender and soft creatures 
 that have not even a skin. The little exterior lungs of 
 the annelides, the slight net work in which certain of the 
 Polypes float, the sensitive and ever-moving hairs which 
 support the Medusae, are objects not merely delicate to 
 sight, but aifecting to imagination. They are of every 
 shade, fine and vague, yet warm ; as though a balmy 
 breath had become visible. You see an ever-varying, 
 ever-moving rainbow that delights your eye ; but for 
 them it is a very serious matter, the creating of that 
 marvellous rainbow, .of various forms and colors ; it is 
 their blood and their weak life converted into changing 
 hues and tints, and lights and shades. Take care ! Do 
 not stifle that little floating soul, which mutely, but oh 
 how eloquently, tells you its secret in those varying and 
 palpitating colors. 
 
 The colors do not long survive, and their creators, 
 the Madrepores, themselves survive only in their base, 
 which has been called inorganic, but which in reality 
 is condensed and solidified life. 
 
 Women, who have a more delicate and penetrating 
 sense of the beautiful than we have, do not thus mis- 
 itake ; they have, at the least, confusedly divined that 
 one of these trees, the coral, is a living thing, and 
 thence the just favor in which they hold it. Vainly 
 
148 BLOOD-FLOWER. 
 
 did science tell them that coral was mere stone, and 
 then that it was a plant, they knew quite differently. 
 
 " Madame, why is it that you prefer this tree of a 
 dubious red, to all the precious stones ? " 
 
 " Monsieur, it suits my complexion. Rubies are too 
 vivid, they make me look pale, while this, somewhat 
 duller, rather more favorably contrasts fairness." 
 
 The lady is quite right ; the coral and the lady are 
 related. In the coral, as in the lip and the cheek of 
 the lady, it is iron, according to Yoyel, which makes 
 the one red and the others roseate. 
 
 " But, Madame, these brilliant stones have an incom- 
 parable polish, and dazzling lustre." 
 
 " Yes, but the coral has something of the softness 
 and even the warmth of the skin. As soon as I put it 
 on, it seems to become a part of myself." 
 
 " But Madame, there are much finer reds than that 
 of your coral necklace." 
 
 " Doctor, leave me this, I love it. Why ? That I 
 know not ; or if there is a reason, that which will do 
 as well as any, is that its Eastern and true name is ' the 
 Blood-Flower. ' " 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE WORLD MAKERS. 
 
 Our Museum of Natural History, within its too narrow 
 limits, contains a faery palace in every part of which 
 we see the genius of metamorphoses of Lamarck and 
 Geoffray. In, the dark lower hall the Madrepores 
 serve as the base of the more and more living world 
 that rises, stage above stage, above. Higher up the su- 
 perior creatures of the sea display tlieir energy of 
 organization, and prepare the life of the terrestrials, 
 and above these, Mammiferae, over which the lovely 
 birds spread their wings and almost seem to be still 
 singing! The multitude of visitors pass quickly and 
 with small show of interest from the Madrepores, those 
 elder born of the globe, and hasten to the light and to 
 the presence of things of brightest beauty, mother of 
 pearl, the richly painted wings of butterflies, and the 
 plumage of birds. I, who stop longer below, often find 
 myself quite alone in that dark little gallery. 
 
150 THE WORLD MAKERS. 
 
 I love that solemn crypt of the great scientific Church. 
 There I best can feel the sacred soul, the still present 
 spirit of our great masters, their great, their sublime 
 effort, and the immortal audacity of our voj^agers and 
 travellers, the intrepid collectors of such a wealth of 
 whatever is beautiful or instructive. Wherever their 
 bones may lie they themselves are still present in the 
 Museum by the treasures which they have bequeathed, 
 treasures which some of them have paid for with their 
 lives. 
 
 On the 15th of last October, having remained in that 
 crypt somewhat late, I had some difficulty in reading the 
 label on some Madrepores — that label bore the name 
 of " Lamarck." 
 
 A sudden warmth, a religious glow, thrilled through 
 my heart and brain. 
 
 " Lamarck ! " Great name, and already antique ! It 
 is as though among the tombs of Saint Denis we should 
 suddenly read the name of Clovis. The glory, the 
 strifes, the royal triumphs, of his successor, have ob- 
 scured somewhat the name of that blind Homer of the 
 Museum, who, with the instinct of genius created, or- 
 ganized, and named the previously almost unknown 
 class of Invertebrates ; a class, nay, a whole world, 
 a vast abyss of soft half organized life still destitute of 
 vertebrae ; that bony centralization and essential support 
 of personality. These are all the more interesting 
 
THE WORLD MAKERS. 151 
 
 because they are obviously the earliest of all — those 
 humble and so long neglected tribes. Reaumur placed 
 the Crocodiles among the insects. The proud Buffon 
 deigned not to know even the names of humble Inverte- 
 brates, he excluded them altogether from the Olympus 
 at Yorsailles which he erected to Nature. These great 
 populations, so obscure, so confused, which, neverthe- 
 less, prepared everything and abound every where, re- 
 mained exiled from the world of science until the 
 coming of Lamarck. It was precisely the elders that 
 were thus excluded, elders so numerous that to exclude 
 them was, in some sort, to close the eyes and bar the 
 gate against nature herself. 
 
 The genius of the Metamorphoses was emancipated 
 by botany and chemistry. It was a bold but most pre- 
 cious thing to take Lamarck, from the Botany in which 
 he had passed his life, and remove him to the vast world 
 of animality. That ardent genius, trained in' miracles 
 by the transformations of plants, and full of faith in- the 
 unity of life, next drew the animals, and that vast ani- 
 mal, the Globe, from the state of petrifaction in which 
 they so long had lain. Half blind, he intrepidly treated 
 a thousand things which the clear sighted scarcely 
 dared to approach. At least, he infused his fire into 
 them, and Geofiray, Cuvier and Blainville found them 
 warm and living. 
 
 " All is living, or has been," said Lamarck ; every- 
 
152 THE WORLD MAKERS. 
 
 thing is life, either present or past." Great revolu- 
 tionary effort, that, against inert matter ; effort proceed- 
 ing even to suppress and banish the inorganic ! No 
 longer any actual death. That which has lived may 
 sleep ; and yet preserve latent life, the capacity to 
 revive. Who is really dead? No one. What? Nothing. 
 
 This dictum, so novel, and so,bold, swelled the sails 
 of our scientific age with a strong and a favoring 
 gale ; it has urged on enquiries, such as but for it we 
 should never have dreamed of making. History, or 
 Natural History, we demand of every thing, who are 
 you — and everywhere the answer is, ^^ I am Life" 
 and, thus. Death retreats before the bold advance and 
 eagle glance of science, and Mind moves onward still, 
 conquering and to conquer. 
 
 Among these resuscitations, I first note my Madre- 
 pores, taking the interest of life, though previously 
 scorned, or unnoticed, as dead stone. When Lamarck 
 collected and explained them at the Museum, they were 
 detected in the mystery of their activity, in their im- 
 mense creations, and they exemplified how a world is 
 made. That once known, it was at once suspected that 
 if the earth makes the animal, the animal also makes 
 the earth ; and that each aids the other in the office of 
 creation. 
 
 Animality is every where, filling every thing and 
 peopling every thing. We find the remains or the im- 
 
THE WORLD MAKERS. 153 
 
 print of it even in the minerals, as the statuary marble 
 and alabaster, which have passed through the crucible 
 of the most destructive fires. At every advance, in our 
 knowledge of the existing, we discover an enormous 
 past of animal life. As soon as our improvements in 
 Optics enabled us to discover and to watch the Infuso- 
 rise, we behold them making mountains and paving the 
 ocean. The hard silex is a mass of animalcules, the 
 sponge is an animated silex. Our limestones are all 
 animals ; Paris is built with infusoriae, a part of Ger- 
 many rests upon a newly buried bed of coral. Infusorise, 
 coral, shells, chalk and lime. They are constantly 
 taking from the Ocean, but the fish, which devour the 
 coral, restore it as chalk, and restore it to the waters 
 whence it came. Thus the Coral Sea in its labor of 
 production, of upheaving, in its constructions incessantly 
 augmented or diminished, built, ruined, and rebuilt, is 
 an immense fabric of limestone which is continually 
 oscillating between its two lives ; — the acting life of 
 the day — the other life that will act to-morrow. 
 
 Foster quite justly decides that these circular islands 
 are the craters of volcanoes, raised up by -the polypes. 
 He has been contradicted, but wrongly so. Upon no oth- 
 er liypothesis can we account for this identity of figure. 
 There is always the same ring of about a hundred paces 
 in diameter, very low, beaten on the outside by the 
 waves, but enclosing a tranquil basin. A few plants of 
 
154 THE WORLD MAKERS. 
 
 three or four species, liere and there, crown the basin 
 with verdure. The water is of the most beautiful green. 
 The enclosing ring is of white sand, the residue of dis- 
 solved coral, contrasting with the blue of the Ocean. 
 Beneath the salt water, our little laborers are at work, 
 the stronger and bolder at the breakers, the weaker 
 and more timid on the smoother sides. 
 
 This is not a very varied world. But wait. The 
 winds and the currents are constantly at work to en- 
 rich it ; come a good tempest, and all the neighboring 
 isles will be laid under contribution to enrich this rising 
 one. And in this is one of the most magnificent func- 
 tions of the Tempest ; the greater, the wilder, and the 
 more sweeping, the more fecund it is. A water-spout 
 passes over an island ; the torrent that it produces 
 carries with it slime, rubbish, plants, living or dead, 
 and even whole forests, which the waves carry to the 
 neighboring isles, raising, and at the same time enrich- 
 ing, their soil. 
 
 A great messenger of life, and one of the most trans- 
 portable, is the solid cocoanut. Not only does it travel 
 well, but, when thrown upon shoal or rock, if it find only 
 a little poor white sand, which would support nothing 
 else, the cocoanut contents itself there, finds brackii^h 
 water not a jot less agreeable than the freshest ; ger- 
 minates, thrives, grows into a robust cocoa tree. A tree 
 being thus planted, fresh water comes, falling leaves ere- 
 
THE WORLD MAKERS. 155 
 
 ate earth, other trees follow, and at length we see the 
 noble palm grove, which ari-ests the vapors, which at 
 length form a rivulet or river, which, flowing from the 
 center of the isle, make an opening of fresh water in 
 the cincture of white sand, and thus keep the polypes, 
 inhabitants only of salt water, at a respectful distance. 
 
 Of the rapidity with which the Polypes do their work, 
 we have some curious proofs. In forty days' harboring 
 at Rio Janeiro, boats were wholly destroyed ; in a 
 strait near Austi-alia, there were formerly only twenty- 
 six islets ; there are already a hundred and fifty — well 
 recognized: and the English admiralty believes that 
 there are even more ; and in. twenty years hence the 
 whole strait, forty leagues in length, will be so com- 
 pletely blocked up as to be unnavigable. 
 
 The eastern shoal of Australia is three hundred and 
 sixty leagues, (one hundred and twenty-seven without 
 any interruption,) and that of New Caledonia one hun- 
 dred and forty-five leagues ; the single shoal of the 
 Maldives is almost five hundred miles long, and groups 
 of isles in the Pacific are four hundred leagues long, 
 by a hundred and fifty wide. To all this work of the 
 Polypes, we must add, that the banks of the isle of 
 France, and the shallows of the Red Sea, are continu- 
 ally rising. Tunis and its environs present a wholly 
 animal world ; and the rocks present forms so strange, 
 and colors so splendid, that the spectator is amazed and 
 
156 THE WORLD MAKERS. 
 
 dazzled. You see them in a space of several leagues 
 of shallow sea water — probably not averaging more 
 than a foot of depth, working calmly, but perseveringly 
 at their business of creating. 
 
 Their first intelligent observer was Forster, compan- 
 ion of Cook, who found them at work, caught them in 
 the very fact of their great conspiracy to make, noise- 
 lessly and marvellously, whole chains of Islands, to be 
 by degrees converted into a continent. 
 
 All this passed before his eyes, as it might have done 
 in the first days of the world. Prom the submarine 
 depths, the central fire throws up a dome or cone, which 
 opens, and its lava forms. a circular crater. But the vol- 
 canic strength becomes exhausted, and the cooling lava 
 becomes covered with a living jelly, an animal multi- 
 tude, whose perpetual exudation of mucus continually 
 raises the circle higher and higher, to low water mark ; 
 no higher, or they would be dry ; no lower, because they 
 would lack the light. If they have no special organ with 
 which to perceive the light, it circumfuses, penetrates, 
 permeates their whole being. The glowing sun of the 
 tropics, which traverses right through their transparent 
 little frames, seems to have for them all the irresistible 
 attraction of magnetism. When the tide ebbs and 
 leaves them uncovered, they, nevertheless, remain open, 
 and drink in the vivid light. 
 
 Dumont d' Urville, who so often coasted among their 
 
THE WORLD MAKERS. 167 
 
 little isles, says : — " It is a real pain to see, so near by 
 the peace of that interior basin, and to see all around 
 shallow waters, beneath which are the shelving rocks, 
 tenanted by the coral insects, in perfect security, while 
 we are enduring all the shocks of a raging tempest." 
 But this amiable community and its edifice are a shoal, 
 a terrible lee shore, scarcely hidden by the shallow wa- 
 ters ; touch flpon that shoal and you will be crushed. 
 Trust not to anchors among those peaked and jagged 
 rocks ; your cables, however good, would soon wear 
 and snap. The seaman's anxiety is extreme, in those 
 long nights when the Southern surges drive him among 
 these shoals, at once so rugged and yet as cutting as ra- 
 zors. 
 
 To such accusations as these, our innocent shoal- 
 makers reply — " Time — give us only time, and these 
 rocks will become hospitable, tenanted, fruitful. These 
 banks, joined on to their neighboring banks, will no 
 longer have these terrible threatenings for the seaman. 
 We are preparing a spare world to replace your old one 
 should it perish. Ingrates ! Come some great and 
 overwhelming catastrophe to your old world, if, as some 
 one among you has said, the sea turns from one pole to 
 the other in every ten thousand years, and you per- 
 chance will bless us, and hail with joy these southern 
 isles which we are making, this huge southern continent 
 
158 THE WORLD MAKERS. 
 
 that we are preparing. Confess, now, that if, unhappi- 
 ly, ships do occasionally perish on these shoals, our 
 work here, nevertheless, is useful, and good, and great. 
 Our improvised world may not unjustly be proud. To say 
 nothing about the beauty of its triumphant colors, be- 
 fore which those of your earth grow pale ; to say noth- 
 ing about the graceful curves and circles on which we 
 pride ourselves, — how many are the problems, which, 
 insolvable to you, find their solution among us ! The 
 division of labor, a charming variety combined with a 
 great regularity, a geometrical order, softened and 
 made graceful and gracious by a rising liberty — where, 
 among you men, will you find these so combined as 
 from the beginning we have combined them among us ? 
 Our incessant labor in relieving the sea-water of its 
 salts, creates those currents which give it life and health- 
 ful power. "We are the very spirits of the Sea, giving, 
 as we do, her motion. 
 
 And the sea is not ungrateful ; she nourishes us at 
 fixed periods ; and not less punctually comes the glow- 
 ing sun to caress us and dower us with brilliant colors. 
 We are the beloved, the favored workers of the Deity, 
 entrusted by him with the first rude sketches and out- 
 lines of his worlds, and all our juniors upon this globe, 
 need us, and are indebted to us. Our friend the Cocoa 
 tree, that inaugurates terrestrial life upon our isle, 
 
THE ■WORLD MAKERS. 159 
 
 could not do so but from our dust. In its far back ori- 
 gin, vegetable life is our liberal gift, and, made rich by 
 us, it nourishes the superior creation." 
 
 " But what need of other animals ? We are within 
 our own circle complete, harmonious and sufficing ; 
 with us the circle of creation might be closed. For as 
 God crowns his isle on his old volcano of fire, he has 
 created a volcano of life, and expansion of that living 
 paradise. He has created all that he needs, and now 
 He may repose." 
 
 Not yet, not yet. A creation must rise above yours, 
 a thing which you do not fear. That rival is not the 
 tempest, you would brave it ; nor the fresh water, you 
 would build beside it. It is not even the earth, which 
 by degrees is invading your constructions. What, then, 
 is that other power ? In yourself, in Polypes, there is 
 an ambition to cease to be one. In your Republic 
 there is a certain creature who in constant anxiety and 
 yearning, repeats that the perfection of this vegetating 
 existence is not real life. It constantly dreams of a 
 freer and more expanded life, navigating hither and 
 thither, penetrating and viewing the unknown world 
 even at the hazard of shipwreck ; — that thing is — the 
 Soul. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 DAUGHTER OP THE SEAS. 
 
 I PASSED the early part of 1858 in the pleasant little 
 town of Hy^res which, from afar, gazes down on the 
 sea, the islets and the peninsula by which its coast is 
 sheltered. The sea, seen from this distance, is even more 
 potently seductive than when one is on its very shore. 
 The paths leading to it, whether we pass between gar- 
 dens with their hedges of jasmin and myrtle, or, 
 ascending some little, pass through the olive grounds 
 and a little wood of pines and laurels, are exceedingly 
 tempting. The wood by no means hinders us from 
 catching, now and then, a glance of the bright sea. 
 The place is, by no means unjustly, called Fair-Coast. 
 Often in the fine days of its gentle winters we met 
 there a most interesting invalid, a young foreign prin- 
 cess who had come thither from a distance of five hun- 
 dred leagues, in the hope of adding some span to her 
 fading and failing life. That life, short as it was, had 
 
DAUGHTER OP THE SEAS. 161 
 
 been a hard and sad one. Scarcely had she become a 
 glad wife when she found herself rudely threatened by 
 Death. And now she dragged on from day to day of 
 suffering, supported and most tenderly treated by him 
 who lived only for her and hoped not to survive her. 
 If wishes and prayers could have preserved her she 
 would still live ; for all prayed for her, especially the 
 poor. But spring came, and bloomed and ended, and 
 on one of those April days whose genial influence re- 
 vives every thing we saw the two shadows pass, pale as 
 the wandering Elysian spectres of Virgil. 
 
 Sad at heart with sympathy, we reached the gulf. 
 Between the bold rocks, the pools left by the sea con- 
 tained some little creatures that had not been able to 
 accompany the retreating tide. Some shelled creatures 
 were there, self-concentrated and suffering from want 
 of water, and amongst them, unshelled, unsheltered, lay 
 the living parasol, that for some, anything, rather than 
 good reason, we call tlie Medusa. Why has that name 
 of terror been given to a creature so charming ? Never 
 before had my attention been attracted to those wrecked 
 beauties, which we so often see high and dry upon the 
 sea shore at low ebb tide. This especial one was 
 small, not larger than my hand, but singularly beau- 
 tiful, in its delicate colors, passing so lightly from tint 
 to tint. It was of an opal whiteness, into which passed, 
 as in a light cloud, a crown of the most delicate lilac. 
 
162 DAUGHTER OP THE SEAS. 
 
 The wind had turned it over, so that its lilac filaments 
 floated above, while the umbrella, that is to say, its 
 proper body, lay upon the rock. Much bruised in that 
 tender body, it was also wounded and mutilated in its 
 fine filaments, or hairs, which are its sensitive organs 
 of respiration, absorption, and even love. And the 
 whole creature thus thrown upside down was receiving 
 in full force the rays of the Provencal sun, severe in its 
 first awakening and rendered still more severe by the 
 dryness of the occasional gusts of the south-westerly 
 winds, the Mistral of our Provencal coasts. The 
 transparent creature was thus doubly pierced, doubly 
 tormented, accustomed as it was to the caressing sea, 
 and unprovided with the resisting epidermis of land 
 animals. 
 
 Close to her dried up lagune were other lagunes still 
 full of water, and communicating with the sea. Within 
 a few paces of her, then, was safety, but for her who 
 had no organs of locomotion, excepting her undulating 
 liairs, it was impossible to traverse even that petty dis- 
 tance, and it seemed that remaining under that fierce 
 sun and exposed to the arid blasts of that wind she very 
 speedily must faint, die, and be actually dissolved. 
 
 Nothing more ephemeral, more delicate than these 
 daughters of the sea. Some of them are so fluid that 
 they dissolve and disappear as soon as taken from the 
 
DAUGHTER OP THE SEAS. 163 
 
 sea. Such is that slight band of azure called the 
 Girdle of Venus. The Medusa, a little more solid has 
 all the more trouble in dying. Was she dying or 
 already dead ? I do not readily believe in death, and 
 believing that she still lived I resolved to convey her to 
 a lagune of salt water. To say the truth I felt some 
 repugnance to touching her. The delicious creature 
 with her visible innocence, and rainbow of tender colors, 
 looked like a trembling jelly which must blip from 
 one's touch or dissolve in one's grasp. However, I 
 conquered this repugnance, slid ray hand gently beneath 
 her and as I turned her over her hairs fell down into 
 their natural position, when used in swimming. I 
 thus carried her to the water, where she sank without 
 giving the slightest sign of life. I walked about the 
 shore, but in about ten minutes returned to look after 
 my Medusa. She was swimming under water, her hairs 
 undulating gracefully beneath her ; and slowly, but 
 safely, she had left the rock far behind her. 
 
 Poor creature, perhaps she got wrecked or stranded 
 again, ere long, for it is impossible to navigate with 
 weaker means or in a fashion more dangerous. The 
 Jledusse fear the shore where so many hard substances 
 hurt them, and in the open sea they are liable to be 
 overturned at every gust of wind, in which case, their 
 swimming-feathers being above instead of below their 
 
164 DAUGHTER OP THE SEAS. 
 
 bodies, they are carried hither and thither, at random, 
 upon the waves, as the prey of fish or the delight of 
 birds who find sport and profit in seizing them. 
 
 During a whole season which I spent on the banks of 
 Gironde I saw them cast ashore to perish miserably by 
 hundreds. On their arrival they were M'hite and bril- 
 liant as crystal. Alas ! How different was their aspect 
 in the course of a couple of days. Very happily they 
 sank beneath the sand and were lost to my pitying view. 
 
 They are the food of every thing marine, and have 
 themselves scarce any aliment, none that we know of, 
 but the, as yet, scarce organized atoms floating in the 
 sea which they, etherialize, as we may say, and suck in 
 witliout making them suffer. They have neither teeth 
 nor weapons ; no defence, excepting that some species, 
 Forbes says not all, can secrete, when attacked, a liquid 
 which stings somewhat like the nettle, but so faintly 
 that Dicquemare with impunity received some of it in 
 his eye. 
 
 Here we liave, indeed, a creature little provided and 
 in great peril. She is superior already ; she has senses, 
 and, if we may judge from her contractions, a great 
 sensibility to suffering. She cannot, like the Polypus, 
 be divided and live. Divide him and you double his 
 existence ; divide her and she dies. Gelatinous as the 
 polypus, the Medea seems to be an embryon cast away 
 too soon from the bosom of the common mother, torn 
 
DAUGHTER OP THE SEAS. 165 
 
 from the solid base and the association to which the 
 Polypus owes his safety, and launched into adventure. 
 How has the imprudent creature set out ? How, without 
 sails, or oars, or helm, has she left her port ? What is 
 her point of departure ? 
 
 Ellis, as long ago as 1750, saw a little Medusa pro- 
 duced from the campanular polypus, and many later 
 observers have ascertained that she is a kind of polypus 
 that has left the society. To speak more simply, she is 
 an escaped polypus. 
 
 And the learned M. Forbes who has so deeply studi- 
 ed them, very aptly asks, what is there astonishing in 
 that ? It only shows that to that extent the animal 
 still obeys the vegetable law. From the tree, the col- 
 lective being, proceeds the individual, the detached 
 fruit which fi'uit will make another tree. A pear tree 
 is a sort of vegetable polypus of which the pear, (the 
 emancipated individual) can give us a pear tree. 
 
 In like manner, adds Forbes, as the leaf laden tree, 
 stops in its development, contracts, and becomes an 
 organ of love — i. e. a flower, the Polypier, contract- 
 ing some of its polypes and transforming their contrac- 
 tions, forms the placenta, the eggs from which proceeds 
 the young and graceful Medusa. 
 
 One would guess as much from her hesitating grace, 
 that weakness at once so unarmed and so fearless, 
 which embarks without instruments of navigation, and 
 
166 DAUGHTER OF THE SEAS. 
 
 trusts too much to life. It is the first tender and 
 touching adventure of the new soul going forth with- 
 out defence from the security of the common life, to be 
 itself, an individual acting and sufiering on its own 
 account — soft sketch of free nature; an embryon of 
 liberty. 
 
 To be oneself, oneself alone, in a little complete 
 world, was a great temptation for all. A universal se- 
 duction ! a beautiful folly, which causes all the effort 
 and all the progress of the world, from our earth up- 
 ward to the very stars. But in her first attempts the 
 Medusa, seems especially unjustified. One would say 
 that she was created on purpose to be drowned. La- 
 den above, and ill-ballasted below, she is formed in 
 conditions exactly opposite to those of her parent, the 
 Physalio. This latter displays on the surface of the 
 water, only a little balloon, an insubmersible membrane 
 and below has infinitely long tentaculse, of twenty feet 
 or more, which steady her, sweep the waters, stupefy 
 the fish, make prey of him. Light and careless, inflat- 
 ing her pearly balloon of blue or purple tints, she darts 
 from her long hairy tentaculas a subtle and murderous 
 poison. Less formidable, the Velelles are no less se- 
 cure. They have the form of radeaux, their minute 
 organization is already somewhat solid, and they can 
 steer and trim their oblique sail to every wind. The 
 Porpites, that seem to be only a flower, a sea Margaret, 
 
DAUGHTER OF THE SEAS. 167 
 
 have their own peculiar levity ; even after death, thev 
 continue to float. It is the same with many other fan- 
 tastic and almost aerial beings, garlands with golden 
 bells or with rosebuds — such as the Physopheres, Ste- 
 phanomie, &c., azure girdles of Venus. All these 
 swim and float invincibly, fear only the shore, and sail 
 boldly out on the open sea, and when it is ever so rough 
 are perfectly safe there. So little do the Porpites and 
 Velelles fear the sea, that, being able to rise at pleas- 
 ure, they exert themselves to sink to the concealing 
 depths when the weather is bad. 
 
 Not such is our poor Medusa. Fearing the shore, 
 she is also in danger at sea. She could sink into the 
 depths at will, but the watery abyss is forbidden to her ; 
 she can live only on the surface, in the broad light and 
 in full peril. She sees, she hears, and her sense of 
 touch is very delicate, to her misfortune, too much so. 
 She cannot guide herself ; her most complicated organs 
 overload and overbalance her. 
 
 And so we are tempted to believe that she must needs 
 repent of so perilous a search after liberty ; and de- 
 sires to be back in the inferior state, the security of the 
 common life. The polypier made the Medusa, she in 
 turn makes the polypier, and returns to the life of com- 
 munity. But this vegetating state wearies her, and in 
 the next generation she again emancipates herself and 
 goes forth again to the perils of her vain navigation. 
 
168 DAUGHTER OF THE SEAS. 
 
 Strange alternation, in which she floats incessantly ; 
 moving, she dreams of repose ; in rest, she sighs for 
 movement. 
 
 These strange metamorphoses, which by turns raise 
 and abase the undecided creature, keeping her alter- 
 nating between two lives so different, are apparently the 
 case of the inferior species, of the Medusa which have 
 not been able to enter decidedly into the irrevocable ca- 
 reer of emancipation. For the others, we can easily 
 suppose that their charming varieties mark the interior 
 progress of life, the degrees of development, the sports, 
 the smiling graces of their new liberty. This latter 
 class, admirably artistic, won this so simple theme of a 
 dislc or parasol which floats, of a light lustre of crystal 
 which reflects the sun's glowing and coloring lights, has 
 made an infinity of variations, a deluge of little marvels. 
 
 All these beauties floating on the green mirror of the 
 sea in their gay and delicate colors, and in the thou- 
 sand attractions of an infantine and unconscious coquet- 
 ry, have puzzled Science, which to class and to name 
 them, has been obliged to call to its aid both the Queens 
 of History and the Goddesses of Mythology. Here 
 we have the waving Berenice, whose rich hair floats 
 another and brighter flood upon the flood ; there we 
 have the little Orithya, the fair spouse of Bolus, who, 
 at the breathing of her husband, displays her pure, 
 white urn, uncertain, and scarcely supported by her fine 
 
DAUGHTER OF THE SEAS. 169 
 
 hair, which she often entangles beneath, or the weepino- 
 Dionea, looking like an alabaster cup, from which, in 
 crystalline streamlets, flow splendid tears. Such, when 
 in Switzerland, I saw spreading themselves the weari- 
 ed and idle cascades, which, having made too many 
 turnings, seemed dropping with drowsiness and languor. 
 
 In the great faery of the illumination of the sea on 
 stormy nights, the Medusa has her separate part. 
 Bathed, like so many other beings, in the phosphoric 
 fluid with which they are all penetrated, she returns it 
 in her manner, with a peculiar charm. 
 
 How dark is the night at sea when we do not see 
 that phosphoric gleam or a fitful flashing ! How vast 
 and formidable are those dark depths, on such gloomy 
 nights. On land, the shadows are less dense and im- 
 penetrable, we see, if dimly, and make out forms, if 
 imperfectly, so that we get so many directing marks. 
 But at sea, how vast, unbroken, infinitely dense is tlie 
 darkness of the dark nights. Nothing, still nothing ; a 
 thousand dangers to be imagined, but not one to bo 
 seen and avoided ! 
 
 We feel all this, even when living on the coast. It 
 is a great gladness, an exciting pleasure, when, the air 
 becoming electric, we see in the distance, a slight line 
 of pale fire. "What is it ? We'see it even at home, on 
 the dead fish, the Herring, for instance. But, living in 
 his great sea, he is still more luminous in the long trains 
 
170 DAUGHTER OF THE SEAS. 
 
 that he leaves behind him. That phosphoric brilliancy 
 is by no means the exclusive privilege of Death. Is it 
 an effect of Heat ? No, for you find it at both poles, 
 in the Antarctic Seas, in the Siberian Seas, in ours — 
 in all. 
 
 It is the common electricity which the half-living wa.-- 
 ters throw off in stormy weather ; the innocent and 
 pacific lightning of which all marine creatures are then 
 so many conductors. They inhale it, and they exhale 
 it, and they restore it largely when they die. The sea 
 gives it, and the sea takes it back again. Along the 
 coasts and in the straits, the currents and the collisions, 
 cause it to circulate the more powerfully, and each crea- 
 ture, according to its waters, takes more or less of it. 
 Here, immense surfaces of peaceable infusorise appear, 
 like a milky sea, of a mild, white light, which, when 
 more animated, turns to the yellow of burning sulphur ; 
 there their conical lights pirouette upon their own ba- 
 ses, or roll in red balls. A great disc of fire (Pyrosorae) 
 commences with an opaline yellow, becomes for a moment 
 greenish, then bursts into red and orange, and at last 
 darkens down into blue. These changes occur with an 
 approach to regularity that would indicate a natural 
 function, the contraction and dilatation of some vast 
 creature, breathing fire. 
 
 Then on the horizon, fiery serpents writhe and glide 
 along an immense length — sometimes to the extent of 
 
DAUGHTER OP THE SEAS. 171 
 
 twenty-five or thirty leagues. The Biphores and the 
 Salpas, transparent alike to sea and sulphur, are the 
 performers in this serpentine spectacle, an astonishiog 
 company which disport themselves in this frantic dance, 
 and then separate. Separated, its free members pro- 
 duce free little ones, which, in their turn light up the 
 horizon with their dancing and wild lights. Great 
 fleets, more peaceful, float over the waves of lights. 
 The Vetelles, at night, light up their little craft. The 
 Beroes are triumphant as flames. None more magical 
 than those of our Medusae. Is it in part a physical effect 
 like that which gives their serpentine motion to the 
 Salpas, injected with fire ? Is it, as others think, and 
 as some observations would lead us to believe, an act 
 of aspiration ? Is it a caprice, as with so many beings 
 that throw out their sparkles and flashes of a vain and 
 inconstant joy ? No, the noble and beautiful Medusae, 
 such as the crowned Oceanique, and the lovely Idonea, 
 seem to express gravest thoughts. Beneath them, 
 their luminous hair, like some sombre watch-light, gives 
 out mysterious lights of emerald and other colors, 
 which, now flasliing, anon growing pale, reveal a senti- 
 ment, and, I know not what of mystery ; suggesting to 
 us the spirit of the abyss, meditating its secrets ; the 
 soul that exists, or is to exist some day. Or should it 
 not rather suggest to us some melancholy dream of an 
 impossible destiny which is never to attain its end ? 
 
172 DAUGHTER OF THE SEAS. 
 
 Or an appeal to that rapture of love which alone con- 
 soles us here below ? 
 
 We know that on land our fire flies, by their fire give 
 the signal of the bashful yet eager lover who thus be- 
 trays her retreat, and decoys her mate. Have the Me- 
 dusae this same sense ? We know not ; but thus much 
 is certain, that they yield at once their flame and their 
 life. The fecund sap, their generative virtue, escapes 
 and diminishes at every gleam. If we desire the cruel 
 pleasure of redoubling this brilliant faery, we have on- 
 ly to expose them to warmth. Then they become ex- 
 cited, flash, and become beautiful, oh, so exquisitely 
 beautiful — and then the scene is at an end. Flame, 
 love, and life, all are at an end — all evanish for ever. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE STONE PICKER. 
 
 When the excellent Doctor Livingston visited the poor 
 Africans who have so much difficulty in defending 
 themselves against the Lion and the slave merchant, 
 the women, seeing him armed with all the protecting 
 arts of Europe, invoked him as their friend and provi- 
 dence in these touching words — " Give us sleep ! " 
 
 •And such is the prayer which all beings in their 
 own language address to Nature. All desire, and all 
 dream of, security. We cannot doubt of that when we 
 note the ingenious endeavors which are made to obtain 
 it. Those efforts have given birth to the "arts. Man 
 has not invented one, which animals had not previously 
 invented, under that strong and abiding instinct, the 
 desire of safety. 
 
 They suffer, they fear, they desire to live. We must 
 not assume that creatures little advanced, and as it were 
 
1T4 THE STONE PICKER. 
 
 embryonic, have, therefore, but little sensibility. The 
 very contrary is certain. In every embryon, that which 
 first appears, is the nervous system, that is to say, the 
 organ and capacity of feelirig and of suflfering. Pain 
 is the spur by which the creature is urged to foresight 
 and expedients. Pleasure serve the like purpose, and 
 it, is already observable even in those which seem the 
 most cold. It has been observed that the snail, after 
 the painful researches of his love, is singularly happy 
 on meeting again the loved object. Both of them with 
 a touching grace wave their swan-like necks, and be- 
 stow upon each other the most lively caresses. Who is 
 it that tells us this ? The rigid, the very exact Blain- 
 ville. 
 
 But alas ! how largely and how widely is pain dis- 
 tributed ! "Who has not noted with pity the painful ef- 
 forts of the slielless mollusc, as he grovels along on his 
 unguarded belly ? Painful but faithful image of a foetus 
 untimely toA from the mother by some cruel chance, 
 and cast upon the ground naked and defenceless. The 
 poor mollusc thickens and indurates his skin as well as 
 he can, softens the asperities of his road, and renders 
 it slippery. But at every contact with the ragged or 
 pointed stones, his writhings and contractions only too 
 plainly show how great is his sensibility to pain. 
 
 Notwithstanding all this, she loves, does that great 
 Soul of Harmony which is the unity of the world ; she 
 
THE STONE PICKER. 175 
 
 loves all beings, and by alternations of pleasure and of 
 pain, instructs them and coApels them to ascend. But 
 to ascend, to pass into a superior grade, they must first 
 exhaust all that the lower one can furnish of trials more 
 or less painful, of instinctive art, and of stimulants to 
 invention. They must even have exaggerated their 
 species, perceived its excesses, and, by contrast, be in- 
 spired with the craving and the need of an opposite 
 one. Progress is thus made by a kind of oscillation 
 between contrary qualities, which by turns are separat- 
 ed from life, and incarnated with it. 
 
 Let us translate these divine things into human lan- 
 guage, familiar, indeed, and little worthy of the gran- 
 deur of such things, but which will make them under- 
 stood : 
 
 Nature, having long delighted to make, unmake, and 
 remake the Medusae, thus infinitely varying the theme 
 of infant liberty, smote her forehead one morning, and 
 said — " I have a new and a delicious idea. I forgot 
 to secure the life of the poor creature. It can continue 
 only by the infinity of number, the very excess of its 
 fecundity. I must now have a creature at once better 
 guarded and more prudent. It shall if need be, be 
 timid, even to excess, but above all, it is my will that 
 it shall survive." ^ 
 
 These timid creatures, when they appeared, were of 
 a prudence carried to its extremest limits. They shut 
 
176 THE STONE PICKER. 
 
 themselves in, shunning even the liglit of day. To save 
 themselves from the rude dbntact of sharp and ragged 
 stones, they employed the universal means, a glutinous 
 mucus from which they secreted an enveloping tube, 
 which elongated in proportion to the length of their 
 journey. A poor expedient, that, which kept these 
 miners, the Tarets out of the light and out of the 
 free air, and which compelled an enormous expenditure 
 of their substance. Every step cost them enormously ; 
 a creature thus ruining itself that it may live, can only 
 vegetate — poor, and incapable of progress. 
 
 The next resource was not much better, temporarily 
 to bury themselves, going below the sands at low water, 
 and rising to the flood-tide ; the resource of the Solen. 
 A varying life that, fugitive twice a day, and conse- 
 quently full of anxiety. 
 
 Among very inferior creatures a thing as yet obscure, 
 which was in time to change the world, began to ap- 
 pear. The simple sea stars had in their fine rays a cer- 
 tain support, a sort of jointed carpentry, and on the out- 
 side some thorns, suckers, which could be thrust for- 
 ward or withdrawn at will. An animal very humble, 
 but timid and serious, seems to have profited by this 
 coarse specimen. It said, I imagine, to Nature : 
 
 " I am quite without a^ibition. I do not ask for the 
 brilliant gifts of the molluscs ; I covet neither pearl 
 nor mother of pearl, much less the brilliant colors, the 
 
THE STONE PICKER. 177 
 
 gorgeous array which would discover and betray me ; 
 least of all do I envy your silly medusae, with the fatal 
 charm of their waving and fiery hair, which serves only 
 to drown them, or give them a helpless prey to fish be- 
 low or birds above. Oh, mother Nature, I ask but one 
 thing, to be, to exist, to have life ; to be one, self con- 
 centrated, and without compromising external appen- 
 dages ; to be strongly and solidly built, self centred, 
 and of rounded figure, as that is the figure that is least 
 easily taken hold of. I have but little desire to travel ; 
 sometimes to roll from high to low water will suffice me. 
 Fastened to my rock, I will solve the problem which 
 your future favorite, man, will vainly brood over, the 
 problem of safety ; the strict exclusion of enemies, and 
 the free admission of friends, especially water, air, and 
 light. I know that to achieve this, I must work hard 
 and work long. Covered with movable thorns, I shall 
 be avoidtid, I shall live a strictly retired life ; and my 
 name shall be oursin, little Bear, or sea hedge-hog. 
 
 How superior is that prudent animal to the Polypes, 
 in their own stone, which they make from their own se-t 
 cretion. without hard labor, indeed, but also without af- 
 fording them any safety ; how superior, even to his su- 
 periors themselves, I mean to so many molluscs, who 
 have more various senses, but are destitute of the unity 
 of his vertebral provision, of his persevering labor, and 
 
178 THE STONE PICKER. 
 
 of the skillful tools with which that very labor has pro- 
 vided him. 
 
 The great marvel, however, of this poor rolling ball, 
 which we might mistake for a thorny chestnut, is that 
 he is at once one and muhiple, fixed and movable, and 
 consists of two thousand four .hundred pieces, which 
 separate at his will and pleasure. 
 
 Let us see his history of creation. 
 
 It was in a narrow creek of the Sea of Brittany, 
 where there was no soft bed of polypes and of Algae, 
 such as the sea hedgehogs of the Indian Sea enjoy, in 
 addition to their exemption from labor. Our Breton, 
 on the contrary, was in presence of great peril and diffi- 
 culty ; like Ulysses, in the Odyssey, who, cast ashore, 
 and anon washed seaward again, endeavored to fasten 
 himself to the rock, with his torn and bleeding fingers. 
 Every ebb and flow of the tide was to our little Ulysses, 
 as bad as a mighty tempest ; but his iron will and po- 
 tent desire made him cling so closely and lovingly to 
 the rock, that he became fastened to it as though the 
 air had been expelled from between them by the cup- 
 ping glass. At the same time his strong thorns scratch- 
 ed and scratched, and endeavored to get a hold, and 
 one of them subdivided and formed a triple and real an- 
 chor of safety in aid of the cupping glass, if this latter 
 should fail to act quite perfectly on a by no means 
 smooth surface. 
 
THK STONE PICKEE. 179 
 
 After he had thus doubly secured himself to his rock, 
 he gradually comprehended that he would be a great 
 gainer if he could form a concavity in it, gradually dig 
 himself out a hole, and thus form himself a snug nest, 
 for the day of sickness or of age. For, in fact, one is 
 not always young and. strong. And how pleasant it 
 would be, if, some day, the veteran oursin could relax 
 somewhat of the eflfort necessitated by this constant 
 holding on, this anchorage by day and night. 
 
 So he worked and worked, to make a hollow ; it was 
 for dear life that he was working, and you may be sure 
 that he never relaxed. Formed of detached pieces, he 
 worked with five claws, which, always pushing togeth- 
 er, united and formed an admirable pick. His pick of 
 five teeth, of the finest enamel, is attached to a frame 
 work, delicate, but very strong, and consisting of forty 
 pieces, which work in a sort of sheath, playing in and 
 out, in the most perfect and regular manner, with an 
 elastftity preventing too violent shocks, and self-repair- 
 ing, in case of any accident. 
 
 Rarely, in the softer stone, which he holds in con- 
 tempt, but almost always in the solid rock, in the hardest 
 granite, it is that this heroically laborious sculptor goes 
 to work. The harder the rock, the firmer he feels him- 
 self secured. And, then, in fact, what does it matter 
 about the length of the task ? Time is of no conse- 
 quence to him, centuries are before him ; supposing that 
 
180 THE STONE PICKER. 
 
 his tools and his life should end to-morrow, another 
 would take his place and continue his work. During 
 their life, they hold but little communication, these her- 
 mits ; but in death a brotherhood exists, even for them, 
 and the young survivor, who shall find the work half 
 done, will bless the memory of .the good workman who 
 has preceded him. 
 
 Do not fancy that he strikes, and strikes continually. 
 He has an art, a labor-saving art of his own. When 
 he has well attacked the layers of the rock, and well 
 cleaned it, he tears away the asperities as with little 
 pincers. A work of great patience, and one which re- 
 quii-es long intervals, too, in order that the water may 
 aid in doing the work upon the denuded parts. He then 
 proceeds to the second layer, then to the next, and so 
 on till the long, long labor is at length completed. 
 
 In this uniform life, however, there are occasional 
 crises, even as in the life of the poor human laborer. 
 The sea retires from certain shores ; in the summer, 
 this or that rock becomes quite insupportably hot ; and 
 our oursin must have two houses, one for summer, and 
 one for winter. A great event, that, of moving from 
 place to place, for a creature without feet and covered 
 all over with points. M. Cailland had an opportunity 
 of observing the conduct of the creature under those 
 circumstances. The weak and movable scoops which 
 play backward and forward, are by no means insensible 
 
THE STONE PICKER. 181 
 
 though he protects them somewhat by covering them 
 with a little soft gelatine. At length he steadies him- 
 self on his thorns, as on so many crutches, rolls his Di- 
 ogenes' tub, and attains his port as he best may. Ar- 
 rived there, he shuts himself up again, and in the little 
 nest which he almost. always finds partly, made, he con- 
 centrates himself in the enjoyment of his solitary and 
 thrice blessed security. Let a thousand enemies prowl 
 without, let the storm-lashed wave moan or rage, all 
 that is for his pleasure. Let the very rock tremble 
 at the dash of the breakers ; he well knows that he has 
 nothing to fear^ that it is only his kind nurse that is 
 making all that noise ; he is safe in his cradle, and with 
 a glad good night, he sleeps. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 SHELLS, MOTHER OP PEARL, AND PEAKL. 
 
 The oursin has carried the genius of defence to its ut- 
 most limit. His cuirass, or, preferably, his fortress of 
 pieces, is at once movable and resisting, yet sensitive, re- 
 tractile, and capable of being repaired in case of acci- 
 dent; this fortress is fast-joined and anchored to the rock, 
 and still farther lodged within a hollow of the rock, so 
 that the enemy has no means of attacking the citadel ; 
 — it is a system of defence so perfect that it can never 
 be surpassed. No shell is comparable to it ; far less 
 are any of the works of human industry. 
 
 The oursin is the completion of the starred and cir- 
 cular creatures ; in him they have their highest and 
 most triumphant development. The circle has few va- 
 riations ; it is the absolute form ; in the globe of the 
 oursin, at once so simple and so complicated, is the 
 perfection and completion of the first world 
 
SHELLS, MOTHEK OF PEARL, AND PEARL. 183 
 
 The beauty of the world next to come, will be the 
 harmony of double forms, their equilibrium, the grace- 
 fulness of their oscillation. From the molluscs even 
 up to man, every being in this next world is to be made 
 up of two corresponding halves ; in every animal is to 
 be found (far better than unity') Union. 
 
 The master piece of the oursin had gone even be- 
 yond what was needed ; that miracle of defence had 
 made him prisoner ; he was not only shut in but buried ; 
 he had dug his own grave. His perfection of isolation 
 had banished him, deprived him of all connections, and 
 of all possibility of progress. 
 
 To have a regular ascent, we must commence from a 
 very low stage, from the elementary embryon, which at 
 the outset will have no other movement than that of 
 the elements. The new creature is the mere serf of 
 the planet ; so completely so, that even in the egg, it 
 turns as the earth turns, with its double turning on its 
 own axis, and the general rotation. 
 
 Even when emancipated from the egg, growing up, 
 become adult, it will still remain the embryon, the soft 
 mollusc. It will vaguely represent the progress of the 
 superior lives ; it will be as the foetus, as the larvae or 
 nymph of the insect, in which, folded and hidden, there 
 yet are the organs of the winged creature which is yet 
 to come. 
 
 One trembles for a creature so weak ; even the polypus 
 
184 SHELLS, MOTHER OF PEARL AND PEARL. 
 
 though not less soft is less in danger. Having life 
 equally in all its parts, wounds, even mutilations will 
 not kill the polypus : wounded and mutilated he still 
 lives on, apparently forgetful of the excised parts. But 
 the centralised mollusc is far more vulnerable. What 
 a door in his ease is open to death ! 
 
 The uncertain motion of the Medusa, which some- 
 times, perchance, may save her ; the mollusc, at least at 
 the outset, possesses but very slightly. All that is 
 granted to him is his sloughing or exuding a gelatine 
 matter, which walls him in, and replaces the cuirass of 
 the oursin and the oursin's rock. The mollusc has the 
 advantage of finding his defence within himself. Two 
 valves form a house, light and fragile, indeed, so much 
 so that those which float are transparent ; in the case 
 of those which are to be stationary, the mucus forms a 
 filamentary anchoring cable, called the hyssas. It is 
 formed exactly as silk is from an element originally 
 quite gelatinous. The gigantic Iridacne, moors so fast 
 by that cable, that the Madrepores mistake it for an 
 islet, build upon it, envelope it, and strangle it. 
 
 Passive and motionless life. It has no other event 
 than the periodical visit of the sun and light, and no 
 other action but to absorb what comes, and to secrete 
 the jelly which makes the house, and will by degrees do 
 the rest. The attraction of the light, always in the 
 same direction, centralizes the view ; and behold the 
 
SHELLS, MOTHEK OP PEARL, AND PEARL. 185 
 
 eye. The secretion fixed by a constant effort, becomes 
 an appendage, an organ which lately was a cable, and 
 which by and bye will become the foot, a shapeless and 
 inarticulated mass, which will bend itself to anything. 
 It is the fin of those that swim, the pick of those that 
 burrow in the sand, and the foot of those who at first 
 rather crawl than walk. Some species arch it so that 
 they can make a clumsy essay at leaping. 
 
 Poor tribe, terribly exposed, pursued by many ene- 
 mies, tossed by the waves and bruised on the rocks. 
 Those of them which do not succeed in building a house, 
 seek a shelter in living beds ; they find a tent with the 
 polypes, or with the floating Halcyons. The pearl- 
 bearing Avicule, tries to find a quiet life in the hollows 
 of the sponge. The Pholade, tries in his stony retreat, 
 to imitate the arts of the oursins, but with what inferi- 
 ority ! Instead of the admirable chisel of the oursin, 
 which might be envied by our stone cutters, the Pholade 
 has but a little rasp, and to dig out a shelter for her 
 fragile shell, she wears out the shell itself. 
 
 With but a few exceptions, the moluscs know them- 
 selves the prey of everything, and are therefore the 
 most timid of creatures. The Cone so well knows that 
 he is sought after, that he dares not leave his shelter, 
 and dies there, from fear of being killed. The Volute 
 and the Porcelain drag slowly along their pretty houses, 
 and conceal them as well as they can. The Casque, to 
 
186 SHELLS, MOTHER OP PEARL, AND PEARL. 
 
 get along with his palace, has only a little Chinese foot, 
 so small and so useless that he scarcely attempts to 
 walk. 
 
 Such the life, such the dwelling ; in no other species 
 is there more complete identity between the inhabitant 
 and the habitation ; taken from his own substance, his 
 house is but a continuation, a supplement of his own 
 body ; alike it even in form and tints. The architect, 
 beneath the edifice, is himself its very foundation-stone. 
 
 A very simple thing it is for the sedentaries to re- 
 main sedentary. The oyster, regularly fed by the sea, 
 has only to gape when he would dine, and sharply to 
 close his shells, when he has any suspicion that he may 
 become himself a dinner for some hungry neighbor. But 
 for the travelling mollusc the thing is more complicated. 
 He can travel, but he cannot leave behind him his be- 
 loved house which he will need for defence as well as 
 shelter ; and it is precisely while on his journey, that 
 he is most liable to be attacked. He must shelter, 
 above all, the most delicate part of his being, the tree 
 by which he breathes, and whose little roots nourish him. 
 His head is of little consequence, often it is lost with- 
 out the destruction of life ; but if the viscera were left 
 uncovered and wounded, he must die. 
 
 Thus, prudent and cuirassed he seeks his livelihood. 
 Come nightfall, lie asks himself whether he will be quite 
 safe in a wide open lodging ? Will not some inquisitives 
 
SHELLS, MOTHER OP PEARL, AND PEAEL. 187 
 
 intrude a look — who knows — may not some one find 
 the way in with claw and tooth as well as glance ? 
 
 The hermit reflects. He has but one instrument, his 
 foot, from that he developes a very serviceable append- 
 age with which he closes the aperture and behold him 
 safe at home for the night. His great and permanent 
 difiSculty is this, to combine safety with connection 
 with the outer world. He cannot, like the oursin, ut- 
 terly isolate himself ; without the aid of his instructors 
 and nurses, light and air, he cannot strengthen his soft 
 body and make his organs. He must acquire senses ; 
 he needs scent and hearing, those guides of the blind ; 
 he must acquire sight, and above all, lie must be able to 
 breathe freely. Great and imperative function, that ! 
 How little we think of it while it is easy; but what 
 terrible pain and agitation if it become too difiScult ! 
 Let our lungs become congested, let the larynx even be 
 embkrrassed for a single night and our agitation and 
 anxiety are so extreme, so unendurable, that often, at 
 all risks, we have every window thrown open. With 
 the asthmatic, the anxiety and torture are so extreme 
 that when they cannot breathe freely through the nat- 
 ural organ, they create a supplementary means. Air, 
 -air, air, or death ! 
 
 Nature, when thus pressed, is terribly inventive. 
 We not wonder if the poor sedentaries, stifling in their 
 houses, have discovered a thousand means, invented a 
 
188 SHELLS, MOTHER OP PEARL, AND PEARL. 
 
 thousand sorts of pipes through which to admit the vital 
 air. One admits air between plates around his feet, 
 another by a sort of comb, another by a disc or buckler, 
 and others by extending threads, some with pretty side 
 plumes, and lastly, some have on their back a little 
 tree, a pretty miniature aspen, which trembles continu- 
 ally and at every movement inhales or exhales a breath. 
 
 Sometimes those most sensitive and important organs 
 affect the most elegant and fanciful forms ; we would 
 say that they wish. to plead, to melt, to secure mercy, 
 taking every form and every color. These little chil- 
 dren of the sea, the molluscs, in their infantine grace, 
 in their rich variety of colors, are their ocean mother's 
 eternal ornament and joy. Stern as she may be, she 
 has but to look on them, and she must smile. 
 
 But a timid life is full of melancholy. One cannot 
 doubt that she greatly suffers from her severe seclusion, 
 that fairest of the fair, that queen beauty of the seas, 
 the Haliotide. She has a foot, and could, if she chose, 
 get along, though slowly ; but she dares not. Ask her 
 why, and she will reply : " I am afraid. The Crab is 
 continually watching me, and a whole world of vora- 
 cious fish are continually swimming over my head. My 
 cruel admirer, man, punishes me for my beauty; pursuing' 
 me from the Indies to the Pole, and is now loading 
 whole ships with me at golden California." 
 
 But the unfortunate, though unable to go out, has dis- 
 
SHELLS, MOTHER OF PEARL, AND PEARL. 189 
 
 covered a subtle means of procuring air and water ; in 
 her house, she has little windows, which communicate 
 with her little lungs. Hunger at length compels her to 
 risk something, and towards evening she crawls a little 
 around, and feeds on some seaweed, her sole nourish- 
 ment. 
 
 Here let us remark, that those marvellous shells, not 
 only the Haliotide, but the Widow (black and white) 
 and the Golden Mouth (of mingled pearly and gold 
 color,) are poor herbivori, inoffensive, temperate, 
 feeders. A living, and decisive refutation, that, of 
 those who fancy that beauty is the daughter of Death, 
 of blood, of murder, of a merely brutal accumulation 
 of animal substance. 
 
 But to these, our beautiful shell-tenants, the mer- 
 est modicum of subsistence suffices. Their chief ali- 
 ment is the light which they drink in, by which they 
 are permeated, by which they color and tint, with more 
 than rainbow beauty, and variety of tint, their inner 
 dwelling, in which they conceal and cherish their solita- 
 ry love. Each of them is double, hermaphrodite ; lov- 
 er and loved, in one. As the palaces of the East are 
 concealed by dark and repulsive outer walls, so, here, 
 also, without, all is rude, within, all is of the most daz- 
 zling beauty ; the hymeneal seclusion is lightened up by 
 the gleaming and many-hued reflections of a little sea of 
 mother of pearl, which, even when the house is closed 
 
190 SHELLS, MOTHER OF PEAEL, AND PEARL. 
 
 to the outer light, create a faery, a mysterious, and a 
 most lovely twilight. 
 
 It is a great consolation that when our poor prisoners 
 cannot liave the sun, they can at least have a moon of 
 their own, a paradise of soft and trembling lights, ever 
 changing, yet ever renewed, and giving to that sedenta- 
 ry life, that little variety which is absolutely needed by 
 every creature. 
 
 The poor children who work in the mines, ask visit- 
 ors, not for food, or sweetmeats, or money, or toys — 
 all they ask for is the means of getting more light. 
 And it is the same with our Ocean children, the Halio- 
 tides. Every day, blind though they be, they feel, and 
 greedily welcome, the return of the light, receiving it, 
 and contemplating it, with the whole of their transpa- 
 rent bodies ; and when the light has departed, from 
 without, they still preserve and nurse some portion of 
 it within themselves. They watch, they wait, they hope 
 for its return ; their whole little soul consists of that 
 hope, that watching, that eager desire, that incessant 
 yearning. Who can doubt that the return of the glad 
 light is as delightful to them a's it is to us, nay, even 
 more so than it is to us, who have the manifold distrac- 
 tions of so busy and varied a life? 
 
 Their whole lives pass in thinking, wishing, divining, 
 hoping, or regretting; their great lover, the Sun. Nev- 
 er seeing him, they yet, in their own fashion, certainly 
 
SHELLS, MOTHER OP PEABL, AND PEAEL. 191 
 
 comprehehend that that warmth, that glorious light comes 
 to them from without, and from a great centre, power- 
 ful, fecund and beneficent. And they love that great 
 deeply felt, though never seen, central light, which ca- 
 resses them, fills them with joy, floods them with life. 
 Had they the power, they no doubt would rush to seek 
 his rays. And, at least, attached as they are to theii 
 abode, they, like the Brahmin at the door of the Pago 
 da, silently offer him up their homage, at once medita- 
 tive and thrilling. First flower of instructive worship. 
 Already they love and pray, who say the little word 
 which the Holy prefers to all prayer — that Oh ! that 
 heart utterance, which contents and pleases Heaven. 
 When the Indian utters it at sunrise, he well knows that 
 all that innocent world of mother of pearl, pearl, and 
 humblest shells, utters it with him, from the depths of 
 the seas. 
 
 I fully understand what the sight of the pearl sug- 
 gests of feeling and fancy to the charmingly untutored 
 heart, the woman heart, that dreams, and fancies, and 
 is stirred by a sweet, and strange, and uncomprehend- 
 ed emotion. That pearl is not exactly a person, but 
 neither, on the other hand, is it exactly a thing. What 
 adorable whiteness ; no, call it not mere whiteness, but 
 candor, virginal candor ; no, not virginal, but better 
 still. For your young virgins, sweet and modest as they 
 are, have always a slight dash of young tartness, and 
 
192 SHELLS, MOTHER OF PEARL, AND PEARL. 
 
 verdancy. No, the pearl's candor rather resembles that 
 of the innocent young bride, so pure, yet so submissive 
 to love. 
 
 No ambition to shine. Our pearl softens, almost sup- 
 presses, its lights. At first, you see only a dull white ; 
 it is only when you have taken a second and a closer 
 glance that you discover its mysterious iris, its exqui- 
 sitely glancing and pure light. 
 
 Where lived it ? Ask the deep Ocean. On what ? 
 Ask the sunbeams ; like some clear spirit it lived on 
 love and light. 
 
 Great mystery ! But our beautiful pearl herself ex- 
 plains it. We cannot look upon her without feeling 
 that this creature, at once so lovely and so meek, must 
 for a long time have lived in quietude, waiting and 
 waited for, willing nothing and doing nothing, but the 
 will of the beloved one. 
 
 The son of the sea put his beautiful dream into his 
 shell, the shell into to the mother of pearl, and she into 
 the pearl, which is but a concentration of herself. 
 
 But the pearl we are told only comes to her mother 
 in consequence of some wound, some continued suffer- 
 ing, which withdraws or absorbs all vulgar life into that 
 divine poetry. 
 
 I have been told that the great ladies of the East, 
 more delicate and tasteful than our vulgar rich, shun 
 the diamond and allow their soft skin to be touched on- 
 
SHELLS, mother' OF PKARL, AND PEARL. 193 
 
 ly by the pearl. And in truth, the brilliancy of the 
 diamond is not in accord with the light of love. A 
 necklace and a pair of bracelets of iine pearls are the 
 harmonious and true decorations for woman ; instead 
 of diverting the glance of the lover, they move him, 
 make tenderness more tender — say to him — " No 
 noise — let us love!" The pearl seems amorous of 
 woman, and woman of the pearl. The ladies of the 
 North, when they have once put on pearl ornaments, 
 never afterwards remove them, but carry them day and 
 night concealed beneath their attire. On very rare oc- 
 casions, if the rich fur cape, lined with white satin, 
 chances to slip aside, we may catch a momentary glance 
 of the happy ornament, the inseparable necklace. It 
 reminds one of the silken tunic which the Odalisque 
 wears close to her person, and loves so much that she 
 will not part with it until it is worn and torn beyond 
 all possibility of repair ; believing it as she does to be 
 a talisman, an infallible love charm. 
 
 It is just so with the pearl ; like the silk, it drinks in 
 and is impregnated with the very life of the wearer, 
 When it has slept so many nights upon her fair bo- 
 som, the ornament is no longer an ornament, it is a 
 part of the person, and is no longer to be seen by an 
 indifferent eye. One alone has a right to know it, and 
 to surprise upon that necklace the mystery of the belov- 
 ed woman. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE SKA ROVEES (POULPE, <fec.) 
 
 The Medusse and the Molluscs are generally innocent 
 creatures, and I have thus far dwelt, as it were, with 
 them in tlieir amiable and peaceful world. Thus far I 
 have met with few carnivora ; and even those few killed 
 only in the stern necessity of hunger, and even of those 
 part fed only on atoms, animal jelly, life unorganized, 
 and scarcely commenced. As a consequence, pain, 
 anger, ci'uelty were absent. Their little souls had, 
 nevertheless, a ray, the aspiration towards the light 
 alike of Heaven and of Love, revealed in the changing 
 flame which illumines and rejoices the seas. 
 
 But, now, I have to enter into quite another world : 
 a world of war, slaughter, fierce pursuit, and greedy 
 devouring. I must confess that from the beginning, 
 from the first appearance of life, death also appeared; 
 a rapid and useful purification of the globe from the 
 weak and slow, but prolific tribes whose fecundity 
 
THE SEA ROVERS. 195 
 
 would othei'wise have been mischievous. In the oldest 
 strata we find two wondrous creatures, the Devour er 
 and the Sucker. The first is made known to us by the 
 imprint of the Trilobite, a species no longer existing, 
 an extinct destroyer of extinct species. The second is 
 known to us by a frightful remnant, a beak of almost 
 two feet pertaining to the great Sucker, the Leiche or 
 Poulpe of Dujardin. Judging from that immense beak, 
 this monster must have had an enormous body, and 
 sucking-arms of twenty or thirty feet, like a prodigious 
 spider. 
 
 Sad reflection, these murderous creatures are those 
 which we earliest find in the depths of the earth. Are 
 we then to suppose that death preceded life ? No 
 doubt ; but the soft creatures upon which these monsters 
 fed have perished utterly, not leaving remains or even 
 imprint of themselves. 
 
 The devourers and the devoured, were they two na- 
 tions of difi"erent origin ? The contrary is more proba- 
 ble. From the mollusc, form undecided, matter still fit 
 to be converted to any form, the superabundant strength 
 of the young world, richly plethoric, abounding in 
 alimentation, there must at an early period have pro- 
 ceeded two forms, contrary in appearance, but tending 
 and qualified to the same end. Swelling and breath- 
 ing, and measurelessly inflating itself, the Mollusc be- 
 came an enormous balloon, an absorbing bladder, absorb- 
 
196 THE SEA ROVERS. 
 
 ing all the more as it stretched the more, ever craving 
 and ever consuming, but toothless, — and we have the 
 f'vcker. On the other hand, by the self-same force, 
 the Mollusc gradually developing articulated members 
 of which each had its shell, and hardening this shelled 
 creature everywhere, but especially at the claws and 
 mandibles formed for gnawing and grinding, to pulp or 
 powder, the very hardest substances became — the De- 
 vourer. Let us in the first place, in this chapter, speak 
 of the first, the Sucker. 
 
 The Sucker of the soft gelatinous world, was himself 
 soft and gelatinous. Warring upon and devouring the 
 molluscs, he himself none the less, remained mollusc, 
 that is to say, still a mere embryon. There would be 
 something absurd, caricatural, were it not so terrible, in 
 this sight of a mere foetus, soft and transparent, yet 
 cruel, raging, eager, breathing nothing but murder. 
 For he, see you, goes not to war for the mere sake of 
 food. He has a real passion for destroying, for de- 
 struction's sake; whenever he has gorged himself, well 
 nigh to bursting, he will destroy still. Destitute of 
 defensive amour, his threatening snortings disguise, but 
 by no means quiet, his real anxiety ; his real, his only 
 safety, is an attack. He is the veritable bully of the 
 young world ; really vulnerable himself, and yet so ter- 
 rible to others ; he sees in everything that he meets 
 only enemy or victim. At all risks he casts hither and 
 
THE SEA ROVERS. 197 
 
 thither his long arms, or rather his whip-lashes, tipped 
 with cupping glasses, and upon enemy or victim, before 
 the fight or the capture commences, he sends out his 
 stupefying, paralysing effluvia. 
 
 Double power. To the mechanical strength of these 
 outstretched arms, add the magical force of that myste- 
 rious fluid, and a singularly acute hearing and quick eye. 
 You see in all these, a creature to alarm you. 
 
 What must it have been, then, when the early world 
 so lavished its wealth of alimentation, that these mon- 
 sters of the deep could feed and swell indefinitely ? 
 They have decreased now, both in number and in size. 
 Yet, even lately. Rang tells us that he has seen them 
 big as a hogshead ; and Peron has seen them quite as 
 large in the South Sea. The creature rolled, and 
 snorted in the rolling wave, with a noise to terrify, to 
 astonish, all meaner creatures. His arms, six or seven 
 feet in length, turning, twisting, writhing, and grasping 
 in every direction, imitated some furious pantomime, 
 some fantastic dance of at once furious and eccentric 
 serpents. 
 
 After these matter of fact statements, it seems to me, 
 that we should not be quite so incredulous, not quite so 
 scornful, when we read the accounts of the old voyagers ; 
 we should not curl the lip quite so insolently as wo 
 read, in Denis de Montford, that he saw a monstrous 
 Poulpe, grasp, with his enormous arms, lash, scourge, 
 
198 THE SEA ROVERS. 
 
 smite, stupefy with his electric lashes a fierce and 
 strong mastiff which, in spite of all his efforts, and his 
 terrible howlings, had to succumb, did succumb, did die 
 in that giant and terrible embrace. 
 
 The Poulpe, that terrible and living steam machine, 
 can accumulate such incalculable force and elasticity, 
 that, as D'Orbigny tells us (see his article Cephal.) 
 it can leap from the sea to the deck of a ship. This at 
 once relieves our old voyagers from the charge so often 
 and so lightly made against them, of exaggeration and 
 mere romance. They told us, and it now seems quite 
 truly told us, that they came athwart a gigantic Poulpe 
 that leaped inboard, twining its prodigious arms around 
 masts and shrouds ; and the monstrous creature would 
 have had possession of the craft, and would have devour- 
 ed all hands, but that these latter cut away its arms with 
 their axes, as they would have cut away masts in a 
 case of impending wreck, and the mutilated but still 
 threatening creature fell into the sea. 
 
 Some have given this creature credit for arms of six- 
 ty feet in length ; and others have reported that while 
 cruising in the North seas, they fell in with the Kraken, 
 a monstrous creature, half a league in circumference, no 
 doubt, one of our terrible Poulpes, able to embrace, 
 stupefy, and devour, a whale a hundred feet long. 
 
 The prolonged existence of these monsters, would 
 have endangered Nature herself, would have absorbed 
 
THE SEA ROVERS. 199 
 
 our very globe. But, on the one hand, gigantic birds 
 (perhaps, for instance, the Epiornis) made war upon 
 them ; and on the other hand the exhausted earth de- 
 stroyed the monster by cutting off its supply of alimen- 
 tation. 
 
 Thank Heaven, our existing Poulpes are somewhat 
 less terrible. Their elegant species of the present day, 
 the Argonaut, that graceful swimmer in its wavy shell, 
 the Calmar, good sailor, if ever there was one, and the 
 handsome Seiche, blue-eyed, and beautiful to look up- 
 on, traverse the Ocean, hither and thither, annoying 
 nothing but the small creatures that they need for their 
 support. 
 
 In them we see exhibited the first approach to the 
 vertebral bone; they display, too, a perfect rainbow of 
 changing colors, that come and go — shine, fade, dazzle 
 and die. We may quite fairly call them the Chame- 
 leons of the sea. They have the exquisite perfume, 
 ambergris, which the whale only owes to the countless 
 multitudes of Seiches which it has absorbed. And the 
 porpoises, too, make an enormous destructibn of them. 
 Your Seiches are very gregarious. About the month 
 of May, they seek the coast to deposit their eggs, and 
 the Porpoises await them there, sure of a splendid ban- 
 quet. And your Porpoise is somewhat of a gourmet 
 though sufficiently gourmand ; he feeds delicately, 
 though we cannot deny that he feeds largely. The 
 
200 THE SEA B0VEB8. 
 
 head and the eight arms are his tid-bits, tender and easy 
 of digestion ; the rest of the carcass they may have 
 who come for it. Tens of thousands of these mutilated 
 Seiches you find upon the coast at Royan ; and there, 
 too, you will see the Porpoises making their mighty 
 bounds when in chase of their coveted prey, the Seich- 
 es, or in bacchanal enjoyment and revelling when the 
 prey has been taken and the banquet is over. 
 
 Notwithstanding the strange, not to say grotesque, 
 appearance of its beak, the Seiche is decidedly an in- 
 teresting creature. All the various shades of the most 
 brilliant and various rainbow, come and go, die and re- 
 appear on his transparent skin, according to the play 
 of the light as he turns now hither and now thither, 
 and as he dies his azure eyes look upon you with an 
 expression, now flashing and now fading, which seems 
 to rebuke you for your cruelty in killing, or to express 
 a regret at parting with life. 
 
 The general decrease of that class, so immensely im- 
 portant in the past ages, is less remarkable as to the 
 navigators (Seiches, &c.) than in the Poulpe, properly 
 so called, the sad frequenter of our shores. It has not 
 the same firmness as the Seiche, strengthened as the 
 latter is by an interior bone, and it has not, like the 
 Argonaut, a resisting exterior, a shell to protect the 
 most vulnerable organs. Neither has it the kind of 
 sail which aids its navigation and spares it the labor o 
 
THE SEA ROVERS. 201 
 
 rowing: It paddles about along our shores, hugging 
 the shore like some timid coaster. And its conscious 
 inferiority teaches it habits of treachery ; it is at once 
 timid and bold — lying in ambush until quite sure that 
 it can devour without the preliminary necessity of a 
 fight. Lying in wait in some rocky crevice, it awaits 
 its prey. That having passed in unsuspicious security, 
 your Poulpe throws out the terrible lashes, the weaker 
 of the prey are devoured, the stronger get loose and 
 escape. A man when swimming, if thus attacked, finds 
 no difficulty in mastering his at once insolent and im- 
 becile assailant. Disgusted, but not alarmed, he han- 
 dles the creature without gloves, crushes, collapses him, 
 and feels actually vexed with himself for having even 
 for an instant been provoked by an enemy so contempti- 
 ble. " Bah ! " one is tempted to exclaim, on having so 
 easily vanquished such a thing — "Bah! You came 
 swelling, blowing, threatening, and after all you prove 
 to be only a sham, a mask rather than a being. With- 
 out fixity, without substance, a blown-up bladder, now 
 collapsed, to be to-morrow a mere drop, a nameless por- 
 tion of the dark blue waters of the Sea." 
 
 9* 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 CRUSTACiB — BATTLE AND INTRIGUE. 
 
 If, from some rich collectiou of armor, of the middle 
 ages, immediately after examining the mighty masses 
 of iron iu which our knights of old oppressed and half 
 stifled themselves, we go to the Museum of Natural 
 History, and examine the armor of the Crustacse, we 
 shall actually feel something very like contempt for our 
 human skill. The former are a mere masquerade of 
 absurd disguises, that seem especially designed for en- 
 cumbering their warlike wearers, and rendering them 
 impotent. But these latter, especially the armor of the 
 terrible Decapodes, the ten-footed warriors of the wa- 
 ters, are so marvellously armed that had they but the 
 stature and bulk of our human warriors, none of us 
 could dare even to look upon them. The veni vidi of 
 Cassar, would be eternally followed by his soon-ended 
 Vici; they would not need to seize, or to strike ; their 
 very aspect would thrill, magnetise — utterly stupefy 
 and subdue us. 
 
CRUSTACEA. 203 
 
 There they are, all ready for the fight, armed at all 
 points. Within that terrible arsenal, offensive and de- 
 fensive, how lightly, yet how strongly are they armed. 
 There are the strong nippers, mandibles, ready to craunch 
 through iron itself, and the cuirasses, furnished with the 
 thousand darts, every one of which cries aloud to the foe 
 Noli me tangere. We ought to be very thankful to Na- 
 ture, that has made them thus diminutive. If only the 
 stature and bulk of man were given k) them, who, who, 
 and by what means, could engage witli them ? Fire 
 arms would be in vain ; the Elephant, vast and mighty, 
 and intelligent as he is, would have to hide ; the fierce 
 Tiger, with lashing tail, blood-shotten eyes and fatal 
 paw, would seek shelter on the topmost branches of the 
 tallest trees, and the trice solid hide of the Rhinoceros, 
 would no longer be invulnerable. 
 
 We perceive at once that the interior agent, the mo- 
 tive power of that machine, centralized within an al- 
 most invariable convex, has, even from that single pe- 
 culiarity, a perfectly enormous force. The slender and 
 delicate elegance of man, his longitudinal figure, divid- 
 ed into three parts, with four great and diverging ap- 
 pendages, distant, all, from his centre, make him, what- 
 ever we may say to the contrary, an essentially weak 
 animal. In those armors of the old knights, in the 
 great, telegraphic arms, and in the heavy, pendant legs, 
 we, at a glance, see, and sadden, as we see, the unsteady. 
 
204 CRUSTACEA, 
 
 uncentralized creature ; halting and staggering, that 
 the slightest collision will beat to the earth. In the 
 crustacas, on the contrary, the appendages are at once 
 so firmly, so neatly, and so closely, conjoined to the 
 short, rounded, and compacted body, that every blow, 
 every touch, every grasp, has the whole weight, and tlie 
 whole force and impetus of the entire mass. Even to 
 the extremity of its claws, every inch is instinct with 
 nervous energy, mighty with the whole physical force. 
 
 It has two brain systems, head and body ; but to con- 
 centrate its power thus, it must have no neck ; head 
 and body must be undivided, a dual unity. Marvel- 
 lous, perfectly marvellous, simplification ! The head 
 combines eyes, feelers, claws and jaws. When the 
 quick eye has discerned the enemy, or the prey, the 
 feelers touch, the claws grasp, the jaws crush, and, im- 
 mediately behind them, the stomach, which is itself fur- 
 nished with a strong crushing machinery, triturates and 
 digests whatever enters it. In an instant the prey 
 is seized, crushed, digested, and disappears. 
 
 In this creature, every organ is superior. 
 
 The eyes can discern, both in front, and in rear. 
 Convexed, exterior, and en facetles, they can, at a 
 glance, sweep almost the entire horizon. 
 
 The antennae, the feelers, organs of touch and trial, 
 of warning and of guiding, have the sense of touch at 
 their extreiiiitjes, of hearing ^pd of scent, at their base. 
 
CRUSTACEA. 205 
 
 An immense advantage, such as we do not possess. 
 How would it be if the human hand could hear and 
 smell ? How rapid and concentrated would then be 
 our power of observation. Divided among three senses, 
 each of which works independently of the other, our 
 impressions are, for that very reason, very often inex- 
 act or evanescent. 
 
 Of the ten feet of the Decapodes, six are hands, hard, 
 griping pincers, and, moreover, are, at their extreme- 
 ties, organs of respiration. And in this last particular 
 our singularly armed warrior, by a quite revolutionary 
 expedient, solves the problem which so much embarassed 
 our poor mollusc ; how to breathe, in spite of the shell. 
 To this he calmly replies : " I breathe through hand 
 and foot. This great, this fatal difficulty of breathing, 
 which would so surely overcome me, I overcome by the 
 very same weapon with which I smite, the very same 
 implement by which I seize and masticate my food." 
 
 The chief and most potent enemies of the Crustacae, 
 are the tempest and the rock. Little in the deep sea, 
 they almost constantly lurk along shore in waiting for 
 their prey. Often, as they lurk there waiting for 
 the oyster to open and furnish them with a breakfast, a 
 hard gale drives them from their ambush, and then their 
 armor becomes their fatality. Hard, and destitute of 
 elasticity, it receives the full and unmitigated shock of 
 every collision ; dashed upon the rocks, they leave it, 
 
206 CRUSTACEA. 
 
 if alive, only with broken weapons and rent armor. 
 Happily for them, they, like the Oursin, can replace an 
 organ, lost or mutilated. So well do they know that 
 strange power, that they voluntarily shake off a claw, 
 if confined by it. It would seem that Nature especial- 
 ly favors servants so useful. To counterbalance the in- 
 finite fecundity of other species, the crustacse have an 
 infinite power of absorption. And they are everywhere; 
 on every coast ; ubiquitous as the seas themselves. The 
 Vultures, and other carrion birds, share with the crus- 
 tacae the essential of&ce of health preservers. Let 
 some large animal die, and, on the instant, the bird 
 above, and the crab below and within, are at work to 
 prevent it from polluting the atmosphere. 
 
 The Talitre, that small and skipping crab that we 
 might almost mistake for an insect, burrows in the 
 sands of the sandy shores. Let a tempest drive a quan- 
 tity of Medusae or other such prey upon the beach, and 
 you will immediately see the sands all in motion, and 
 myriads of crabs swarming, leaping, hungry, and ap- 
 parently determined to clear away the spoil before the 
 next flood tide. 
 
 Large, robust, and full of wiles, the great crabs are 
 a very combative race. So highly are they gifted with 
 the instinct of war that they even resort to noise in 
 order to intimidate their enemies; advancing to the 
 fight they clash their claws together with a noise like 
 
CEUSTACEiEU 207 
 
 that of castanettes. Yet, they are very prudent when 
 they have to do with a stronger enemy. I remember 
 to have watched them from the top of a high rock, when 
 the tide was out. But, high above them as I was, they 
 perceived that they were watched, and speedily beat a 
 retreat; the warriors hurrying sidelong, as is their 
 wont, into their secure ambush. They resemble Achil- 
 les far less tlian Hannibal. When they feel that they 
 are the stronger, they will attack both the living and 
 the dead, and the helplessly wounded man may well 
 dread them. It is related that, on some desert isle, 
 several of Drake's sailors were attacked and devoured 
 by these greedy creatures. 
 
 No living creature can fight them with equal weap- 
 ons. The gigantic Poulpe who should enlace the 
 smallest of the crab family, would do so at the risk of 
 losing his antennae, and the greediest of fish would not 
 venture to swallow so hard a morsel. 
 
 When the Crustaceae are large they are the tyrants and 
 the terror of both land and sea ; their impregnable ar- 
 mor enables them to attack everything. They would 
 multiply to such an excess as to disturb the balance of liv- 
 ing creatures, but that their armour itself is their great 
 peril and destroyer. Hard and inelastic, it will not yield 
 to the increasing growth of the animal and thus be- 
 comes its prison always, and at certain periods its torture. 
 
 To find, despite this solid wall, the means of breath- 
 
208 
 
 CRUSTACEiE. 
 
 ing, it is obliged to place the organ of respiration in 
 that very organ, the claw, which it most frequently 
 loses. To allow for the growth of its interior sub- 
 stance, it is obliged — most perilous obligation! — to 
 submit that the hard cuirass shell shall at times be dis- 
 carded ; that the creature shall have its seasons of mouU- 
 ing; that the eyes,and the claws,and the tentacles, which 
 supply the place of lungs shall suffer with all the 
 rest. 
 
 A strange and pitiful sight it is to see the Lobster 
 writhing, twisting, struggling, to get out of its too eon- 
 fining armor. So violent is the struggle that he some- 
 times actually casts off his claws. Then he remains 
 soft, weak, exhausted. In two or three days a raw 
 shell covers the naked body ; but the Crab" does not so 
 easily repair damages; it takes him much longer to 
 renew his armor, and during that time he is the victim 
 of all that previously were his unspared and unpitied 
 prey. Even handed justice now becomes terrible to 
 him. The victims now have their revenge ; the strong 
 is subjected to the law of the weak; falls, as a species, 
 to their level, and pays full share in the great balance 
 between Life and Death. 
 
 If one died but once in this world, there would be 
 less of sadness, but every living thing must partially die 
 daily ; daily suffer moulting, that partial death which 
 is essential to the continuance of life. Hence, a weak- 
 
CRUSTACEA. 209 
 
 ness and a melancholy to which we do not readily 
 confess. But what is to be done ? The bird in its 
 moulting time is sad and silent ; still more sad is the 
 poor snake when it casts its skin. We, also, in every 
 month, every day, every instant, are parting with por- 
 tions of our living frame, but as gently as constantly, 
 and only feel weakened, in those moments of dreamy 
 melancholy, when the vital flame is weakened, that it 
 may become stronger and more vivid. 
 
 How far more terrible it must be for the creature 
 whose whole external frame work must be rent asunder 
 and cast off. It is weak, timorous, crushed ; — at the 
 mercy of the first comer. 
 
 There are crustacse of the fresh water that must thus 
 partially die a score of times in every two months. 
 Others (the crustacean suckers) succumb to this terri- 
 ble operation, are unable to renew their ai-mor, and 
 lose all power. So to speak, they resign their piratical 
 commission, and, coward-like, take shelter in the viscera 
 of the larger animals, which, in spite of themselves, 
 have to forage for them and to feed them. 
 
 The insect in its Chrysalis seems utterly to forget 
 itself, not only does it not suffer, but it even seems to 
 enjoy that semblance of death, that unconscious life, 
 which the infant enjoys in its warm cradle. But the 
 crustacae, in their moulting time, see themselves and 
 feel themselves as they are, suddenly hurled from ener-- 
 
210 CRUSTIACE^. 
 
 getic and terrible life and power to the most complete 
 impotency. They are alarmed, helpless, lost, and can 
 but creep under some sheltering stone, seeing nothing, 
 hearing nothing, feeling nothing but the terror of the 
 coming foe and the unpitied death. Never having en- 
 countered terrible foe, or even serious obstacle, and 
 relieved from all necessity of industry by their potent 
 armor, they no sooner lose that than they find them- 
 selves utterly without resource. Each might protect 
 the other, but they are all defenceless at the same time. 
 Yet it is said that, in certain species, the male does 
 strive to protect the female, and that if we take one we 
 take both. 
 
 That terrible necessity of moulting, and the eager re- 
 search of man, more and more lord of the shores, and 
 the extinction of the old species that afforded them 
 such abounding alimentation, have necessarily kept 
 down the increase of the crustaceas. Even the Poulpe 
 which, being good for nothing, is neither hunted after 
 nor eaten, has considerably decreased in number. How 
 much more so, then, the crustaceas whose flesh is so ex- 
 cellent and so coveted by all creatures. They actually 
 seem to be aware of this. The weaker among them 
 resort to the grossest little rogueries to protect them- 
 selves ; they are ingenious, intriguing. This latter 
 epithet is the true one ; they really resemble intriguers 
 who, without visible means, contrive to support them- 
 
CRUSTACEA. 211 
 
 selves upon the means of others. A kind of bastards, 
 neither quite fish, nor quite flesh, they malce increment 
 alike of the living, the dying and the dead ; occasion- 
 ally even of land animals. 
 
 The Oxystome makes himself a kind of miser, and 
 thieves by night ; the Birgus at nightfall quits the sea 
 on a marauding expedition, and, for want of better, 
 even ascends the cocoa tree and eats the fruit. The 
 Dromios disguise themselves, and Bernard the Hermit, 
 unable to harden his exterior, seizes a Mollusc, de- 
 vours the body, and clothes himself in the shell. Thus 
 fitted out, he prowls at evening in search of food, and 
 we detect the furtive pilgrim by the noise which he 
 cannofc avoid making as he halts and staggers along, 
 under the load of his ill acquired and ill fitting 
 armor. 
 
 Others, at most times, but especially in the winter, 
 seek the land, and burrow. Perhaps they would 
 change their nature altogether and become insects, 
 were the sea not so dear to them. As once in every 
 year the twelve tribes of Israel were wont to wend their 
 way to Jerusalem to celebrate the feast of Tabernacles, 
 there are certain shores to which these faithful children 
 of the sea repair to pay her their homage and to con- 
 sign to her tender care their eggs, thus recommending 
 their offspring to her who nursed their ancestiy. 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE FISH. 
 
 It was inevitable that the free element, the Sea, should, 
 sooner or later, produce a creature like unto herself, 
 eminently free, undulating and fluid, gliding like the 
 wave, but with a marvellous mobility founded onian in- 
 terior miracle greater still, on an internal organization 
 at once delicate and strong, and very elastic, such as 
 no creature had previously ever approached to. 
 
 The Mollusc, crawling on its belly, was the poor serf 
 of the glebe, and the Poulpe, with all his swelling and 
 threatening pride, swimming badly and unable to walk 
 or crawl at at all, was still more completely the serf of 
 chance. The warlike crustacese, by turns so high and 
 so low, alternately the terror and derision of all, were at 
 times the slave, the prey of even the weakest creatures. 
 
 Great and terrible servitudes those ; how were they 
 to be remedied ? 
 
 Strength is the very soul of liberty. From the very 
 
THE PISH. 213 
 
 beginning, Life seems gradually but confusedly to have 
 sought the creation of a central axis which should give 
 the creature unity, and enormously increase its strength 
 of motion. The rayed family and the molluscs exhibit 
 a presentiment, a partial sketch of it, but they were too 
 much led away by the insoluble problem of the exterior 
 defence. The covering, always the covering, was that 
 which constantly occupied the attention of these poor 
 beings. As to that one point, they produced master- 
 pieces ; the thorny ball of the Oursin, the shell at once 
 open and closed of the Haliotide, and, finally, the ar- 
 mors of jointed pieces of the Orustaceae, are the very 
 perfection of armor at once defensive and terribly of- 
 fensive. What more could be required?. It would 
 seem, iiothing. 
 
 Nothing ? Say, rather, everything. Let us have a 
 creature who shall trust entirely to motion, a creature 
 of freedom and audacity, that shall look down upon 
 all these creatures as infirm, or miserably slow ; a crea- 
 ture that shall consider the envelope as a merely secon- 
 dary matter, and concentrate his whole strength within 
 himself. 
 
 The crustaceae shroud themselves, as it were, in an 
 exterior skeleton. The fish has his skeleton within, to 
 which nerves, muscles, and all organs are attached. 
 
 This seems a fanciful invention, and one quite con- 
 trary to good sense ; to place the hard and the solid be- 
 
214 THE FISH. 
 
 neath the tbick covering of the soft ! To place the bone, 
 so useful without, precisely where it seems it must be so 
 useless ! The crustaceae must needs have laughed in 
 derision when they first saw the short, thick, soft fish 
 of the Indian Ocean, for instance, without defensive ar- 
 mor, having no strength save inwardly, protected only 
 by its oily fluidity, by the exuberant mucus that sur- 
 rounds it, and which by degrees consolidates into clas- 
 tic scales, a slight cuirass, which ever yielding, never 
 yields entirely. 
 
 It was a revolution comparable to that of Gustavus 
 Adolphus, when he relieved his soldiery of their heavy 
 iron armor, and covered their breasts only with the at 
 once stout .and yielding buff leather. A late revolution, 
 but a wise one. 
 
 Our fish, being no longer confined like the crab or lob- 
 ster, imprisoned in armor, is at the same time relieved 
 from the cruel condition inseparable from that armor, the 
 moulting, with its attendant danger, weakness, struggle, 
 and enormously wasteful expenditure of strength. Like 
 the superior animals and man, he moults slowly. He econ- 
 omises and hoards up strength, and createsfor himself the 
 treasure of a powerful nervous system, with numerous 
 telegrapliic threads that connect spine and brain. Even 
 when the bone is soft or absent, and the fish preserves 
 its embryonic appearance, he has nevertheless his great 
 harmony in that abundant provision of nervous threads. 
 
THE FISH. 215 
 
 We do not find in the.fisli the elegant weakness of 
 the reptile and the insect, so slender that in those parts 
 one can cut through them as through a thread ; his seg- 
 ments are within, and well protected. He uses them 
 for contractile power, but does not, as the less perfect 
 reptile and insect do, expose them to external injury. 
 
 Like the crustaceae, the fish prefers strength to beau- 
 ty, and for this end has no neck ; head and trunk form 
 one mass. Admirable principle of strength, which en- 
 ables him, in cleaving through so yielding an element as 
 water, to strike, at will, with a thousand fold more force 
 than is necessary, and then his motion is as the flight of 
 an arrow or the flash of lightning ! 
 
 The interior bone, single in the Seiche, is in the fish 
 at once one and multiple ; one for force of unity, multi- 
 ple for elasticity, enabling the muscles alternately to 
 contract and expand, and thus create swift motion. 
 Marvellous, really marvellous is that formation of the 
 fish, so solid without and contractile within, that inward 
 keel to which are attached the motor muscles which 
 work with an alternating shock. Exteriorly, he expos- 
 es only his auxiliary oars, short fins which are but little 
 in danger, being strong, slippery, and sharp to wound, 
 or to scrape. How superior in all this is the fish, to 
 the Poulpe and the Medusa, which present to all comers 
 soft flesh, a tempting morsel for the crustaceae or the 
 porpoise. 
 
216 
 
 THE FISH. 
 
 Tliis trtie son of the water, gliding and mobile as his 
 
 mother, glides by means of his mucus, cleaves with his 
 
 head, impelled by his contractile muscles, and finally, 
 
 with his strong fins rows and steers. 
 
 The least of these powers would suffice, but he unites 
 
 them all ; a perfect model and absolute type of swift 
 
 motion. 
 
 Even the bird is less mobile, seeing that he hag to 
 
 perch. He is fixed for the night, but the fish, never ; 
 
 even asleep, he still floats. 
 
 So extremely mobile, he at the same time is in the 
 highest degree strong and lively. Wherever there is 
 water, there is the fish : he is the universal creature of 
 the globe. In the loftiest lakes of Asia and of the 
 Cordilleras, where the atmosphere is so rarefied that no 
 other creature can endure it, the fish lives and thrives. 
 It is the red fish of the Gudgeon species, which thus 
 looks down upon all the earth. In like manner, in the 
 great depths, beneath the most enormous weights, live 
 the Heri'ing and the Cod. Forbes, who divides them 
 into ten superposed beds or stages, finds them all inhab- 
 ited, and in the lowest of all, supposed to be so dark, 
 he finds a fish provided with eyes so admirable that he 
 finds sufficient light in that which seems to us the utter- 
 most darkness of night. 
 
 There is yet another privilege of the fish. Many 
 species, as Salmon, Shad, Eels, Sturgeon, &c., can live 
 
THE FISH. 217 
 
 equally in fresh water or sea water, and regularly mi- 
 grate from one to the other. Many families of fish in- 
 clude both sea fish and fresh water fish, as for instance, 
 the Thornback. 
 
 Nevertheless, peculiar degrees of heat, peculiar food, 
 and peculiar habits, seem to confine them within certain 
 limits in the seas, free as that element is. The warm seas 
 are as a confining wall beyond which the polar species 
 cannot pass ; and on the other hand, the fish of the warm 
 seas are stopped by the cold currents at the Cape of 
 Good Hope. We know of only two or three species 
 that can be properly called cosmopolitan. Few of them 
 frequent the open sea; most of them hug tlie shore, and 
 have favorite shores to frequent. Those of the United 
 States are not those of Europe. Then, too, fish have 
 peculiarities of taste which attach them to certain local- 
 ities, though they do not actually confine them there. 
 The Thornback grovels in the mud. Soles in sandy bot- 
 toms, the Bullhead loves the high bottoms, and the Sea 
 Eel the rocks. The Scorpene, or flying fish, swims and 
 flies by turns ; when pursued by fish, she darts from the 
 water, and for some distance sustains herself in the air ; 
 and when pursued by birds she drops back into the 
 water. 
 
 The popular phrase, " As happy as a fish in water," 
 is founded on a truth. In fine weather he floats at his 
 ease, enabled as he is to rise or sink at pleasure, to 
 
 10 
 
218 
 
 THE FISH. 
 
 mate himself a balloon more or less filled with air, and 
 therefore lighter or heavier. He moves in peace, rock- 
 ed and caressed by the wave, and, if he so chooses, even 
 sleeps as he floats. He is at once surrounded and iso- 
 lated by the unctuous substance which renders his skin 
 and his scales slippery and impenetrable by the water. 
 His temperature varies but little and is neither too hot 
 nor too cold. What a difference between a life so con- 
 venient, and that which is allotted to us dwellers upon 
 the land ; where at every step we meet with asperities 
 and obstacles, which fatigue and exhaust us as we toil 
 up or down our hills and mountains ! The atmosphere 
 varies, and often most cruelly, with our various seasons. 
 For days and nights together, the cold rains pour piti- 
 lessly down, penetrating us ; at times frozen, and pierc- 
 ing us with its sharp crystal points. 
 
 The felicity and fullness of life of the fish is shown 
 at the Tropics by the splendor of his colors, and at the 
 North by the swiftness of his motion. In Oceania and 
 the Indian Sea they rove and sport in the oddest forms 
 and colors, taking their pleasure among the corals, 
 and living flowers. Our fish, of the temperate and 
 cold seas, are potent rowers ; thorough sailors. Their 
 slender and elongated figures give them an arrowy 
 swiftness and grace of movement, which might serve as 
 ensample to our ship builders. Some of them have as 
 many as ten fins which serve them, at will, as sails or 
 
THE PISH. 219 
 
 oars, and may be kept wide spread or close-reefed. 
 Their tail, that maryellous rudder, is also the principal 
 oar. The best swimmers have it forked, the entire 
 spine ends there and which contracting its muscles 
 gives the fish his swift motion. The Thornback has 
 two immense fins, two great wings to cleave the waves. 
 His long, supple, and slender tail is a weapon with 
 which to lash and divide the waters. So slender and 
 displacing so little water, this fish has no need of the 
 air bladder which supports the thicker fish. Thus 
 each has the peculiar provisions that fit it for its pecu- 
 liar locality and surroundings. The Sole is oval and 
 flat that it may glide in the sand, the Eel long and 
 slender that it may glide through the mud, and the 
 Lophies, that they may cling to the rocks, have hand 
 like fins that remind one rather of frogs than fish. 
 
 Sight is the great sense of the bird ; scent is that of 
 the fish. The Hawk, from above the clouds, pierces, 
 with his glance, the deep space and marks the scarcely 
 visible prey below ; in like manner the Shark, from the 
 depths of the water, scents his tempting prey, and darts 
 upward upon it. Those that, like the Sturgeon, rum- 
 mage the mud for food have exquisite touch. In the 
 watery world half darkened, and having only uncertain 
 and delusive lights, scent, and, in some cases, touch, must 
 be relied on. The Shark, the Thornback and the Cod, 
 with his great eyes, see badly, but have an exquisite 
 
220 THE FISH. 
 
 sense of scent. The Thornback has that sense in such 
 excess that he is provided with a veil for the express 
 purpose of deadening it at will, when it probably affects 
 his brain unpleasantly. To this powerful means of 
 chasing their prey, we must add admirable teeth, some- 
 times like those of a saw. Some species have several 
 rows of them, lining the mouth, the palate, the throat, 
 and even the tongue. These teeth being so fine are, 
 therefore, fragile ; and behind, therefore, are others 
 ready to replace them if they break. 
 
 At the commencement of this second book, we said 
 that it was necessary that the sea should produce these 
 terrible and mighty destroyers to combat her own too 
 great fecundity. Death by persevering excision and 
 bleedings relieved her of a plethora which, otherwise, 
 would have destroyed her. Against that alarming tor- 
 rent of production which we have instanced in the case 
 of the Herring and the Cod, those frightful multiplying 
 machines which would have choked up the ocean and 
 desolated the earth, she defends herself by the ma- 
 chine of Death, the armed swimmer, the fierce and 
 voracious fish. Great, splendid, impressive spectacle I 
 The universal combat between Death and Life, whiclk 
 wo witness upon the land, fades into insignificance 
 when we compare it to that which is going on in the 
 depths of the sea. There, its surpassing grandeur, at 
 first, almost alarms us, but when we examine more 
 
THE PISH. 221 
 
 closely we see that ail is harmonious and in marvellous 
 equilibrium. That fury is necessary; that dazzlingly 
 rapid exchange of substance, that prodigality of slaugh- 
 ter, are safety. Nothing of sadness, but a wild fierce joy 
 seems to reign in all this. In this opposition in the sea 
 of two forces, that seem so inevitably destructive of 
 each other, the sea finds her marvellous health, her in- 
 comparable purity, and a beauty at once sublime and 
 terrible. She triumphs alike in the living and in the 
 dead, giving to them and receiving from them the elec- 
 tricity, the light which beams, flashes, sparkles every- 
 where, even in the long, dark, polar night. 
 
 What is melancholy in the sea is not her carelessness 
 to multiply death, but her impotence to reconcile pro- 
 gress with the excess of movement. 
 
 She is a hundred times, a thousand times richer, and 
 more rapidly fecund than the earth. She even builds 
 up for earth. The increase of the land, as we have 
 seen in the case of the Corals, is given by the sea ; the 
 sea is no other than the parturient and laboring womb 
 of the globe. Her sole obstacle is in the rapidity of her 
 births ; her inferiority appears in the difiSculty, which, 
 so rich in generation, she finds in organizing Love. 
 It is melancholy to reflect that the myriads upon my- 
 riads of the inhabitants of the sea have only a vague, 
 elementary, and imperfect, Love. Those vast tribes 
 
222 THE FISH. 
 
 that, each in its turn, ascend and go in pilgrimage to- 
 wards pleasure and light, give in floods the best of 
 themselves, their very life, to blind and unknown 
 chance. They love, and they will never know the be- 
 loved creature in which their dream, their desire, was 
 incarnated ; they produce multitudes, but never know 
 their posterity. A few, a very few of the most active, 
 warlike, and cruel species love after our human man- 
 ner. Those terrific monsters, the Shark and his female, 
 are obliged to approach each other. Nature has im- 
 posed upon them the peril of embracing. A terrible 
 and suspicious embrace. Habitually they devour, ea- 
 gerly and blindly, everything that comes in their 
 animals, wood, stone, iron — anything, but in their 
 fierce love, they restrain their hunger. They approach 
 each other with their sawlike and fatal teeth, and the 
 female intrepidly allows the male to seize her with his, 
 and tlius fastened together, they sometimes roll furious- 
 ly about for weeks, unwilling to separate, even though 
 famishing, and invincible in their fierce embrace, even 
 by the fiercer tempest. 
 
 It is affirmed that even after they have separated, 
 they lovingly pursue each other, the faithful male fol- 
 lowing his mate till the birth of his heir presumptive, 
 the sole fruit of that marriage, and never, never de- 
 vours him, but follows and watches over him. In fact, 
 
THE FISH. 223 
 
 in case of peril to the sharkling, the excellent father 
 takes him into his vast throat, but to shelter, not digest 
 him. 
 
 If the life of the sea has a dream, a wish, a confused 
 desire, it is that of fixity. The violent and tyrannical 
 embrace of the Shark, the fury of his union with the 
 female give us an idea of a perfectly desperate love. 
 Who knows if in other species, gentler and better fitted 
 for families, who knows if this impotence of union, this 
 eternal fluctuation of an objectless voyage, is not a 
 cause of sadness ? These cliildren of the sea become 
 owners of the land. Many of them ascend the rivers 
 amorous with the fresh water, which they find so poor 
 and possessed of so little nutriment, that they may de- 
 posit there, far from the raging waves, the hope of their 
 posterity. At the very least they approach the shore 
 in search of some sinuous and land locked creek. At 
 this time they even become industrious, and with sand, 
 mud, and grass endeavor to make little nests. A 
 touching effort ! They have none of the implements of 
 the insect, that marvel of animal industry. They are 
 far more destitute than the bird. By sheer dint of per- 
 severance, without hands, or claws, or beak, and solely 
 with their poor bodies, they yet pass and repass over it 
 till they have pressed it into a suflScient cohesion, as 
 Coste informs us in his description of the Sticklebacks. 
 And what obstacles still await them ! The female, 
 
224 THE FISH. 
 
 blitfd and greedy, threatens the eggs, the male will not 
 quit them, but guards and protects them, more motherly 
 than the mother herself. This instinct is found in sev- 
 eral species, especially in the humblest, the Gobies, a 
 small fish, unfit for food, held in such contempt that 
 if, by chance, caught, it is thrown back again to the 
 water. Well, this lowest of the low is a tender father. 
 Weak, small, destitute as he is, he, nevertheless, is the 
 ingenious architect and laborious workman of the nest, 
 and constructs it unaided, save by his tenderness and 
 his strong will. 
 
 It moves one to pitying reverie, to perceive that such 
 an effort of the heart is arrested at the first effort of art, 
 and by the fatality of the world, in which its nature de- 
 tains it. We feel that that world of waters is not all 
 sufficient for itself. 
 
 Great mother that hath commenced life, thou canst 
 not perfect it ; allow thy daughter, the Earth, to con- 
 tinue the work. You see it, even in your bosom ; your 
 children think of Earth and long for its fixity ; they 
 approach her, offer her their homage. 
 
 It is for thee still to commence the series of new 
 beings, by an unexpected prodigy, a grandiose rough . 
 draft of the warm amorous life, of blood, of milk, of 
 tenderness which will have its development in the 
 terrestrial races. 
 
 10* 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE WHALE. 
 
 " The fisherman belated at night in the North Sea," says 
 Milton, " saw an isle, a shoal, which, like the back of 
 an enormous mountain, lay upon the water, and in that 
 isle or shoal he fastened his anchor. The isle fled and 
 carried him away. That isle was Leviathan." 
 
 An error only too natural. D'Urmont Durville was 
 similarly though not so fatally deceived. He saw at a 
 distance what seemed a bank with breakers and eddies 
 all around it, and certain patches upon it looked like 
 rocks. Above and around this seeming bank the swal- 
 low and the stormy petrel raced and sported. The 
 bank looked venerably grey, covered as it was with 
 shells and madepores. But the mighty mass suddenly 
 moved, and two enormous columns of water which it 
 threw high into the air, revealed the awakened Whale. 
 
 The inhabitant of another planet who should descend 
 towards ours in a balloon and survey it from a vast 
 
226 THE WHALE. 
 
 height would say to himself, " The only creatures that 
 I can discover there are from one hundred to two hun- 
 dred feet long, their arms are only twenty feet long, 
 l)ut their superb tail, thirty feet, magnificently beats the 
 Sea, and enables them to advance with a speed and a 
 majestic ease which make it very evident that they are 
 the sovereigns of that planet." 
 
 And by and bye he would add : " It is a great pity 
 that the solid part of that globe should be deserted, or 
 at best peopled only by creatures so small that they are 
 invisible. The sea alone is inhabited and by a kind 
 and gentle race. Here the family is held in honor, the 
 mother nurses and suckles her young ones with tender- 
 ness, and although her arms are very short she con- 
 trives during the raging of the tempest to protect her 
 little one by pressing it to her vast body." 
 
 Whales are given to companionship. Formerly they 
 were seen sailing along not only in pairs, but occasion- 
 ally in large families of ten or twelve in the solitary 
 seas. Nothing exceeded the grandeur of those vast 
 and living fleets, sometimes lighted up by their own 
 phosphorescence, and throwing to the height of thirty or 
 forty feet in the Polar seas columns of water which smok- 
 ed as it rose. They would approach a vessel, peaceably 
 and in evident curiosity; looking upon her as some spe- 
 cimen of a new and strange species of fish ; and they 
 sported around and welcomed the visitor. In their joy 
 
THE WHALE. 227 
 
 they raised themselves half upright and then fell down 
 again with a huge noise, making a boiling gulf as they 
 sank. Their innocent familiarity went so far that they 
 sometimes touched the ship or her boats. An impru- 
 dent confidence which was most cruelly deceived ! In 
 less than a century, the great species of the "Whale have 
 almost disappeared. 
 
 Their manners and their organization are those of 
 our herbivora. Like our ruminating animals they have 
 a succession of stomachs where their nourishment is 
 elaborated ; they need no teeth and have none. They 
 easily graze the living prairies of the sea, I mean the 
 gigantic, soft, and gelatinous, fucus, the beds of infuso- 
 riae, the banks of the imperceptible atoms. For such 
 aliments the chase is not necessary. Having no occa- 
 sion for war, they have no necessity for the sawlike 
 teeth or the frightful jaws of the Shark and other de- 
 structive creatures. Boitard tells us that they never 
 pursue. Their food is borne to them on every wave. 
 Innocent and peaceable, they engulf a world of scarce- 
 ly organized creatures which die ere they lived, and 
 pass unconsciously into the crucible of universal 
 change. 
 
 Not the slightest connection between this gentle race 
 of mammiferas, which, like our own, have milk and red 
 blood, and the monsters of an earlier age, — horrible 
 abortions of the primitive mud ! The Whale, of far 
 
228 THE WHALE. 
 
 more recent origin, found a purified water, a free Sea, 
 and a peaceful globe. 
 
 He had finished, the Globe had, his old discordant 
 dream of lizard-fishes, and flying dragons, the frightful 
 reign of the reptile ; he had got out of the sinister fogs 
 and mists into the lovely dawn of harmonious concep- 
 tions. Our carnivorous creatures were not yet in exis- 
 tence. There was a brief time (a hundred thousand 
 years, perhaps,) of great gentleness and innocence, when 
 the Opossum and other pouched animals were on the 
 earth ; excellent creatures, that tenderly loved their 
 families, that carried their young, and, in case of the 
 fatigue or danger of those little creatures, sheltered 
 them in their pouches. In the Sea appeared vast and 
 gentle giants. 
 
 The milk of the sea, its superabundant oil, its warm 
 animalized mucus, saturated with a marvellous power 
 tending to life, swelling at length into those gigantic 
 creatures, those spoilt children of nature which she en- 
 dowed with an incomparable strength, and with the yet 
 greater gift of the beautiful and warm red blood, which 
 now for the first time appeared. 
 
 That is the true flower of the world. All the pale 
 and cold blooded creation is languid and seemingly 
 heartless, when compared with the generous and exult- 
 ing life which boils with anger or love in the rich pur- 
 ple. 
 
THE WHALE. 229 
 
 The strength of the superior creation, its charm, its 
 beauty, reside in that blood. With it commenced a new 
 youth in nature, a flame of desire, of love, and the love 
 of family and race; to be completed and crowned in 
 man by divine Pity. 
 
 But with this magnificent gift of red blood, the ner- 
 vous sensibility was enormously increased ; the being 
 became more vulnerable, more sensitive alike to pleas- 
 ure and to pain. The Whale having scarcely any sense 
 of scent or hearing, every thing in his organization is 
 favorable to the sense of touch. The thick blubber 
 which so well protects him from the cold, does not at 
 all guard him against hurts. His finely organized skin 
 of six tissues shudders and vibrates in them all at every 
 blow, and their papillae are most delicate instruments 
 of touch. And all this is animated and made vivid by 
 rich, red blood, which, even allowing for difierence of 
 bulk, is infinitely more abundant than that of the 
 terrestrial mammiferae. The Whale, when wounded, 
 ensanguines the ocean to a great distance ; the blood 
 that we have in drops,is lavished upon him in torrents. 
 
 The female is pregnant nine months. Her milk is 
 sweetish and warm, like that of the human female. But 
 as she has always to breast the wave, her front mam- 
 mse, if placed on the chest, would be exposed to all 
 shocks; they are, therefore, placed a little lower on the 
 belly. Here the young one is sheltered and safe from 
 
230 THE WHALE. 
 
 the shock of the wave, which is already broken, ere it 
 reaches him. The form, inherent to such a life, con- 
 tracts the mother, at the waist and deprives her of that 
 adorable grace of woman, that beauty of seUled and 
 harmonious life, where all is tenderness. But the 
 Whale, the great woman of the sea, however tender she 
 may be, is forced to conform, in every thing, to her 
 continual battle with the waves. For the rest, beneath 
 that strange uncouth disguise, the organization, and 
 the sensitiveness, are the same ; fish above, the Whale is 
 woman beneath. She is infinitely timid, too ; the mere 
 flight of a bird will sometimes terrify her so much that 
 she dives so violently as to hurt herself by striking the 
 bottom. 
 
 Love with the Whale being subject to difficult condi- 
 tion requires a profoundly peaceful place. Like a 
 noble elephant, who fears profane eyes, the Whales 
 love only the desert. Their meeting place for pairing 
 is towards the poles, in the solitary bays of Greenland, 
 among the fogs of Behring, and, also, no doubt, in the 
 warm sea which is known to exist close to the pole 
 itself. A solitude they must have to mate in, be it 
 arctic or antarctic. 
 
 Will that warm sea be found again ? It is only to 
 be reached by traversing the horrid defiles which open, 
 close, and change, with every succeeding year, as though 
 to prevent the return. The Whale, it is believed, pass 
 
THE WHALE. 231 
 
 under the ice from one sea to the other ; a bold and 
 peiilous journey by that dark road. Compelled to 
 rise to breathe every quarter of an hour, though they 
 have reserves of air which will last them a little longer, 
 they are much endangered as they pass through that 
 enormous crust with only here and there a breathing 
 hole. If one of these cannot be reached in due time, 
 the ice is so thick and solid every where else, that no 
 strength of the Whale could break through it ; and he 
 would be as helplessly drowned as Leander in the 
 Hellespont. But the Whales know nothing about the 
 fate of Leander ; so they boldly venture, and for the 
 most part pass safely. 
 
 The solitude is great, it is a strange scene of death 
 and silence for this festival of ardent and passionate 
 life. A white Bear, a Seal, or, perhaps, a blue Pox, 
 respectful and prudent, looks on from a distance. Fan- 
 tastically brilliant chandeliers and mirrors are not 
 wanting. Bluish crystals, huge and dazzling peaks of 
 ice, and masses of virgin snow, are all around. 
 
 What renders this Elephantine Hymen the more in- 
 teresting, is, that it is one of express consent. They 
 have not the tyrannous weapons of the Shark by which 
 he subdues his female, for on the contrary their slippery 
 skins separate them. In their struggle to overcome 
 this desperate obstacle to their happiness, one might 
 suppose them to be fighting. The whale-men assert 
 
232 THE WHALE. 
 
 that they have seen this strange spectacle. The couples 
 in their burning transports rear themselves upright 
 liise two vast towers, and endeavor to embrace with 
 their short arms. They fall down again with an im- 
 mense crash ; and Bear and Man alike retreat, astounded 
 by the deafening sobs of the vast creatures. 
 
 The solution is unknown ; those explanations, which 
 have been given, are simply absurd. What is certain 
 is, that, whether in the act of love or of suckling, or of 
 defence, the unfortunate Whale suffers under the double 
 oppression of its weight and its difficulty of breathing. 
 She can only breathe with her head above water ; if she 
 remain below she will be choked. Is the Whale, there- 
 fore, a terrestrial animal ? Not so. If by chance she 
 be stranded on the coast, the enormous weight of her 
 flesh and blubber overwhelms her respiring organs and 
 she is strangled. 
 
 Placed wholly in the only element in which she can re- 
 spire, she is asphyxiated just as surely as if kept beyond 
 a certain space of time wholly beneath the water. 
 
 Let us speak plainly. This vast mammiferous giant 
 is an incomplete creature, the first poetic offspring of 
 creative power, which first contemplates the sublime 
 and then reverts to the possible and the durable. The 
 admirable animal was well provided as to size, strength, 
 warm blood, sweet milk, and good disposition. It 
 needed nothing but the means of living. It was made 
 
THE WHALE. 233 
 
 without respect to the general proportions of this globe, 
 without respect to the imperative law of weight. In 
 spite of his enormous bones, beneath, his gigantic sides 
 were not strong enough to keep his chest sufficiently 
 expanded and free. Escaping from his enemy, the 
 water, he found another enemy in the land, and his 
 mighty lungs were overwhelmed, and collapsed. His 
 magnificent blowing apertures throwing up columns of 
 water thirty feet into the air, are, in themselves, proofs 
 of an organization infantine and rude. In throwing up 
 that column towards the sky the panting blower seems 
 to say, " Oh, nature, why hast thou made me a serf? " 
 
 The life of this creature was a problem, and it 
 seemed that this splendid but imperfect fii-st draft 
 of the vast and the warm-blooded could not endure. 
 Their furtive and difficult love, their suckling amidst 
 the roar and the rush of the tempest, in the hard choice 
 between shipwreck and strangling ; the two great acts 
 of their life rendered almost impossible, and performed 
 only by mightiest effort and most heroic will ; — what 
 conditions of existence are these ! 
 
 The mother has never more than one little one, and 
 that is much for her to achieve. Both she and it have 
 three great annoyances, the difficulty of breasting the 
 waves, the suckling, and the fatal necessity of rising to 
 the surface to breathe. The education of the young 
 one is a real combat. Tempest-tossed and sorely 
 
234 THE WHALE. 
 
 beaten by the waves, the young one sucks, as it were, 
 by stealth, when the mother can throw herself on her 
 side. Here the mother is admirable. She knows that 
 the young one in endeavoring to draw the teat will be 
 forced to leave its hold; and, therefore, seizing the 
 favorable moment, she, as from a piston, discharges a 
 tun of milk into the gaping and craving mouth. 
 
 The male seldom quits the female. Their embarrass- 
 ment is great when the eager and cruel fishers attack 
 them in the person of their young one. The whalemen 
 harpoon the young one, well knowing that the parents 
 will follow it. And, in fact, they do make almost in- 
 credible efforts to save it and carry it off; they rise to 
 the surface and expose themselves to the utmost dan- 
 ger. Even when it is dead, they still defend it ; though 
 so well able to dive and save themselves, they remain 
 upon the water in full peril to follow the floating body 
 of their little one. 
 
 Shipwrecks are common among them, for two reasons. 
 In the first place they cannot, like the fishes, remain 
 during tempestuous weather in tlie lower and peaceable 
 depths ; and in the next place, whatever the danger, 
 they will not> separate ; the strong nobly share the 
 fate of the weak ; the whole family drowns together. 
 
 In December, 1723, at the mouth of the Elbe, eight 
 females perished, and near their carcasses were their 
 eight males : and a similar scene was witnessed in 1784, 
 
THE WHALE. 235 
 
 at Andierne in Brittany. In the latter instance, fish 
 and frightened porpoises were driven on shore by the 
 tempest, and strange and terrible bellowings were 
 heard from a great family of Whales, tempest-driven, 
 and struggling for life. There, again, the males per- 
 ished with the females. Many of the latter were with 
 young and defenceless against the pitiless waves ; they 
 were cast upon the shore to die. Two of them, in this 
 situation, brouglit forth their young with piercing 
 shrielcs, and groans most harrowingly human. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE STBENS. 
 
 Behold me once more on shore. I had enough, and to 
 spare, of shipwreck. I want durable races. The Cat- 
 aceae must disappear. Let us moderate our conceptions, 
 and, of that gigantic faery of the first-born mammalia, 
 of milk and warm blood, let us preserve all except the 
 giant. 
 
 Above all, let us preserve the gentleness, the love, 
 and the love of family. Let us preserve them com- 
 pletely in those humbler but kindly races into which 
 both elements infuse their spirits. 
 
 The benedictions of the Earth already begin to be 
 felt. On quitting the life of the fish, many things im- 
 possible to it, easily become harmonized. 
 
 Thus the Whale, tender mother if ever there was 
 one, could grasp her nursling, but could not press it to 
 her breast, the arms being too high and short, and the 
 breast, as we have already shown, being, perforce, placed 
 far back. In the new creatures, which swim, but whicl 
 
THE SYRENS. 237 
 
 also creep upon the land, such as seals, sea cows, &c., 
 the breast, lest it should be hurt by the ground, is plac- 
 ed upon the chest, thus foreshadowing woman, and giv- 
 ing to the form and attitude, a grace most illusive at a 
 distance. 
 
 In reality, even closely examined, if it has less of 
 charming whiteness, the breast of the new creatures is 
 a true feminine breast ; that globe which, swelling with 
 love, and with the sweet necessity of giving suck, ex- 
 hibits, in its gentle hcavings, all the sighs of the heart 
 beneath, and invites the child to nourishment and soft 
 repose. All this is denied to the mother that swims and 
 floats, but is enjoyed by her who rests. The fixity of 
 the family, the constant tenderness, let us at once say, 
 Society, all these commence from the moment that the 
 child reposes on the maternal breast. 
 
 But how is organization to pass from creatures of the 
 sea to creatures of both sea and land ? Let us try to 
 divine that transition. 
 
 At the outset, the parentage of the amphibious race 
 is evident. Many, amphibious still, to their great in- 
 convenience, have the heavy tail of the Whale. And 
 this latter, in one species, at least, conceals in its tail 
 the rude outlines and distinct commencements of the 
 two hind feet of the highest of the amphibious crea- 
 tures. 
 
 In the seas studded with islands, continually interpos- 
 
238 
 
 THE SYRENS. 
 
 ing land, the cetacete, so frequently interrupted«in their 
 passage, had to modify their habits accordingly. Their 
 less rapid motion, and confined life, diminished their 
 bulk, and from the Whale they were reduced to the 
 sea Elephant, and reserving the memory of the superb 
 which had armed certain of the cetaceje, in their grand 
 sea life, the sea Elephant still has strong, but very 
 harmless fore teeth. Even its masticating teeth are not 
 precisely either herbivorous or carnivorous. They are 
 but ill adapted to either diet, and must needs operate 
 but slowly. 
 
 Two things tended to lighten the Whale ; his mass 
 of blubber, that vast mass of concentrated oil, which 
 floated him on the water, and that powerful tail whose 
 alternate strokes to right and left, urged him onward. 
 But all this was unfitted for the amphibious creature, 
 grovelling in shallow waters, or crawling on the rocks. 
 The fish, so agile, scorns a creature that cannot catch 
 hiin, and he consequently gets little other prey than the 
 molluscs, as slow as himself By degrees, he learns to 
 eat the abundant and gelatinous, sea wrack, which nour- 
 ishes, and fattens, but without giving the strength of 
 animal food. 
 
 Such a one we may see in the Red Sea, the Malay 
 isles, and those of Australia. Crawling or sitting, that 
 rare coUossus, the Dugong, displays its chests and 
 breasts. He is sometimes called the Dagon of the Tab- 
 
THE SYRENS. 239 
 
 ernacles, an inert idol, which in spite of its imposing 
 aspect, cannot defend itself, and which will soon disap- 
 pear, and enter into that region of fable which already 
 contains so many realities, at which we as stupidly, as 
 presumptuously, laugh. What has caused this great 
 change, created the terrestrial Dugong, and his brother 
 the Walrus ? The plentiful alimentation of the gener- 
 ous and fertile earth, truly pacific before the coming of 
 man, and doubtless, also. Love, so difficult to the Whale, 
 so easy in the quiet and settled life of the amphibious. 
 
 Love, to these latter, is no longer a thing of flight 
 and danger; the female is no longer the shy giant 
 that must be followed to the end of the world, but is 
 content, on her bed of sea-weed, to obey the will of her 
 master, whose life she makes pleasant. Few mysteries 
 here. The amphibious live frankly and honestly in the 
 face of day. The females being very numerous, volun- 
 tarily form a seraglio. Prom wild, fierce poetry, we 
 descend to patriarchal manners and pleasures too facile. 
 The male, good patriarch, notable for his large head, 
 his moustaches, and his great front teeth, sits proudly 
 between his Sarah and Agar, Rebecca and Leah, and 
 his little flock of young ones, to all of which he is most 
 kind. In his quiet life, the great strength of this san- 
 guineous creature, turns wholly to family tenderness ; 
 he embraces all his family, and is willing to die, if 
 need be, in their defence. But, alas ! his strength and 
 
240 THE SYKENS. 
 
 his fury serve him but feebly for even his own defence ; 
 his enormous mass delivers him over to the enemy. He 
 bellows, and crawls, and is willing to combat, but una- 
 ble — gigantic failure as he is ; an abortion belonging 
 to neither world, a poor disarmed Caliban. 
 
 Weight, so fatal to the Whale, is still more so to 
 these. Let us, then, still farther reduce the bulk, make, 
 the spine more supple, and above all, either do away 
 witli that tail, or rather, let us fork it into two fleshy 
 appendages, which will be much more useful. This new 
 being, the Seal, lighter, a good fisher, getting his sub- 
 sistence in the sea, but living on the land, will employ 
 his life in endeavoring to return to it, to climb the rock 
 to which his females and their offspring await his return 
 from fishing. Having no tusks, like those with which 
 the Walrus assists himself in climbing, he presses into 
 the service his front and back members, clings to the 
 seaweed, distending his members continually, until they 
 form into fingers. 
 
 What is finest in the Seal, what strikes you the mo- 
 ment you catch sight of his round head, is the great 
 capaciousness of brain. Boitard assures us that, with 
 the exception of man, no creature has so fine a cerebral 
 development as the Seal. We are strongly impressed 
 by the aspect of the Seal, far more so than by that of 
 the ape tribe, whose grimaces never fail to revolt us. 
 I shall never forget the Seals in the Zoological Garden 
 
THE SYRENS. 241 
 
 at Amsterdam, admirable museum, so rich, so beautiful, 
 so well organized, decidedly one of the finest establish- 
 ments in the world. I was there on the twelfth of 
 last July, just after a great rain fall. The atmosphere 
 was heavy and sultry, and two Seals sought shelter and 
 coolness, swimming and playing in their pond. When 
 they rested they looked up at me with their velvety 
 eyes, and there was a mixed intelligence and melan- 
 choly in their fixed gaze. There was no language 
 which we could mutually understand. Pity that, be- 
 tween soul and soul, there should be that' eternal 
 barrier ! 
 
 The earth is the world of their greatest aflFection. 
 There they are born, there they love ; thither, when 
 wounded, they retire to die. Thither they take their 
 pregnant females, form for them their beds of seaweed, 
 and provide them with fish. They are very affection- 
 ate, good neighbors, mutually defending each otlier ; 
 only at their season of amours they are a little apt to 
 fight. Each male has two or three females that he 
 finds a home for on some mossy rock of sufficient ex- 
 tent. That Jk his estate, and he suffers no intrusion 
 upon it. He knows how to maintain lys right of pro- 
 prietorship. The females are gentle and defenceless. 
 If ill treated, they weep, are agitated and cast despair- 
 ing glances upon the assailant. 
 
 They are parturient during nine months, and nurse 
 11 
 
242 THE SYRENS. 
 
 their young during five or six months, teaching them to 
 swim, fish, and select the best food. No doubt they 
 would keep them still longer, but the husband is jealous 
 of his own progeny, fearing that the too weak mother 
 will give him a rival. 
 
 No doubt this brevity of education has limited the 
 progress which the Seal would otherwise have made. 
 Maternity is only complete when we come to the Sea 
 Cow, an excellent family in which the parents hare not 
 the sad courage to drive away their young. "The 
 mothers nurse them for a long time ; even while suck- 
 ling a second, the mother still keeps by her the eldest, 
 which, though it be a male, the father never ill treats, 
 but seems to regard him with a love only second to 
 that of the mother. 
 
 This extreme tenderness, peculiar to that species, is 
 exemplified in the physical progress made in the or- 
 ganization. In the Seal, a great swimmer, and in the 
 heavy and clumsy sea Elephant the arms still continue 
 to be fins ; closely attached to the body are incapable 
 of extension. But at length the Sea Cow, the Sea 
 Mama as the negroes call her, accomplishes the mira- 
 cle. All extend and becomes pliant by a continuous 
 effort. Nature exerts all her ingenuity upon the fixed 
 idea of holding, pressing, caressing the young. The 
 ligaments yield and extend, the fore arm appears and 
 by and by appears the hand. 
 
THE SYRENS. 243 
 
 And then the mother has the gii^at, the supreme 
 pleasure to press her young one to her breast. Here, 
 then, are two things which may enable these amphibi- 
 ous creatures to make great progress. Already they 
 have the hand, that organ of industry, that essential in- 
 strument of future toil. It must be supplied, must aid 
 the work of the teeth as with the Beaver, and the Ant, 
 will commence, at the outset, with building a home for 
 the family. 
 
 On the other hand, education, also, has become possi- 
 ble. The young one rests on the maternal bosom 
 and, slowly drinking in her life, remains there a long 
 time, and to an age when he can learn every thing, — 
 all this depends on the kindness of the father who pro- 
 tects the innocent rival. And it is that which allows 
 of progress. 
 
 And, if we might give credence to certain traditions, 
 progress did marvellously continue. The developed 
 amphibious creatures, according to th(5se traditions, ap- 
 proached nearer and nearer to the human form and 
 became Tritons and Syrens, men and women of the 
 Sea. Only, in contradiction to the fables of the melo- 
 dious Syrens, these are dumb in their utter impotency to 
 find a language in which to address themselves to man 
 and obtain his pity. These races will have perished, as 
 has the unfortunate Beaver which cannot speak, but 
 weeps. 
 
244 
 
 THE SYRENS. 
 
 It has been vety lightly affirmed that these men and 
 women of the Sea were Seals. But how is it possible 
 that such a mistake could be made ? Every species of 
 the Seal has been known from very early times ; even as 
 early as the seventh century the Seal was hunted, not 
 only for his skin, but also for- his flesh, which was then 
 eaten. 
 
 The men and women of the Sea which are spoken of 
 in the writings of the sixteenth century, were seen, not 
 merely for an instant, and on the water, but brought to 
 land, shown, and kept in the great cities of Antwerp 
 and Amsterdam in the time of Charles V. and Philip 
 II., and, therefore, under the very eyes of Vesale and 
 other learned men and eminent naturalists. Mention 
 is made of a marine woman who, for several years, 
 wore the dress of a nun and lived in a Convent where 
 any one might see her. She could not speak, but 
 worked, and could spin, knit, and sew. Only one pe- 
 culiarity, they cotild not cure her of, — her great love of 
 the water, and her incessant efforts to return to it. 
 
 But it will be asked — "If these creatures really 
 existed, how is it that we do not see them now ? " 
 Alas ! We need not seek far for the reply. They were 
 so generally killed ! It was considered a sin to let 
 them live, " for they were monsters.^' This we are 
 expressly told by the old writers. 
 
 Whatever had not the known form of animality, and, 
 
THE SYRENS. 245 
 
 especially, whatever approached to the form of man 
 passed for a monster, and was pitilessly dispatched'. 
 Even the human mother of a greatly deformed child, 
 could not protect it ; the poor creature was smothered„as 
 being a child of the Devil, an invention of his malice to 
 outrage the creation and calumniate the Deity. On 
 the other hand, those Syrens, too analogous to hu- 
 manity, Vere all the more taken and detested for a 
 diabolic mockery. In such horror and hate were they 
 held in the eyes of the middle ages that their appear- 
 ance was considered a prodigy, an omen that God permit- 
 ted to terrify sinners. People scarcely dared to name 
 them, and made haste to get rid of them. Even the bold 
 sixteenth century still believed them to be men and 
 women in shape, but Devils in reality, and not even to 
 be touched, excepting with the harpoon. They had 
 become very rare when miscreants made a profit of 
 keeping and exhibiting them. 
 
 But do there now exist any remains, any whole, or 
 even partial, skeletons of these creatures ? "We shall 
 know that, when the Museums of Europe shall throw 
 open to our view the whole of their immense collec- 
 tions. I am aware that room is wanting for that ; and 
 it is always likely to be wanting, if we need a palace. 
 But the moat simple building, if it only be suflBciently 
 spacious and weather tight, would serve to hold such 
 
246 
 
 THE STBENS. 
 
 collections, and needs not to be at all costly. Hitherto, 
 we have only seen mere specimens and selections. 
 
 Let us add that stuffed amphibious creatures, to give 
 us^a real idea of them, should be so placed as to ex- 
 hibit these monsters in the attitudes of their actual life. 
 Let the maternal Seal, or the Sea Cow, be seen on its 
 rock, as a Syren, in the first use of her hand and 
 pressing her little one to her breast. • 
 
 Is this to aflSrm that these creatures might have as- 
 cended to us ? Or that we have descended from them ? 
 Mallet supposed' so, but I cannot see the least proba- 
 bility in either. 
 
 The Sea, no doubt, commenced everything. But it 
 is not from the highest marine animals, that has pro- 
 proceeded the long parallel series of terrestrials that is 
 culminated and crowned in Man. They were already 
 too fixed, too special, to form the first rude sketch of a 
 nature so different. They had carried far, almost ex- 
 hausted, the fecundity of their species. In that case 
 the elders perish ; and it is very low down in the ob- 
 scure juniors of some parent class that the new series 
 commences that is to ascend so much higher. _ [See 
 notes at the end of the volume.] 
 
 Man was not their son, but their brother — a terribly 
 tyrannical brother. 
 
 See him at length arrive, the active, the ingenious, 
 
THE SYKENS. 247 
 
 the cruel monarch of the world ! My book grows 
 brighter, clearer. But what does it now proceed to 
 exhibit? Alas! What sad things must I now draw 
 into that broad, bright light! This creature, this 
 tyrannical sovereign, can create a second nature within 
 Nature. But what has he done with the first, with his 
 mother, and his nurse ? With the very teeth that she 
 has given him, he has cruelly gnawed her bosom ! 
 
 How many animals that lived peaceably, were becom- 
 ing civilized, began even to practise some of the arts, 
 are now hunted and terrified into the Condition of mere 
 brutes? The Ape-kings of Ceylon, whose sagacity 
 was so well known in India, and that Brahmin of the 
 creation, the Elephant, have been chased, subdued into 
 the state of mere beasts of burthen. 
 
 The freest of beings, that formerly sported so joy- 
 ously and harmlessly in the sea, those afi^ectionate Seals, 
 those gentle Whales, the pacific pride of the Ocean, 
 have fled to the polar sea^ the terrible world of ice. 
 But they cannot all support, for long, so hard a life ; 
 in a brief time they will all have disappeared. 
 
 An unfortunate race, the Polish peasants, have learn- 
 ed to understand the intelligence of the dumb exile 
 which has taken refuge in the lakes of Lithuania. The 
 Poles say — "Woe to him who makes the Beaver 
 weep." 
 
 That artist-animal has become a timid beast, which 
 
248 THE SYRENS. 
 
 knows nothing and can do nothing. The few that still 
 survive in America, still retire farther and farther from 
 the vicinage of man. A traveller lately found one, far, 
 very far off, beyond the great lakes. It was timidly 
 resuming its traditional labors, and had commenced 
 building a house for its family. When it saw a man, it 
 dropped the wood on which it was working ; it did not 
 even dare to escape, but burst into tears. 
 
BOOK THIEU. 
 
 CONQUEST OF THE SEA, 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE HABPOON. 
 
 " The Sailor who sights Greenland," says Captain John 
 Ross, with a grave simplicity, " finds nothing to delight 
 him with the sight." I can very well believe it. In 
 the first place, it is an iron-bound coast of most pitiless 
 aspect, whose dark granite does not even preserve a 
 vestment of snow. Everywhere else, Ice ; not a trace 
 of vegetation. That desolate land which hides the 
 Pole from us, seems a veritable land of Famine and of 
 Death. 
 
 During the brief time when the water remains un- 
 frozen, one might contrive to live there ; but the place 
 is frozen up for nine months in the year, and during all 
 that time, what is to be done ? And what can one get 
 to eat ? One can scarcely even search for food. The 
 night lasts for months together, and at times the dark- 
 ness is so dense that Kane, surrounded by his dogs, 
 could only discover them by the humid warmth of their 
 
252 THE HARPOON. 
 
 breath. In that long, long, darkness, on that sterile 
 land, clothed in impenetrable ice, there wander, howev- 
 er, two Hermits, who persist in living in that land of 
 horror. One of these is the fishing Bear, a bold and 
 eager prowler, in rich fur, and in so thick an under 
 vestment of fat, that he can for a long time defy both 
 cold and hunger. The other, a grotesque creature, 
 looks, when seen from a distance, like a fish reared up- 
 wards, standing on the tip of its tail ; a fish clumsily 
 and awkwardly built, and having long hanging fins. 
 But this seeming fish is a man. Each scents the other, 
 the brute and the man ; both are fierce with hunger, 
 yet the Bear sometimes declines the combat, and re- 
 treats before the fiercer, and still more famished, man. 
 
 A famishing man is very terrible in his cruel courage. 
 "With no other weapon than a sharpened bone, our 
 Greenlander pursues the enormous Bear. But he would 
 have long since perished of famine, had he no other 
 food than his terrible compatriot. He saved himself 
 from death only by a crime. The earth afi'ording noth- 
 ing, he turned his attention to the Sea, and as it was 
 closed by the ice, he found nothing there to kill except 
 his gentle acquaintance the Seal. In him he found the 
 oil without which he would be dead of cold, even soon- 
 er than of hunger. 
 
 The day dream of the Greenlander is that at his 
 death he will pass to the Moon, where he will have 
 
THE HARPOON. 253 
 
 wood, fire, the light of the hearth. Here below, in 
 Greenland, oil supplies the place of all these. He 
 drinks it, in huge draughts, and is at once warmed and 
 nourished. 
 
 A groat contrast between that man and the somno- 
 lent, amphibious creatures, that, even in that climate, 
 can live without any very severe suffering ! The gentle 
 eye of the Seal, sufficiently indicates that. Nursling of 
 the Sea he is always, in connection with her, and there are 
 always clefts in the ice, at which the excellent swimmer 
 knows how to provide himself with food. Heavy and 
 clumsy as we may take him to be, he can adroitly mount 
 on a piece of ice and steer himself in search of a conve- 
 nient fishing place. The water, thick with molluscs, 
 and fat with animated atoms, richly nourishes the fish, 
 for the use of the Seal, who, having well filled himself, 
 returns to his rock, and sleeps too soundly to feel the 
 cold, or to fear anything. 
 
 The man's life in Greenland, is the very contrary of 
 this. He seems to be there in spite of Nature, an ac- 
 cursed being, upon whom everything makes pitiless war. 
 Looking upon the photographs that we have of the Es- 
 quimaux, we can read their terrible destiny in the fixi- 
 ty of their gaze, and in the harsh, dark eye ; black as 
 midnight. They look as though petrified by perpetual- 
 ly seeing before them the vision of an infinite wretch- 
 edness. That gazing upon eternal terror, has hidden 
 
254 
 
 THE HARPOON. 
 
 beneath a mask of iron the man's strong intelligence, 
 which, however, is rapid and full of the expedients sug- 
 gested by the endless dangers and sufferings of such a 
 life. 
 
 What was he to do. His family was famishing, his 
 children cried for bread, and his wife shivered upon 
 the snow. The North wind, pitilessly assailed them all 
 with mingled hail and snow, that horrid pelting which 
 blinds, stupefies, deprives one of sense and voice. The 
 Sea was frozen up; so, fish was out of the question. 
 But the Seftl was there, and how many fish there were 
 in one Seal ; what an accumulation of the richest oil ! 
 The Seal was there, defenceless, sleeping. Nay, had he 
 even been awake, he would not have tried to escape. 
 He is like the Sea Cow ; you must beat him if you wish 
 to drive him away. Take one of their young and it is 
 in vain that you throw him into the Sea, he will get out 
 and still follow you, gentle and attached as your favor- 
 ite dog. This facile, this affectionate, ti-ait in the crea- 
 ture's character, must have terribly troubled the man 
 who first thought of killing such a creature ; must have 
 made him hesitate and resist the tempation. But at 
 length cold and famine got the upper hand, and he 
 committed the assassination ; from that moment he was 
 rich. 
 
 The flesh nourished the famishing people, the oil 
 served to warm and cheer them, and the bone and 
 
THE HARPOON. 255 
 
 sinews served for many domestic uses, while the skin 
 served to clothe £hem. And what was still more use- 
 ful was, that by industriously sowing the skins together 
 they made a vehicle, at once light, and strong, and 
 water proof, which the man called his canoe, and in 
 which he dared to put out to sea. 
 
 A miserable little vehicle it was ; long, slender, and 
 weighing scarcely anything. But it was every where 
 very firmly closed up, except an opening in which the 
 rower seated himself, drawing the skin tightly around 
 his waist. One would suppose that such a craft must 
 upset and be swamped; but nothing of the sort occurs. 
 It darts like an arrow over the crest of the wave, dis- 
 appears, reappears, now in the eddies, now between the 
 icebergs. 
 
 Man and boat are one ; a marine entity ; an artifi- 
 cial fish. But how inferior is this artificial fish to the 
 true one ! He has not the floating bladder, which 
 enables the fish to make itself lighter or heavier as the 
 occasion may demand. Still more, the man has not 
 the vigorous motion, the lively contraction and expansion 
 of the spine to communicate such power to the strokes 
 of the tail, nor has he the oil which, being so much 
 lighter than water, will always ride above the waves. 
 What the man best imitates is the fin, but even that 
 only imperfectly. The man's fins, his oars, are not at- 
 tached to his body, but, moved by his long arms, aro 
 
256 
 
 THE HARPOON. 
 
 weak compared to the fin, and, moreover, soon fatigue 
 the rower. What is it that makes amends for so much 
 of inferiority in the means of the man ? His terrible 
 energy, his vivid reason which, from beneath that fixed 
 and melancholy countenance, flashes out from time to 
 time, invents, resolves, and finds an instant remedy for 
 all the deficiences which, in this floating skin, momen- 
 tarily threaten him with death. 
 
 Frequently our rower is stopped by a mass of ice 
 which peremptorily refuses him a passage. Then comes 
 a new expedient, the parts are changed on the instant. 
 Hitherto the canoe has carried the man; now the man 
 carries the canoe. He takes it on his shoulder and 
 traverses the icy portage till he comes again to open 
 water, the ice crackling beneath him as he crosses it. 
 Occasionally icebergs, floating, and terrible mountains, 
 are so close that they leave between them only a nar- 
 row passage which our man passes through at the risk 
 of being in an instant crushed, flattened between them. 
 Those icy walls now widen, now contract, the space be- 
 tween them ; they may, at any moment, come together 
 with a force that would crush a seventy-four, to say 
 nothing about our poor Greenlander in his poor skin 
 canoe. Such a fate did, in fact, once occur to a tall 
 ship ; she was cut in two, flattened, crushed; by the 
 coming together of two icebergs. 
 These Greenlanders tell us that their ancestors were 
 
THE HARPOON. 257 
 
 Whale fishers. They were less wretched then, more 
 ingenious, and better provided. No doubt they had iron; 
 procured probably from Norway or Iceland. Whales 
 have always been very numerous in the Greenland seas. 
 A grand object of desire to those to whom oil is a 
 thing of the very first necessity ! The fish give it by 
 drops, the Seal in waves — the Whale in mountains ! 
 He was truly a man, and a bold one, who first, with his 
 poor weapons, with the sea howling at his feet, and the 
 darkness closing around him, dared to pursue the 
 Whale ! A bold man, he, who trusting to his courage, 
 the strength of his arm and the weight of his harpoon, 
 first believed that he could pierce that mighty mass of 
 blubber and flesh and convert it to his own profit ! — the 
 man who first imagined that he could attack the Whale 
 and not perish in the tempest that would be raised by 
 the plunges and terrific tail-blows of the astonished 
 and suffering monster! And, as if to crown his au- 
 dacity, the man next fastened a line to his harpoon, and 
 braving still more closely the frightful shock of the 
 agonized and dying giant, never once feared that that 
 giant might plunge headlong into the deep, taking with 
 him harpoon, line, boat, — and man ! 
 
 There is still another danger, and no less terrible. It 
 is that instead of meeting the common Whale, our man 
 should fall in with the Cachalot, that terror of the seas. 
 He is not very large, perhaps not more than from sixty 
 
258 
 
 THE HARPOON. 
 
 to eighty feet. But his head alone measures about a 
 third ; from twenty to twenty-five feet. In case of 
 such a meeting, woe to the fisher; he would become the 
 chased instead of the chaser, the victim instead of tlie 
 tyrant. The Cachalot has horrible jaws, and no fewer 
 than forty-eight enormous teeth ; he could with ease de- 
 vour all; both boat and man. And he seems always 
 drunk with blood. His bliud rage so terrifies all the 
 other Whales that they escape, bellowing, throwing 
 themselves on the shore, or striving to hide themselves 
 in the sand. Even when he is dead they still fear him 
 and will not approach his carcass. The fiercest species 
 of the Cachalot is the Ourque or Physetene of the an- 
 cients, which is so much dreaded by the Icelanders, 
 that when they are on the sea they will not so much as 
 name him lest he should come and attack them. They 
 believe, on the other hand, tliat a species of Whale, the 
 Jubarte, loves and protects them, and provokes the 
 monster in order to save them from his fury. 
 
 Many think that the first who undertook so perilous 
 a task as that of Whale fishing must have been eccen- 
 tric hot heads. According to those who think so, that 
 perilous chase could never have originated with the 
 prudent men of the North, but must have been initiated 
 by the Basques, those .daring hunters and fishers who 
 were so well accustomed to their own capricious sea, 
 the Gulf of Gascony, where they fished the Tunny. 
 
THE HARPOON. 259 
 
 Here they first saw the huge Whales at play and pur- 
 sued them, frenzied by the hope of such enormous prey, 
 and pursued them still, onward and onward, no matter 
 whither ; even to the confines of the pole. 
 
 Here the poor Colossus fancied it must needs be 
 safe, for it could not fancy any one would be desperate 
 enough to follow it thither, and so it went tranquilly 
 to sleep. But our Basque mad-caps approached it 
 stealthily and silently. Tightening his red belt around 
 his waist, the boldest and most active of the Basque 
 sailors leaped from the deck right on to the back of the 
 sleeping monster, and, fearlessly or carelessly, drove the 
 harpoon home to the very eye. Poor Whale ! 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 DISCOVERT OP THK THREE OCEANS. 
 
 Who opened up to mea the great distant navigation ? 
 Who revealed the Ocean, and marked out its zones and 
 its liquid highways ? Who discovered the secrets of 
 the Globe ? The Whale and the Whaler ! 
 
 And all this before Columbus and the famous gold 
 seekers, who have monopolized all the glory, found 
 again, with much outcry about their discovery, what 
 had so long before been discovered by the Whalers. 
 
 That crossing of the Ocean which was so boastfully 
 celebrated in the fifteenth centuiy, had often been made, 
 not only by the narrow passage between Iceland and 
 Greenland, but also by the open sea ; for the Basques 
 went to Newfoundland. The smallest danger was the 
 mere voyage, for these men, who went to the very end 
 of the then world, to challenge the Whale to single 
 combat. To steer right away into the Northern seas. 
 
DISCOVERY OF THE THREE OCEANS. 261 
 
 to attack the mighty monster, amid darkness and storms, 
 with the dense fog all around and the foaming waves 
 below, those who could do this, were, believe it well, 
 not the men to shrink from the ordinary dangers of the 
 voyage. 
 
 Noble warfare; great school of courage ! That Fish- 
 ery was not then, as it is now, an easy war to wage, 
 made from a distance, and with a potently murderous 
 machine. No ; the fisher then struck with his own strong 
 hand, impelled and guided by his own fearless heart ; 
 and he risked life to take life. The men of that day 
 killed but few "Whales, but they gained infinitely in 
 maritime ability, in patience, in sagacity, and in intre- 
 pidity. They .brought back less of oil ; but more, far 
 more, of glory. 
 
 Every nation has its own peculiar genius. We rec- 
 ognize each by its own style of procedure. There are 
 a hundred forms of courage, and these graduated vari- 
 eties, formed, as it were, another heroic game. At the 
 North, the Scandinavian, the ruddy race from Norway 
 to Flanders, had their sanguine fury. At the South, 
 the wild burst, the gay daring, the clear-headed excite- 
 ment, that impelled, at once, and guided them over the 
 world. In the center, the silent and patient firmness of 
 the Breton, who, yet, in the hour of danger could dis- 
 play a quite sublime eccentricity. And lastly, the Nor- 
 
262 DISCOVERY OP THE THREE OCEANS. 
 
 man wanness, considerately courageous; daring all, but 
 daring all for success. 
 
 Such was the beauty of man, in that sovereign mani- 
 festation of human courage. 
 
 We owe a vast deal to the Whale. But for it, the 
 fishers would still have hugged the shore ; for almost ev- 
 ery edible fish, seeks the shore, and the river. It was 
 it that emancipated them, and led them afar. It led 
 them onward, and onward still, until they found it, af- 
 ter having almost unconsciously, passed from one world 
 to the other. Greenland did not seduce them, it was 
 not the land that they sought, but the sea, and the 
 tracks of the Whale. The Ocean at large is its home, 
 and especially the broad and open Sea. Each species 
 has its especial preference for this or that latitude, for 
 a certain zone of water; more or less cold. And it was 
 that preference which traced out the great divisions of 
 the Atlantic. 
 
 The tribe of inferior Whales, that have a dorsal fin, 
 (Baleinopteres) are to be found in the warmest, and in 
 the coldest seas ; under the line, and in the polar seas. 
 In the great intermediate region, the fierce Cachalot 
 inclines towards the South, devastating the warm wa- 
 ters. On the contrary, the Free Whale fears the warm 
 waters ; we should rather say that they did, formerly, 
 fear them ; — they have become so scarce ! Especially 
 
DISCOVERY OP THE THREE OCEANS. 263 
 
 affecting, for their food, the molluscs, and other forms 
 of elementary life, they sought them in the temperate 
 waters, a little to the northward. They are never 
 found in the warm, southern current; it was that fact 
 that led to the cui-rent being noticed, and thence to the 
 discovery of the true course from America to Europe. 
 From Europe to America, the trade winds will serve 
 us. 
 
 If the Free Whale has a perfect horror of the warm 
 waters, and cannot pass the Equator, it is clear that he 
 cannot double the southern end of America. How 
 happens it, then, that when he is wounded on one side 
 of America, in the Atlantic, he is sometimes found on 
 the other side of America, and in the Pacific ? It 
 proves that there is a north-western passage. Another 
 discovery which we owe to the Whale, and one which 
 throws a broad light alike on the form of the globe, and 
 the geography of the seas ! 
 
 By degrees, the Whale has led us everywhere. Rare 
 as he is at present, he has led us to both poles, from the 
 uttermost recesses of the Pacific to Behring's strait, 
 and the infinite wastes of the Antarctic waters. There 
 is even an enormous region that no vessel, whether war 
 ship or merchantman, ever traverses, at a few degrees 
 beyond the southern points of America and Africa. No 
 one visits that region but the Whalers. 
 
 Had they chosen, the magnates of the earth might 
 
264 DISCOVERY OP THE THREE OCEANS. 
 
 much earlier have made the discoveries of the Sfteenth 
 century. They should have addressed themselves to 
 the sea rovers, to the Basques, to the Icelanders, to the 
 Norwegians, and to our Normans. For very many rea- 
 sons, they could not venture to do so. The Portu- 
 guese were unwilling tct employ any but men of their 
 own naitionality, and formed in their own school. 
 They feared our Normans, whom they chased and dis- 
 possessed from the coast of Africa. On the other hand, 
 the kings of Castile always felt suspicious of their sub- 
 jects, the Basques, whose privileges rendered them a 
 kind of republic within a monarchy, and who, moreo- 
 ver, were well known to be both bold and dangerous. 
 It was this feeling which caused these princes to fail, in 
 more than one enterprise. We need mention only one 
 of them, the miserably rmned Armada, so proudly^and 
 absurdly called the Invincible,. Philip II, who had two 
 veteran Basque Admirals, gave the command of the Ar- 
 mada, to a Castilian. The advice of the veterans was 
 neglected, and thence the disaster. 
 
 A terrible disease broke out in the fifteenth century. 
 The hunger, the thirst, the raging thirst for gold. 
 Kings, priests, warriors, people, all cried aloud for 
 gold. There was no longer any means of balancing in- 
 come and expenditure. False money, cruel persecu- 
 tions, atrocious wars, all and every thing, were em- 
 ployed, but still the cry was for gold, and the gold was 
 
DISCOVERY OF THE THREE OCEANS. 265 
 
 not forthcoming. The alchemists confidently promised 
 that they -would soon make it ; but it was to be waited 
 for, that gold ; still, still, it was not forthcoming. The 
 treasury became furious as a hungry Lion, devoured the 
 Jews, devoured the Moors, and of all that mighty de- 
 vouring there was not a morsel left between the teeth 
 of the still gold-hungry nations. 
 
 The peoples were quite as eager as the kings. Lean 
 and sucked to the very bone, they begged, they prayed, 
 they implored, for a miracle that would bring down 
 gold from Heaven. 
 
 We all know the story of Sinbad the Sailor, that 
 capital story in the Arabian Nights. The poor porter, 
 Hindbad, bending under a load of wood, stops before 
 the doors of Sinbad's palace, to listen to the music, and 
 bitterly complains of the contrast between the lot of 
 the poor porter Hindbad, and that of Sinbad, the re- 
 turned, renowned, and magnificently rich Sinbad. But 
 when the enriched sailor related all the perils he had 
 undergone, and all the sufi'erings he had endured, 
 Hindbad stood aghast at the tale. The entire effect of 
 the story is to exaggerate the dangers of the great 
 game, the vast lottery of travelling, but also to exag- 
 gerate the profits that may be made by it, and to dis- 
 courage steady and humble industry. 
 
 The legend, which, in the fifteenth century, influenc- 
 ed so many hearts, and turned so many brains, was a 
 12 
 
2G6 DISCOVERY OP THE THREE OCEANS. 
 
 rehash of the fable of the Hesperides, an Eldorado, a 
 land of gold, which was located in the Indies ; a ter- 
 restrial paradise, still existing here below. The only 
 difficulty consisted in finding that same golden land. 
 They did not care to seek it in the North, which was 
 the reason why so little use was made of the discovery 
 of Newfoundland and Greenland. In the South, on the 
 contrary, gold dust had already been found in Africa. 
 That was encouraging. 
 
 The learned dreamers of a pedantic century heaped 
 up texts and commentaries, and the discovery, by no 
 means difficult in itself, was rendered so, by dint of 
 lectures, reflections, and Utopian dreams. Was this 
 land of gold. Paradise, or was it not ? Was it at our 
 antipodes ? and, in fact, have we any antipodes ? And 
 at this last question all the Doctors, all the men of the 
 black robe, stopped the learned quite short, and remind- 
 ed them that upon that point, the Church was quite pos- 
 itive ; the heretical doctrine of the Antipodes having 
 been formally and expressly condemned. Behold a 
 serious difficulty ! Our learned dreamers were stopped 
 short. 
 
 But why was it so difficult to discover the already 
 discovered America ? The reason seems to be that the 
 discovery was at once hoped for and dreaded. 
 
 The learned Italian bookseller, Columbus, felt quite 
 satisfied upon the subject. He had been in Iceland to 
 
DISCOVERY OP THE THKBE OCEANS. 267 
 
 collect traditions, and on the other hand the Basques 
 told him all that they knew about Newfoundland. A 
 Gallician had been cast away there and had lived 
 there. Columbus selected for his associates the Pin- 
 90ns, Andalusian pilots, who are with much probability 
 supposed to be identical with the Pin§ons of Dieppe. 
 We say that this is very probable because our Basques 
 and Normans, subjects of Castile, were intimately con- 
 nected. They are the same who, under the name of 
 Castilians, were led by the Norman Bethencourt to the 
 famous expedition of the Canaries. Our kings conferred 
 privileges on the Castilians settled at Honfleur and 
 Dieppe; and, on the other hand, the men of Dieppe had 
 trading establishments at Seville. It is not certain that 
 a Dieppois found America four years before Columbus, 
 but it is about certain that these Pin§ons of Andalusia 
 were Norman privateers. 
 
 Neither Basques nor Normans could obtain authority 
 to act under the commission of Castile. It was an 
 able and eloquent Italian, a persistent Genoese, who 
 seized upon the fitting moment, and used it, and set all 
 scruple aside, — that moment when the ruin of the 
 Moors had cost so dear to Castile, and when the cry of 
 Gold, Gold, or we perish, became louder, more pite- 
 ous, and more unanimous, than ever. That moment 
 was when victorious Spain shuddered as she counted 
 the cost, paid and unpaid, of her wars of the crusade 
 
268 DISCOVERT OF THE THEEE OCEANS. 
 
 and the InquisUion. The Italian seized upon that lever 
 and used it most unscrupulously ; becoming most de- 
 vout among the devout. More apparently bigoted than 
 the Bigots themselves, he pressed the very Church into 
 his service. Isabella was reminded of the great sin and 
 scandal of leaving whole nations of Pagans still in the 
 valley of the shadow of death ; and it was particularly 
 pressed upon her observation, that to discover the gold- 
 en land, was the one thing needful to acquiring the 
 ability to exterminate the Turk and to recover Jeru- 
 salem. 
 
 It is well known that of three ships the Pin§ons 
 shipped two, and commanded them, and they led the 
 way. One of them, indeed, mistook his course, but the 
 others, Francis Pinion and his younger brother Vin- 
 cent, pilot of the vessel Nina, signalled to Columbus, on 
 the 12th of October, 1492, to steer to the south-west. 
 Columbus, who was on a westerly course, would have 
 encountered the gulf stream in its fullest force, and 
 directly thwart hawse, and he would have crossed that 
 liquid wall only with the greatest difficulty. He would 
 have perished, or would have made such little way 
 that his discouraged crew would have mutinied. On' 
 the contrary, the Pin9ons, who probably had collected 
 some traditions on the subject, steered as though they 
 were well acquainted with the current ; they did not 
 attempt to cross it in its force, but keeping well to the 
 
DISCOVERY OF THE THREE OCEANS. 269 
 
 southward, crossed without difiSculty and made the ex 
 act spot where the trades blow directly from Africa to 
 America in the latitude of Haiti. This is proved from 
 the journal of Columbus himself, who candidly avows 
 that he was guided by the Pinions. 
 
 Who first saw America ? One of Pinion's sailors, if 
 we may put any confidence in the report of the royal 
 enquiry of 1513. 
 
 From all this it would seem pretty plain that a good 
 share of both the glory and the gain ought to have been 
 awarded to the Pinions. They thought the same, and 
 commenced legal proceedings, but the king decided in 
 favor of Columbus. Why ? Apparently because the 
 Pin§ons were Normans, and Spain preferred to recog- 
 nize the right of a Genoese, without national feeling, 
 than that of French subjects of Louis XII, and of 
 Francis I, to whom, as French subjects, they might some 
 day, from fear or favor, transfer their rights. One of 
 the Pin§ons died of despair, caused by this very mani- 
 festly unjust decision. 
 
 But still, who had overcome the great obstacle of 
 religious repugnance ? Whose eloquence, tact, and 
 perseverance, in fact set the expedition fairly afloat ? 
 Columbus, and Columbus alone. He was the real au- 
 thor of the enterprise and he was also its heroic con- 
 ductor, and he merits the glory which his posterity 
 preserves and ever will preserve for him. 
 
270 DISCOVERT OF THE THREE OCEANS. 
 
 I think- with M. Jules de Blosseville (a noble heart 
 and a good judge of great and heroic things) that in 
 all these discoveries the only real difficulty was the cir- 
 cumnavigation of the globe, the enterprise of Magellan 
 and his pilot, the Basque, Sebastian del Cano. The 
 most brilliant, but at the same time the easiest, was the 
 crossing the Atlantic, catching the trade wind, and 
 thus getting to America far south of the point at which 
 it had long before been discovered at the North. 
 
 The Portuguese did a far less extraordinary thing ih 
 taking an entire century to discover the Western coast 
 of Africa. Our Normans, in a very brief space had 
 discovered the half of it. In spite of all that is said 
 about the laudable perseverance of Prince Henry, in 
 establishing the Lisbon school, the Venetian Cadamos- 
 to clearly proves the want of ability of the Portuguese 
 pilots. They no sooner had one at once bold and high- 
 ly gifted, in the person of Bartholomew Diaz, who 
 doubled the Cape, than they replaced him by Gama, a 
 noble of the king's household, and, above all, a soldier. 
 The truth is, that the Portuguese cared more about con- 
 quests to make, and treasure to gain, than about discov- 
 eries, properly so called. Gama was brave as brave 
 could be, but he was only too faithful to his orders to 
 suffer no other flag in the same seas. A ship load of 
 Pilgrims from Mecca, whom he barbarously murdered, 
 exasperated all the hates, and augmented, throughout 
 
DISCOVERY OF THE THREE OCEANS. 271 
 
 the East, that horror of the very name of Christian, 
 which more and more closed Asia, alike against discov- 
 erers, for the sake of discovery, and adventurers for 
 the sake of plunder. 
 
 Is it true that Magellan, before his great enterprise, 
 had seen the Pacific laid down upon a globe by the 
 German, Behaim ? No ; that globe has never been 
 produced. Had he seen, in the possession of his mas- 
 ter, the king of Portugal, a chart which had it so laid 
 down ? It has been said, but never proved. It is far 
 more probable that some of the adventurers who, al- 
 ready, for twenty years, had been traversing the Amer- 
 ican continent, had seen the Pacific, not on globes or 
 charts, but with their own eyes. That report, which 
 was circulated, spread admirably well with the theoret- 
 ical calculation of such a counterpoise, necessary to our 
 hemsiphere, and to the equilibrium of the globe. 
 
 There is not a more terrible biography than that of 
 Magellan. Throughout, we have nothing but combat, 
 far voyages, flights, trials, attempted assassination, and 
 at length, death, among the scourges. He fought in 
 Africa, he fought in the Indies, and he married among 
 the brave but ferocious Malays ; — whom, by the way, 
 he seems not a little to have resembled. 
 
 During his long residence in Asia, he collected all 
 possible information, preparatory to his great expedi-. 
 tion, to find the way by America, to the Spice Islands, 
 
272 DISCOVERT OF THE THREE OCEANS. 
 
 the Moluccas; thus getting spices so much cheaper than 
 by the old course. His original idea of the enterprise, 
 was, thus, an altogether commercial one. To lower the 
 price of pepper, was the primitive inspiration of the 
 most heroic voyage ever made on this globe ! 
 
 The true court spirit of intrigue, reigned in Portugal 
 in full power over everything. Magellan finding him- 
 self ill treated there, went over to Spain, where Charles 
 V. magnificently furnished him with five ships, but not 
 choosing to put full confidence in a Portugueses malcon- 
 tent, the king associated with Magellan a Castilian. 
 Magellan sailed between two dangers, the jealousy of 
 the Castilian, and the vengeance of the Portuguese, 
 who sought to assassinate him. He soon had a mutiny 
 in the fleet, and displayed, in crushing it an indomita- 
 ble heroism, and no less barbarity. The mutineers 
 he savagely put to death, and his Castilian colleague he 
 put into irons. To increase his troubles, some of his 
 vessels were wrecked. His people ^ere unwilling to 
 proceed with him, when they saw the desolate aspect of 
 Cape Horn, the .truly discouraging aspect of Terra-del- 
 Fuego, and Cape Forward. The islands, which form, 
 under the name of Cape Horn, the southern point of 
 America, seem to have been violently rent from the 
 continent by the fury of many volcanoes, and suddenly 
 cooled. As the result, they present a frightfully heter- 
 ogeneous mass of sharp peaks, huge blocks of granite, 
 
DISCOYERY OP THE THREE OCEANS. 273 
 
 of lava, and of basalt, all these, grotesquely, yet fright- 
 fully, arranged, in frowning confusion, and clothed in 
 ice and snow. 
 
 All had quite enough of this at a single glance, and 
 bold Magellan's word was — " Onward ! " He filled 
 away his sails, steered now to starboard, now to lar- 
 board, then to starboard again, and at length found 
 himself in that boundless sea which was then so Pacific 
 that it then received the name which it has ever since 
 borne ; though all who have sailed upon it, well know 
 that at times, it can comport itself in an anything rath- 
 er than pacific style. 
 
 Magellan at length perished in the Philippines. Four 
 vessels were lost. The only one which survived, was 
 the Victory, whose crew was reduced to thirteen men. 
 But among them was the great and intrepid Pilot, the 
 Basque, Sebastian, who, in 1521, returned to Spain, the 
 first of mortal men who had been completely round the 
 globe. 
 
 Nothing could be grander. The sphericity of the 
 globe was thus made matter of certainty. That physi- 
 cal marvel of water uniformly extended over a globe, 
 and constantly adhering to it, that strange mechanical 
 postulate, was fully demonstrated. The Pacific was at 
 length known, that grand, and till then mysterious la- 
 boratory, in which, far from our ken, Nature so pro- 
 12* 
 
274 DISCOVERY OP THE THREE OCEANS. 
 
 foundly labors ia life-creating and life-nurturing, mak- 
 ing new rocks, new islands, new continents. 
 
 A revelation, that, of immense significance ; and not 
 only of material, but also of moral significance, which 
 gave a hundred fold increase to man's daring, and sent 
 him forth on another daring voyage, on the boundless 
 Ocean of the Sciences, to circumnavigate, — with more 
 or less of success, as it may chance, — the IKFINITE ! 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE LAW OP STORMS. 
 
 It is but yesterday, as it were, that we have built ships 
 fit for southern navigation ; for navigation in those seas 
 where the long, strong, rollers, pile themselves, each 
 upon each, into absolutely mountainous masses of storm- 
 lashed waves. What, then, shall we say of the early 
 navigators who ventured into such seas with their 
 clumsy leewards, heavy, and yet scarcely sea-worthy 
 cock-boats ? 
 
 Especially for the polar seas, whether arctic or an- 
 tarctic, we need ships expressly built for such rude 
 service. They were bold men, those who, like a Cabot, 
 a Brentz, a Willoughby, ventured in their clumsy, ill- 
 found, badly rigged, and scarcely sea-worthy tubs to 
 navigate the icy seas ; to dare Spitzbergen, to make 
 Greenland by that funereal cape Farewell, and to coast 
 the thousand giant icebergs in sight of which, men in 
 our own day, a hundred Whalers have gone to pieces. 
 
276 
 
 THE LAW OF STORMS. 
 
 What chiefly rendered those ancient heroes so sub- 
 lime was their very ignorance, their blind courage, their 
 desperate resolution. They knew but little of the sea, 
 and of the Heavens they knew still less ; the compass, 
 their only instructor and their only reliance, they dared 
 the most alarming phenomena without being able even 
 to guess at their causes. They had none of our instru- 
 ments which speak to us so plainly and so unmistakably. 
 They went blindfolded towards, and fearlessly into, the 
 uttermost darkness. They, themselves, confess that 
 they feared, but also, they would not yield. The sea's 
 tempests, the air's whirlwinds and water spouts, the 
 tragic dialogues of those two Oceans, of air and water, 
 the striking, and, not so long since, ominous phenome- 
 na of the Aurora Borealis, all this strange and wild 
 phantasmagoria seemed to them the fury of irritated 
 Nature, a veritable strife of Demons against which man 
 could dare all — as they did — but could do wliat they 
 also did —nothing. 
 
 During three centuries but little progress was made. 
 Read Cook, read Peron, and you will readily compre- 
 hend how difficult, uncertain, and perilous was naviga- 
 tion, even up to an hour so near our own. 
 
 Cook, that man of immense courage, but also, of 
 most lively imagination, himself confesses, as his Jour- 
 nal testifies, that he knew how uncertain and perilous 
 was the profession of the seaman even so lately as his 
 
THE LAW OF STOKMS. 277 
 
 day. In his Journal, we read ; " The dangers arc so 
 great, that I venture to say, that no one will dare to go 
 farther than I have gone." 
 
 Now it is precisely since then that voyages have be- 
 come, at once, more distant, more regular, and less 
 dangerous. 
 
 A great -age, a Titanic age, the 19th century, has 
 coolly, intelligently, and sternly noted all those phe- 
 nomena which the old navigators braved, but did not 
 examine. In this century it is that we, for the first 
 time, have dared to look the Tempest squarely, and 
 fearlessly, and scrutinizingly, in the eyes. Its premoni- 
 tory symptoms, its characteristics, its results ; — each 
 and all have been calmly watched, and carefully and 
 systematically registered ; and, then, from that regis- 
 tration, necessarily come explanation and generaliza- 
 tion, and thence, the grand, bold — and, as our not 
 very distant ancestors would have said, impious system 
 — the Law of Storms. 
 
 So ! What we took, what we in the old, bold, but 
 blind day, took for matter of caprice, is really, after 
 all, reducible to a system, obedient to a Law ! So ! 
 then, those terrible facts, that made the brain swim, 
 the boldest quail, because the fought shadows and 
 walked in the darkness, so ! then, those terrible facts 
 have a certain regularity of recurrence, and the sea- 
 man, resolute and strong, calmly considers whether he 
 
278 THE LAW OF STORMS. 
 
 cannot oppose to those regular attacks a defence no 
 less regular. In brief, if the Tempest has its science, 
 can we not create and use an art ? An art not merely 
 to survive the Tempest but even to make it useful ? 
 
 But our science and our art cannot be called into life 
 and activity until we shall have laid aside our old and 
 ill founded notion that Tempests are caused by " the 
 caprice of the winds." Attentive observation has taught 
 us that the winds are not capricious, that they are the 
 accident, sometimes, also, the agent of the Tempest, but 
 that, generally speaking, the Tempest is an electrical 
 phenomenon, and often occurs in the absence of gales. 
 
 Romme (brother of the Conventionalist, principal 
 author of the Calendar) laid the foundations of our 
 very important science. English seamen had remarked 
 that in the tempests in the Indian Seas, they sailed for 
 days together, and yet made no headway. Romme col- 
 lected and systematized all their observations, and 
 pointed out the important fact that the same occurred 
 in the tempests of China, Africa, and the Antilles. He 
 also first pointed out that rectilinear winds are of rare 
 occurrence, and that, usually, tempests have a circular 
 character, — are, literally, a whirl wind. The great 
 whirling tempests of the United States in 1815, and 
 that of 1821 (the year of the great eruption of Hecla) 
 when the winds blew from all points to a common cen- 
 tre, aroused philosophical attention, both in America 
 
THE LAW OF STORMS. 279 
 
 and Europe. Brande, in Germany, and at the same 
 time, Redfieldin New York, were the next after Romme 
 in profiting by these facts to lay down the law that, 
 generally, the tempest is a W/iirl-w'md, advancing, and 
 at the same time revolving on Us own base. In 1838, 
 the English engineer, Reid, being sent to Barbadoes 
 after the too celebrated tempest which killed fifteen hun- 
 dred people, ascertained, with mathematical precision, 
 this double movement of advance and rotation. But 
 his still more important discovery was that in our north- 
 ern hemisphere the tempest turns from right to left, 
 that is to say from East to North, and round the com- 
 pass, back to East ; while in southern tempests it turns 
 from left to right. A most important fact to regulate 
 the seaman's course. 
 
 Reid very rightfully gave his book the bold title of — 
 " On the Law of Storms." 
 
 But it was the law of their Motion, not the expla- 
 nation of their cause ; it told nothing, either, of what 
 Storms do, or of what they are. 
 
 Here Prance came to the rescue. In IS-IO, Peltier 
 published his Causes of Whirlwinds, and his ingenious 
 and numerous experiments established the fact that 
 whirlwinds, whether at sea or on shore, were electrical 
 phenomena, m vf]a.ch. the winds play only a secondary 
 part. Beccaria, a full century earlier, had suspected 
 
280 THE LAW OP STORMS. 
 
 that fact, but it was reserved for Peltier to establish the 
 fact, by making miniature storms. 
 
 Electrical whirlwinds readily take their rise in the 
 neighborhood of Tolcanoes, — those ventilating pipes of 
 tlie subterranean world, and therefore they are more 
 common in the subterranean world, than in ours. 
 
 The Atlantic, open at both ends, and swept in all di- 
 rections by the winds, should necessarily, have more 
 rectilinear, and fewer circular tempests ; but Pidding- 
 ton quotes a great number of the latter. 
 
 From 1840 to 1860, the immense compilations of Pid- 
 dington and Maury were made, at Calcutta and New 
 York. Maury is rendered illustrious for his charts, 
 his Directions, and his Geography of the Sea. Pid- 
 dington, less artistical, but not less learned, in his Sea- 
 man's Guide, tliat Encyclopedia of storms, gives the re- 
 sults of an infinite experience, the minutest and most 
 precise means of calculating the distance of the whirl- 
 wind, its rate of speed, and the nature of its various 
 waves. He confirmed the ideas of Peltier, as to the 
 electric theory, and showed that those who had dwelt 
 on the caprice of the whirlwind, had, in truth, com- 
 pletely mistaken the effect for the cause. 
 
 The old art of auguries, and science of presages, 
 never contemptible, was most happily revived by that 
 excellent book. 
 
THE LAW OF STORMS. 281 
 
 The setting of the Sun, is by no means an indiffer- 
 ent augury. If he set red, and if the sea retain the 
 reflection of his blood-red rays, rely upon it, a storm is 
 brewing, in that other Ocean — the air; if around 
 him you see a lurid red* within a white circle, and the 
 stars are flickering, and seeming to fall, be sure that the 
 upper regions of the atmosphere are threatening. 
 
 Still worse, it is, if, upon a dirty sky, you see small 
 clouds marshalling, like so many pdrple arrows, flying 
 from all quarters to one common point, and if, at the same 
 time, the larger masses assume the shape of strange build- 
 ings, ruined bridges, broken rainbows, and a hundred 
 other eccentricities ; then rely upon it, the storm has 
 already commenced in the upper region. At present, 
 all is calm, here below, but, on the horizon, you may 
 discern the faintly flashing, and silent lightnings. Lis- 
 ten attentively, and, from time to time, you shall hear 
 the low mutterings of the distant thunder; and the 
 waves, as they break upon the beach, seem to sob. 
 Look out ! The sea tells you, plaintively, of the com- 
 ing storm. " What are ihose wild waves saying ? " 
 They are warning you, I repeat, of the coming storm. 
 The wild, free birds have already taken warning,' and 
 hasten to their secure shelter in the clefts of the rocks. 
 If they are far from land when they see, and feel, and 
 hear, the first threatenings of the rising storm, they set- 
 tle down upon your masts, and yards, and shrouds. 
 
282 
 
 THE LAW OP STORMS. 
 
 And first among them comes that bird of evil omen» 
 the "Mother Carey's Chicken," the Stormy Petrd. 
 Look out, my brothers ; I assure you the tempest ap- 
 proaches. 
 
 Does it thunder ? Be very glad of that, brother sea- 
 man ; the electric discharge is taking place far above 
 us, and we shall have the less of the tempest. It is an 
 old popular observation, but confirmed by the science 
 of Peltier and by the experience of Piddington and 
 others. 
 
 If the electricity, accumulated on high, discharges 
 itself here below, it will create circular currents, and 
 we shall have whirlwind, fierce tempest, and, probably 
 water spout. 
 
 This last sort of storm not uncommonly attacks you 
 when you are seemingly quite safe in harbor. In 1698, 
 Captain Langford, in port and well anchored, saw that 
 he was about to be thus assailed, slipped his cable, and 
 found safety on the open sea. Other craft, whose 
 commanders had less freight or less daring, remained 
 at anchor and were destroyed. 
 
 At Madras and at Barbadoes, warning signals are 
 given to the ships at anchor. Inr Canada, the electric 
 Telegraph, swifter than Nature's own electricity, sends 
 warning of the coming storm from port to port. 
 
 To the sailor when on the broad Ocean, the great 
 friend and adviser is the Barometer ; its perfect sensi- 
 
THE LAW OP STORMS. 283 
 
 tiveness gives you the most exact information of tlio 
 weight with which the storm-laden atmosphei'o op- 
 presses it. Usually, it tells you of nothing but fine 
 weather ; it almost seems to sleep. But at the first and 
 most distant note of the rising storm, it suddenly 
 awakens, is agitated, and its mercury descends, as- 
 cends, redescends. The barometer has its own tem- 
 pest. Peron when at the Mauritius observed that 
 flashqs of pale light escaped from the mercury, and iilled 
 the whole tube. During gales, the sensitive instrument 
 seems actually to breathe. " In its fluctuations," say 
 Daniel and Barlow, " the water barometer breathed, 
 blew, like some wild animal. 
 
 But the Tempest advances and occasionally illuminat- 
 es the horizon all around with its electric lightnings. 
 lu 1772, during the great storm in the West Indies, 
 when the sea rose seventy feet above ordinary high 
 water mark, the dense darkness of the night was dissi- 
 pated by balls of lurid fires that lighted up every shore. 
 
 The approach of the storm may be more or less rapid. 
 In the Indian Ocean, thickly studded with islands and 
 obstacles, the whirlwind and the water-spout approach 
 you only at the rate of some two miles an hour : while 
 when they come along the' course of the warm current, 
 that comes to us from the Antilles, they travel at the 
 rate of from forty to fifty. Their speed would, in fact, 
 
284 THE LAW OP STORMS. 
 
 be incalculably great but for their oscillation, beaten as 
 they are by the winds, both internally and externally. 
 
 Slow or rapid, the fury of the tempest is the same. 
 In 1789, in a single instant and with a single rush, the 
 tempest dashed to pieces every vessel in the port of 
 Ceringa ; at a second i-ush the town was flooded ; at the 
 third it was in ruins, and twenty thousand of its inhabi- 
 tants were dead. In 1822, off Bengal, a water spout 
 was for twenty-four hours sucking up air and water, 
 and, when it burst, fifty thousand people perished. 
 
 "In different localities, difierent aspects of the Tem- 
 pest. In Africa you have the upas, the fierce com- 
 pound of simoom and tornado. The atmosphere seems 
 calm and clear, and yet you feel a strange oppression 
 of the lungs and a general anxiety as terrible as it is 
 strange. Then a black cloud, " no bigger than a man's 
 hand," appears on the horizon, approaches with light- 
 ning speed, lengthening, widening, and deepening as it 
 approaches {vires acquirit eundo') the storm descends, 
 and in a quarter of an hour all around is devastated, 
 utterly ruined, and ships have utterly disappeared. Na- 
 ture takes no heed of such small matters. About Suma- 
 tra and Bengal, you see in the evening or night (never 
 in the morning) a dark arched cloud in the sky. It 
 rapidly increases, and presently, from that dark cloud, 
 come down flashes and sheets of pale and ghastly 
 
THE LAW OP STORMS. 285 
 
 lights. Woe to the mariner who shall encounter the 
 first wind that rushes from that sinister cloud ; he will 
 pretty certainly go down. 
 
 But the ordinary form is that of a huge funnel. A 
 sailor, who was caught in one of these terrible storms, 
 says : " I found myself, as it were, at the bottbm of an 
 enormous crater of a volcano ; all around was darkness, 
 above a glimmering of lurid lights. That light is what 
 is technically termed " the eye of the Tempest." 
 
 When the Water spout, the horrible Typhoon, emp- 
 ties itself, human science and human daring are of no 
 avail. Roaring, howling, shrieking, hissing, the storm 
 fiends are at work above, below, around the luckless 
 vessel. Suddenly there is a dead, a quite horrible 
 silence, and there comes forth, seemingly, from the very 
 centre of the water spout, a blinding flash, and a 
 deafening report, and when you, at length, recover 
 power to look aloft, you find that mast and spars have 
 been shivered. 
 
 Seymour tells us that, sometimes, after being caught 
 in one of those horrible Typhoons the sailors, for a long 
 time, have blackened nails and weakened sight. Some- 
 times, too, this terrible Typhoon sucks up not only air 
 and water, but also the luckless ship, holds it suspend- 
 ed in the air, and then dashes it rudely down into the 
 watery abyss. From this terrible action and pitiless 
 power of the Typhoon, the Chinese derived their notion 
 
286 
 
 THE LAW OF STORMS. 
 
 of the terrible mother Typhon, who, hovering in the 
 sky, picks out her victims and is ever conceiving and 
 bearing the Ken Woo, whirlwinds of fire and iron. To 
 that terrible Typhon they have erected temples and 
 altars, adoring her and praying to her in the vain hope 
 of humanising her. 
 
 The brave Piddington had no adoration to spare for 
 her ; on the contrary, he gives her a marvellously ill 
 name. He calls her an only too strong corsair, a pirate 
 so strong and so tricky that there is no dishonor in 
 getting out of her way. 
 
 That perfidious enemy sometimes sets a snare for 
 you ; tempts you with a good wind. Avoid that same 
 good wind, turn your back to it if you possibly can. 
 Give that dangerous companion the widest possible 
 berth. Steer very clear of the storm cloud or it will 
 suddenly sink you ; ship, crew and cargo. 
 
 Such is the advice of the brave and skillful Pidding- 
 ton, and, assuredly, one would gladly take such advice. 
 But how ? It would be utterly useless if the storm 
 cloud and the ship were brought together within nar- 
 row and land locked waters. But, in general, this 
 enormous compound of whirlwind and water spout em- 
 braces a circle of ten, twenty, or even thirty leagues, 
 and this gives every ship,, on which a constant a,nd 
 intelligent look out is kept, a fair chance of keeping at 
 a respectful distance from so redoubtable a foe. The 
 
THE LAW OF STORMS. 287 
 
 great point to be ascertained is, where is the centre, the 
 nucleus, the terrible home, of this terrible Typhon. And 
 then to ascertain its rate of progression and its line of 
 approach. 
 
 The sailor of the present day has two excellent 
 lights to steer by ; his Maury and his Piddington. On 
 the one hand, Maury teaches him the general laws of 
 the air and sea, and the art of selecting and using the 
 currents, directing him, as it were, along the streets 
 and highways of the Ocean. On the other hand, Pid- 
 dington in his small, but instructive volume, sums up for 
 him, and places in his hands, the Experience of Tem- 
 pests; not only how to avoid them, when possible, but 
 sometimes when to make them useful. 
 
 And this it is that at once explains and justifies the 
 fine sentence of the Dutch Captain Jansen. " At sea," 
 says he, " the first impression is that of the power of 
 nature, the profundity of the depths — and our own 
 nothingness. On board of the largest ship, we still feel 
 that we are constantly in danger. But when the 
 mind's eye has penetrated the depths and surveyed the 
 expanse, man no longer fears the danger. He rises to 
 the true sense of the situation. Guided by Astronomy, 
 shown by Maury along the highways and byways of 
 tlie Ocean, he steers his course safely and confidently." 
 
 This is truly sublime. The Tempest is not abolished, 
 it is true; but ignorance, bewilderment, that terrible 
 
288 THE LAW OF STOBMS. 
 
 bewilderment which is born of danger and darkness, 
 are abolished. At least if the seaman of the present 
 day perish, he will know the why and wherefore. 
 Great, oh, very great is the safeguard of having the 
 calm, clear presence of mind, with our soul and intellect 
 unruflled and resigned to whatever may be the effect of 
 the great divine laws of the world which, at the ex- 
 pense of a few shipwrecks, produce Equilibrium and 
 Safety. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE POLAR SEAS. 
 
 What most tempts man ? The difficult, the useless, 
 the impossible. Of all maritime enterprises, that to 
 which the most persistent energy has been given, is tlie 
 north western passage, the direct line from Europe to 
 Asia. And yet, the plainest common-sense might an- 
 ticipatively have told us that, given, the existence of 
 such a passage, in a latitude so cold, so blocked up by 
 ice, it would, practically, be useless ; few would, none 
 could, make any regular use of it. Open this year, U- 
 is quite sure to be closed up next year. 
 
 Remember that that region has not the flatness of 
 Siberia ; it is a mountain of a thousand leagues, horri- 
 bly broken, with deep chasms, with seas, that, thawed 
 one hour, are frozen up the next, passages between ice- 
 bergs, which shift their position from time to time, open 
 to invite you, and close to crush you. At length, in 
 1853, that passage was found, by a man who had got 
 BO far in, that it was safer to go ahead, than to recede, 
 
290 THE POLAR SEAS. 
 
 and wlio, therefore, went daringly and desperately for- 
 ward, till he found that which he sought. Now we 
 know what that passage is ; men's minds are calmed 
 down ; we know that there is such a passage, and we 
 have not even the smallest desire to make use of it. 
 
 When I spoke of that passage, as being useless, I 
 spoke of it as a commercial highway. But in following 
 this commercially useless enterprise, we have made 
 many very useful discoveries for Geography, Meteorol- 
 ogy, and the magnetism of the Earth ; just as silly Al- 
 chemy, has done so much for wise, and admirably use- 
 ful Chemistry. 
 
 What was the original idea ? To open a short way 
 to tlie land of gold, to the East Indies. England, and 
 otlier powers, jealous of Spain and Portugal, reckoned 
 upon surprising them in the very heart of their distant 
 possessions, in the very sanctuary of wealth. From the 
 time of Queen Elizabeth of England, adventurers hav- 
 ing found, or stated that they found, some portions of 
 gold in Greenland, searched into, and made bold use of 
 the old Northern legend of treasure hidden beneath 
 the Pole ; mountains of gold, guarded by Gnomes, &c., 
 ifec. And the legend inflamed men's minds. Upon so 
 reasonable a notion, sixteen ships were sent out, having 
 on board the sons and hopes of the noblest families. 
 There was quite a competition as to who should have 
 leave to go in quest of that Polar Eldorado ; and those 
 
THE POLAR SEAS. 291 
 
 who sought it, succeeded in finding only hunger, icy 
 barriers, suffering, and — Death ! But that check was 
 unavailing ; during three hundred years, explorers, 
 with a perfectly marvellous perseverance, continued to 
 explore, to fail, to be martyrized, and to die. Cabot, 
 the earliest of them, was only saved by the mutiny of 
 his crew, who would not allow him to go any farther. 
 Brentz died of cold, and Willoughby of famine. Oor- 
 tereul lost all, property, and life ; and Hudson was set 
 adrift by his men, and, as he had neither sails nor pro- 
 visious, it is but too probable that he perished misera- 
 bly, though his fate was never precisely ascertained. 
 Behring, in finding the strait which separates America 
 from Asia, perished of fatigue, cold, and want, on a 
 desert island. Incur own day, Franklin perished, in 
 the ice ; he and his men having been reduced to the 
 most horrible cannibalism. 
 
 Every thing that can discourage man, is combined in 
 these Northern voyages. Considerably before the Po- 
 lar circle is reached, a cold fog freezes upon the sea, 
 and covers you with hoar frost ; sails and ropes are icy 
 and stiffened, the deck is one sheet of glare ice, and 
 every manoeuvre is a work of immense difficulty; and 
 those moving shoals, the icebergs, that are so much to 
 be dreaded, can scarcely be made out at the distance of 
 the ship's length. At the mast-head, the look-out man, an 
 actual living stalactite, every now and then warns the 
 
292 THE POLAR SEAS. 
 
 watch upon deck of the approach of a new enemy, a 
 huge white phantom, a terrible iceberg, often from two 
 to three hundred feet out of the water. 
 
 But these preliminary horrors, which announce to the 
 seaman his approach to the world of ice and suflFering, 
 so far from deterring, increase his desire and determin- 
 ation to proceed. In the mystery of the Pole, there is, 
 I know not what, of sublime horror and heroic suffer- 
 ing. Even those who have only gone as far North as 
 Spitzbergen, retain in memory a profound impression of 
 its drear and horrible sublimity. That mass of peaks, 
 chains, and precipices, which, for four thousand five 
 hundred feet, rears its icy front, is like a gigantic ap- 
 parition, in that gloomy sea. Its glaciers flash forth 
 living lights, dazzling flashes of the most brilliant col- 
 ors, green, blue, and purple, contrasting marvellously 
 with the uniform whiteness of the snow. During the 
 nights, whose duration is not of hours, but of months, 
 the Aurora Borealis, every now and then lights up the 
 dreary scene in the strange splendors of a sinister illu- 
 mination ; vast and terrible bale fires, that, from time to 
 time, light up the whole horizon, forming, with their 
 magnificent jets of lurid lights, a fantastic Etna, that 
 throws temporary and illusive light on that scene of 
 eternal winter. 
 
 All is prismatic in an atmosphere surcharged with 
 icy particles, where the air is full of mirrors and little 
 
THE POLAR SEAS. 293 
 
 crystals. Hence, the most astonishing mirages, ren- 
 dering one uncertain whether he may take the evidence 
 of his own eyes as to the reality of any thing that he 
 thinks he sees. Merely aerial reflections and colored 
 mists appear solid masses, castles, cathedrals, islands, — 
 anything ; and what you see upright at one moment, is 
 upside down a moment afterwards. The strata of air 
 which produce these effects, are in constant revolution, 
 the lightest ascends above the others, and in an instant 
 the mirage changes form, color, size, and character. 
 The slightest variation of the temperature, lowers, 
 raises, or slopes, the huge mirror ; tlie image becomes 
 confounded with the object ; they separate, disperse, an- 
 other succeeds, and then a third, pale and feeble, ap- 
 pears, to disappear in its turn. 
 
 It is a world of illusion. If you love to dream ; if, 
 especially, you love day-dreaming, with fancies wild 
 or tender, go to the North, and there you will see real, 
 yet no less fugitive, all that your waking dreams have 
 ever painted. In that world of mirages, the atmos- 
 phere will put all your " castles in the air " to utter 
 shame. No style of architecture but that magical at- 
 mosphere can imitate. Now you have the classic Greek, 
 with its porticos and colonnades ; anon, Egyptian obe- 
 lisks appear, the one pointing high and sharp, towards 
 the sky, the other lying prostrate, and in twain, at the 
 base of the former. And, then, mountain upon moun- 
 
294 THE POLAR SEAS. 
 
 tain appears, Pelion upon Ossa, a whole city of giants, 
 with Cyclopean walls, which change into the circular 
 sacrificial stones of the Druids, with dark, mysterious 
 caves beneath. Finally, all disappears ; the wind rises, 
 and the mists and. atmospheric reflections are dispersed. 
 In this veritable world of the upside down, the law of 
 gravitation is repealed, or, at the least, disregarded; the 
 weak and the light, carrying the strong and the heavy ; 
 a spacious church is seen on the top of a slender spire, 
 an Egyptian pyramid whirls, dances, upon the sharply 
 pointed apex ; it is an eccentric, a mad, school of art, 
 where you pass at once from the beautiful to the terri- 
 ble, from the terribly sublime to the absurdly fantastic. 
 Sometimes a terrible incident occurs. Against the 
 great stream, which flows majestically and slowly from 
 the north, there suddenly comes, from the south, a huge 
 iceberg, whose base is some six or seven hundred feet 
 below the water. It is impelled by the strong under- 
 tow, and advances so swiftly that it dashes aside, or to 
 pieces, whatever it happens to encounter. Arrived at 
 the plain of ice, this moving giant, this terrible ice- 
 berg is not at all embarrassed. Thus, Duncan, writing 
 in 1826, describes a scene of the kind — " The field-ice 
 was broken up for miles in less than a minute, with re- 
 ports loud as those of a hundred pieces of artillery. 
 As the mountainous heap approached us, the space be- 
 tween it and us was filled with the mighty masses, into 
 
THE POLAR SEAS. 295 
 
 which the shock of her collision had broken up the mas 
 sive field ice. We should assuredly have perished, but 
 the huge mass suddenly sheered oif to the northeast, 
 and we were saved." 
 
 It was in 1818, after the European war, that this 
 war against nature, this search after the northwestern 
 passage was resumed. It opened with a serious and 
 singular event. The gallant Captain Ross, being sent 
 with ^wo ships into Baffin's Bay, was completely de- 
 ceived by the phantasmagoria of that world of spec- 
 tral delusions. He distinctly saw, as he thought, a 
 land which has never existed, maintained that if ho 
 proceeded he would certainly lay the bones of his ships 
 on that non-existent shore, and actually returned to 
 England. There he was laughed at, and accused of 
 timidity, and he was refused by the Admiralty, the com- 
 mand of another expedition, which he solicited, in the 
 interest of his honor. Sir Felix Booth, a London dis- 
 tiller and liquor merchant, more liberal than the Brit- 
 ish Government, presented Ross with a hundred thou- 
 sand dollars, and Ross returned to the North, deter- 
 mined to pass or die. Neither the one nor the other 
 was granted to him ! But he remained during I know 
 not how many winters, forgotten, in those terrible soli- 
 tudes. He had all the appearance of a mere savage, 
 so long and so horrible was his destitution, when he 
 was saved by some whalers, who, when they first saw 
 
296 THE POLAR SEAS. 
 
 him, asked him if he had, by any chance, fallen in with 
 the late Captain John Ross I 
 
 His Lieutenant, Parry, who confidently believed that 
 he could pass, made four attempts to do so ; trying first 
 by Baffin's Bay and the West, and then by Spitzbergen 
 and the North. He made some discoveries by boldly 
 pushing forward in a sledge-boat ; a sledge on the ice, 
 and a boat in the water. But the ice always defeated 
 his bold attempts, and he was no more successful than 
 Ross. 
 
 In 1832, a brave young Frenchman, Jules de Blass- 
 ville, conceived that France, in his person, might win 
 the glory of discovering the northwest passage. He 
 risked, at once, money and life ; and purchased death. 
 He could not even get the selection of a proper ship. 
 They gave him the Lilloise, which sprang a leak on 
 her very first day out, and he had her repaired and re- 
 fitted, at his own cost of about eight thousand dollars. 
 In this unsafe vessel, he sailed for the iron-bound coast 
 of Greenland. According to all appearance, he did 
 not get even as far out as that. He has never since 
 been heard of, nor has any portion of his unseaworthy 
 vessel been picked up. Most likely she foundered, with 
 all hands on board. 
 
 The English expeditions have been fitted out in a 
 very difi'erent style ; every thing was provided that 
 prudence could suggest or liberal -expenditure supply ; 
 
THE POLAR SEAS. 297 
 
 yet they succeeded no better. The gallant, scientific, 
 and ill fated, Franklin, was blocked in by the ice in 
 1845. For twelve years from that date the English, 
 with an honorable persistence, sent out expeditions in 
 search of him. And not England alone ; France and 
 America no less honorably assisted, and both those 
 great nations lost some of their brightest and best in 
 the brave, though fruitless, search. Side by side with 
 the name of Franklin, as connected with the icy peaks 
 and capes of that desolate region, our Belliot, and 
 others, must be named, who devoted themselves in hope 
 to save him. And, on the other hand. Captain John 
 Ross offered to organize and lead an expedition to 
 search for Blainville. Dark Greenland is connected 
 with a host of such brave, sad reminiscences, and the 
 desert is no longer quite a desert when connected with 
 such touching testimonies of human brotherhood. 
 
 There is something very touching in the persistent 
 belief, the inflexible affection, of Lady Franklin. She 
 could not, would not, believe herself widowed, but in- 
 cessantly besought for further search after her brave 
 husband. She vowed that she was quite sure that he 
 still lived for his country and for her ; and so well did 
 ■ she impress her own belief upon the Admiralty board, 
 that, seven years after he was completely missing, he 
 was ofiBcially named, not as Captain, but as Vice Admi- 
 ral. And she was right ; he was then still living. The 
 13* 
 
298 THE POLAR SEAS. 
 
 Esquimaux saw him in 1850, and he had then sixty of 
 his men with him. Very soon after he had only thirty, 
 and those so worn by fatigue and want that they could 
 not hunt, or even walk, and as each one died he was 
 eaten by his far more wretched survivors. If Lady 
 Franklin's advice had been duly attended to, her brave 
 husband and most, perhaps all, of his men would have 
 been Saved. For she said — and the soundest sense 
 dictated her words — that he should be sought for to 
 the southward, inasmuch as it was to the last degree 
 improbable that in his desperate situation he should ag- 
 gravate it by proceeding towards the North. But the 
 Admiralty, perhaps more anxious about the north-west 
 passage than about the lost Franklin, persisted in 
 sending expeditions to the North, and the afflicted lady 
 did for herself what the Admiralty would not do for 
 her. At a great expense, she fitted out a vessel to 
 search to the southward of his last known or presumed 
 position. But it was already too late. Only the bones 
 of Franklin were found. 
 
 In the mean time longer, but more successful, voyages 
 were made towards the South pole. There we do not 
 find the same commingling of land and sea, ice and 
 tempestuous thaws, that make up the great horror of 
 Greenland. There is a boundless sea of immense and 
 mighty waves, and a glacier far more extensive tiian 
 ours of the North. Very few islands ; those which 
 
THE rOLAK SEAS. 299 
 
 have been seen, or, rather fancied, have most probably- 
 been only shifting and wandering icebergs. Everything 
 there varies with the varying character of the winters. 
 Morel in 1820, Weddell in 1824, and Ballery in 1839, 
 found an opening, and made their way into an open sea, 
 which none since have been able to find. 
 
 The French Kerguelen and the English James Ross 
 have, undoubtedly, discovered lands. The first, in 
 1771, discovered the large island which he named after 
 himself, but to which the English have given the appro- 
 priate title of Desolation. Two hundred leagues in 
 length it has some excellent ports, and, in spite of the 
 severity of the climate, it is tolerably prolific in seals 
 and birds, with which a ship can be plentifully provis- 
 ioned. That glorious discovery which Louis XVI., on 
 his accession, rewarded with a peerage, was, subse- 
 quently the ruin of Kerguelen. False charges were 
 brought against him, and the rivalry of noble officers 
 overwhelmed him, jealous rivals with a hateful intre- 
 pidity, bearing false witness against him. It was from 
 a dungeon of six feet square that, in 1782, he dated the 
 narrative of his discovery. 
 
 In 1838, America, France, and England each fitted 
 out an expedition in the interests of science. The 
 illustrious Duperrey had pointed out the way to import- 
 ant magnetic observations, and it was desired to con- 
 tinue them under the very pole. The English expcdi- 
 
300 
 
 THE POLAR SEAS. 
 
 tion, with this object, was entrusted to the command of 
 James Ross, nephew and lieutenant of the Captaia John 
 Ross of whom we have spoken. It was a model expe- 
 dition for whicli everything was foreseen, and provided, 
 and James Ross brought back his crew without having 
 lost a man, or even had a man sick. 
 
 The American Wilkes and the French Dumont d'Ur- 
 ville were not thus admirably fitted out ; and perils and 
 sickness scourged them fearfully. James Ross, more 
 fortunate, doubled the Arctic circle and found real land ; 
 but he confesses, with a really admirable modesty, that 
 he chiefly owed his success to the admirable manner in 
 which his government had fitted him out. The Erebus 
 and the Terror with their powerful machines, their ice 
 saw, and their iron shielded prow, cut their way through 
 the ice till they reached an open sea abounding in 
 birds, seals, and whales, and lighted up by a volcano 
 of twelve thousand feet in height, a northern Etna. 
 But no vegetation, no landing place, but an enormously 
 high and sharply scarped granite upon which not even 
 the snows could retain their hold. But it was land ; 
 not a doubt of that. That Polar Etna, which they 
 named after their good ship Erebus, is there to prove it. 
 
 A terrestrial nucleus, therefore, is girdled by the 
 arctic sea. 
 
 4.pril and May of 1853, were a grand date. in the 
 historjr qf the arctic pole. 
 
THE POLAR SEAS. 301 
 
 In April that passage was found which had been so 
 perseveringly and vainly sought for during three centu- 
 ries. The discovery resulted from a bold stroke of 
 desperation. 
 
 Captain Maclure having made his way in by Behring's 
 strait was, for two years, shut in by the ice. Find- 
 ing it impossible to return, he determined, at all haz- 
 ards, to push forward. He did so and in only forty 
 miles further found himself along side of English ships 
 in the Eastern ocean. His boldness saved him and the 
 great problem was at length solved. 
 
 At that very time, May, 1858, New York sent out an 
 expedition for the extreme North. A young naval sur- 
 geon, Elisha Kent Kane, only about thirty years old, 
 but who had already sailed far and wide, announced an 
 idea which greatly excited the American mind. Just 
 as Wilkes had proposed to find a world, Kane proposed 
 to find a sea, an open sea, under the pole. The English, 
 in their routine, had searched from East to West ; 
 Kane proposed to sail due North and take possession, 
 for his country, of that, as yet, undiscovered open polar 
 sea. The bold proposal was enthusiastically hailed. 
 Grinnell of New York, a great ship owner, princely 
 alike in fortune and in heart, generously gave two 
 ships ; learned societies, and not a few of the general 
 public, assisted with pecuniary contributions, with a 
 perfectly religious zeal made up and contributed warm 
 
802 THE PLOAB SEAS. 
 
 clothing. The crews, carefully selected frota volun- 
 teers, were sworn to three things; to be obedient to or- 
 ders, to abstain from spirituous liquors, and from pro- 
 fane language. A first expedition failed, but its failure 
 daunted neither Mr. Grinnell nor the American public ; 
 and a second was fitted out, with the aid of certain 
 English societies, who had chiefly in view the propaga- 
 tion of the gospel or a final search after Franklin. 
 
 Few voyages are more interesting than this second 
 one of Kane's. We can readily understand the ascen- 
 dancy which young Kane acquired over his followers. 
 Every line of his book is marked by his strength, his 
 brilliant vivacity, and his practical exemplification of 
 the bold American watchword — Go ahead. He knows 
 every thing ; is confident of everything ; prudent, hope- 
 ful, more than hopeful, — positive. Every line tells you 
 that he is a man to be conquered by no obstacle. He 
 will go as far as mortal man can go. The combat is 
 curious between such a character and the pitiless and 
 icy North, that rampart of terrible obstacles. Scarcely 
 has he sailed when he is already seized by the cold 
 hand of winter and detained for six months amidst the 
 ice. Even in the spring he had a cold of seventy de- 
 grees ! At the approach of the second winter, on the 
 28th of August, nine out of his seventeen men, deserted 
 him. But the fewer his men and resources, the bolder 
 and sterner he became, being determined, as he tells 
 
THK POLAR SEAS. 303 
 
 US, to make himself the better respected. His good 
 friends, the Esquimaux, who hunted or fished for him, 
 and from whom he is even compelled to take some small 
 objects, stole three copper vessels from him. In return 
 he kidnapped two of their women. An excessive and 
 savage chastisement. It was hardly prudent to bring 
 these poor creatures among the eight seamen who still 
 remained with him ; all the less prudent when we con- 
 sider that discipline was already so much relaxed. 
 They were married women, too. Siver, wife of Metek, 
 and Aninqua, wife of Marsiqua, were in tears for five 
 days. Kane laughed at them and makes us laugh too, 
 when he says : " They wept and made terrible lamenta- 
 tion ; but they did not lose their appetite.'" 
 
 At length their husbands and friends took back the 
 stolen articles and took all that had passed in good 
 part, with the native good sense of men who had no 
 weapons, but sharpened fish bones, to oppose to revol- 
 vers. They agreed to every thing and promised the 
 utmost friendship and most faithful alliance. A week 
 after, they disappeared and we may easily imagine with 
 what feelings of friendship ! Of course, wherever they 
 went, they would warn the natives to shun the white 
 man. And thus it is that we close the uncivilized 
 world alike against ourselves and civilization. 
 
 The sequel is sad. So cruel are the suiferings of the 
 seamen that some die and others want to return. But 
 
COi THE POLAR SEAS. 
 
 Kane is of quite another mind, he has promised to dis- 
 cover a new sea, and discover it he will. Plots, deser- 
 tions, treacheries, all add to the horrors of his situation. 
 In the third winter he must have died, destitute as he 
 was of food and fuel, had not other Esquimaux supplied 
 him with fish ; he aiding them by hunting. In the 
 mean time some of the men, who had been out exploring, 
 had the good fortune to find that sea about which he 
 was so anxious. At least they reported that they had 
 seen a vast extent of open unfrozen water, and, all 
 around, birds which seemed to find there the shelter of 
 a less severe climate. 
 
 That was enough to warrant the return. Kane, 
 saved by the Esquimaux, who took no advantage either 
 of their superior numbers or of his extreme destitution, 
 left there his vessel frozen up in the ice. 
 
 Weak and exhausted, he yet contrived, in eighty-two 
 days, to get back to the South. But he got back only 
 to die. That intrepid young man, who approached 
 nearer to the pole than any other man had ever done, 
 dying, carried off the prize which the learned societies 
 of Prance laid upon his tomb — the great geographical 
 prize. 
 
 In his narrative, which contains so many terrible 
 things, there is one which seems to me to be very 
 touching. It enables us to estimate the exceeding 
 sufi"erings of such an expedition; I allude to the death 
 
THE POLAR SEAS. 305 
 
 of his dogs. He had some excellent ones of the New- 
 foundland breed, and some of the Esquimaux ; they, 
 rather than men, were his companions and his friends. 
 During his long winter nights, those nights of months, 
 they watched around his ship, and when he sallied out 
 in the dense darkness he recognized the brave brutes by 
 their warm breath as they came and licked his hands. 
 The Newfoundlanders were the first to grow sick. 
 He fancied that they suffered less from the cold than 
 from the privation of light ; when the lanterns were 
 shown to them they seemed to revive. But, by degrees, 
 a strange melancholy grew upon them, and they went 
 mad. Next followed, in the same sad course, the Es- 
 quimaux dogs, and none remained but his little slut, 
 Flora, the wisest little thing — as he calls her — and 
 she neither went mad nor died. I believe this is the 
 only point, in his fearfully intere^sting narrative, at 
 which you can perceive that that brave, stern heart, for 
 an instant sank. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 man's wak upon the eaces op the sea. 
 
 On reviewing the whole history of Voyages, we are 
 impressed by two quite contrary feelings : 
 
 1. We admire the courage and genius with which 
 man has conquered the seas, and dominated his whole 
 planet. 
 
 2. We are astonished to find him so unskilful in all 
 that concerns the conciliation of the inhabitants of the 
 various seas and lands, that he has conquered. Every 
 where, the voyager has gone, as the enemy of the young 
 populations, whether human or brute, whether terrestri- 
 al or maritime, which, properly treated, would have 
 been, each in its own limited sphere, so servicable to 
 him. Man, as to the globe on which he has made such 
 grand discoveries, is like a musical novice, before some 
 immense Organ, from which he can produce but a few 
 notes. Emerging from the middle ages, after so much 
 of philosophy and theology, he still remained barbar- 
 
man's war upon the races op the sea. 307 
 
 ous ; of the sacred instrument, he only knew how to 
 break the keys. 
 
 The gold seekers, as we have seen, sought only gold, 
 nothing but that ; man they pitilessly crushed. Co- 
 lumbus, though the last of them, shows this with a quite 
 terrible plainness and simplicity, in his own journal. 
 His words make us shudder, anticipating, prophesying, 
 as they do, what would be done by his successors. No 
 sooner has he landed in Haiti, than he enquires, " where 
 is the gold ? Who has got gold ? " The natives smil- 
 ed, in their innocent astonishment, at this fierce desire 
 for gold. They promised him that they would search for 
 it for him, and in the mean time, gave their rings and or- 
 naments to satisfy the earlier, that eager appetite. 
 
 He gives us a most touching description of that un- 
 fortunate race, so interesting for its beauty, its kindness, 
 and its tender confide^ice. But the Geonese, touchingly 
 as he described that people, had his -own mission of av- 
 arice, his hard, stern habits of thought. The Turkish 
 wars, the atrocious galleys, and theic wretched 'slaves, 
 piracy and manstealing, wera the common life of that 
 day. The sight of that young, unarmed community, 
 those poor, naked children, and lovely and innocent 
 women, inspired him only with the horrible mercantile 
 thought, that they might be very easily enslaved. 
 
 He would not, however, consent to have them carried 
 away from the beautiful island ; they and it, belonged, 
 
308 man's war upon the 
 
 « 
 
 said he, to the King and Queen, Ferdinand and Isabel- 
 la. But he said these darkly and terribly significant 
 words — " They are timid and well fitted for obedience. 
 They will do whatever they are ordered to do ; a thou- 
 sand of them would retreat before three or four of ours. 
 If your Highnesses give me the order to carry them 
 ofi" or to enslave thcnf here, there is nothing to hinder 
 it ; fifty men will suffice to do it." Thus wrote he in 
 his Journal, or Despatch, of 14 and 16, December. 
 
 Presently came from Europe the wholesale sentence 
 of that whole poor innocent people. They were or- 
 dered to be the slaves of gold — all subjected to com- 
 pulsory labor, some to seek gold, and others to feed the 
 goldseekers. 
 
 Columbus confesses that in twelve years, six sevenths 
 of that once happy population had perished ; and Her- 
 rera adds that in twenty-five years, that population had 
 fallen from a million of souls to fourteen thousand. 
 
 What followed, is only too well known. The gold 
 seeker and the planter exterminated the natives and in- 
 cessantly replaced them a-t the expense of the negroes. 
 And what has been the consequence ? That in the low, 
 hot, immensely fecund countries, the black race alone, 
 are permanent. America will belong to that race ; 
 Europe has achieved precisely the opposite of that 
 which it intended. 
 
 Every where, in all directions, the colonizing impo- 
 
RACES OP THE SEA. 309 
 
 tency of Europe has displayed itself iu America. The 
 French adventurer has not survived ; he took thither 
 no family, and did take thither all the worst vices of 
 his native land. As a natural consequence, instead oi 
 civilizing the barbarians, he added their vices to his 
 own, and sank to their barbarous level. With the ex- 
 ception of two temperate countries into which they went 
 en masse, and in families, the English have not been 
 much more successful than the French in planting their 
 race permanently and healthily in transmarine colonies. 
 In another century, India will scarcely know that the 
 Englishmen once lived there. " Have the Missionaries, 
 whether Catholic or Protestant, made any converts ? 
 Dumont, the thoroughly well-informed Dumont, tells 
 me — " not one ! " 
 
 Between them and us, there are thirty centuries and 
 thirty religions. Try to force their intellect, and the 
 result will be that which the truly great Humboldt ob- 
 served in those American villages which are to this day 
 called " Missions ;" that, having lost their own native 
 energies and traditions, without acquiring ours, they 
 will sink into a sort of stupefaction, become merely so 
 many children of a larger growth, alive in body, but 
 dead in mind, — all but idiots, useless alike to them- 
 selves and to others. 
 
 Our voyages, upon which we moderns, and more es- 
 pecially the learned, so plume ourselves, have they 
 
310 man's war upon the 
 
 boon really, or at all, servicable to the savages ? I re-- 
 ally cannot see it. While, on the one hand, the hero- 
 ic races of North America have perished of hunger and 
 wretchedness, the soft, effeminate, gentle races of the 
 South, perish, too, to the great shame of our seamen, 
 who, in that distant part of the world, have thrown off 
 even the very mask of decency. Population at once 
 kindly and weak, in whom Bourgainville discerned such 
 excess of complaisance, among whom the English Mis- 
 sionaries have gained much profit, but not a single 
 soul, — kindly and weak people, they arc perishing mis- 
 erably beneath the double scourge of the worst vices 
 and the most loathsome diseases of the old world. 
 
 Formerly, the long coast of Siberia was well peopled. 
 Under that terribly hard climate, the nomadic natives 
 hunted the richly, the preciously, furred animals which 
 at once fed and clothed them. The Russian despotism, 
 at once strong and senseless, compelled them to adopt 
 the settled life of agriculturists, in a climate, and upon 
 a soil, where agriculture is an absurdity, an impossi- 
 bility. The consequence is that these peoples have 
 gi-adually died off. Oa the other hand, the trading 
 spirit, that greedy and insatiable devourer, has refused 
 to spare the brutes in their breeding seasons, and as a 
 necessary consequence, the brutes have disappeared 
 with the men ; and now, for a thousand miles along that 
 coast, you have a terril)le solitude, wlicre man hunts 
 
RACES OF THE SEA. 311 
 
 Bot, and where the brutes arc not. The winds may 
 whistle shrilly, the frost may be bitter and biting as ev- 
 er, but there is neither man nor beast to listen to the 
 one or to shudder beneath the other. 
 
 Had our voyagers to the North been truly wise, their 
 very first care should have been to form a good, firm 
 friendship with the Esquimaux, to mitigate their mise- 
 ries, to adopt some of their children and have them well 
 instructed in Europe, and thus lay the foundation of a 
 great indigenous race of discoverers. We learn from 
 Captain John Ross, and from not a few others, that- 
 they are very intelligent, and very readily acquire the 
 knowledge and the arts of Europe. Marriages would 
 have been contracted between European sailors and the 
 native women ; a mixed population would thus have 
 sprung up, to which all that northei"n portion of the 
 American continent would have been "native and to 
 the manor born." And that would have been the, at 
 once, safe and sure way of discovering the much covet- 
 ed North-western passage. Thirty years — a single 
 generation — would have done it effectually — and in 
 three hundred years it has been done only uselessly 
 because you have terrified thoge poor savages ; because 
 you have destroyed alike the man of the soil and the 
 Genius Loci. What is the use of merely seeing that 
 desert, when, in the very act of seeing it you make it 
 either depopulated or hostile ? 
 
312 man's wae upon the 
 
 We may be quite sure that if man, civilized man, has 
 thus ill treated his uncivilized brother man, he has been 
 neither more friendly nor more merciful for the brutes. 
 He has converted the gentlest and the most affectionate 
 of them forever, irreclaimably, into savage and merciless 
 foes to man. And man, civilized man, has done this. 
 All the old authors concur iu telling us that when these 
 poor brutes first (most unluckily for themselves ! ) 
 made the acquaintance of man, they exhibited nothing 
 but the most confident and inquisitive sympathy. He 
 could walk past and through whole families of Sea 
 Cows and Seals, and they never fled from him. The 
 Penguins, and their kindred species, followed him, 
 begged a share of his shelter, yea, even nestled at night 
 beneath his garments. 
 
 Our forefathers, quite justly, believed that, to a very 
 great extent, the animals feel and love, even as we do. 
 Certain it is that they have a singular and very decided 
 taste fo«' music. The very Shad, simple as they seem, 
 will follow you to the sound of bells ; Valence tells us ; 
 and Noel tells us that he has often seen the poor Whale, 
 the Joubarde roll and frolic around the bark, de- 
 lighted with the music, and, fearless of the man ! 
 
 What the poor, dumb creatures most enjoy; what 
 they most possess of intelligent life ; what they have 
 most been deprived of by dint of human and very 
 cruel persecution; — is the right, the security, the 
 
RACES OF THE SEA. 313 
 
 sanctity of marriage ! Fugitive and isolated, they now- 
 only retain that which we, most cruelly, have left to 
 them ; temporary concubinage, that miserable temporary 
 concubinage which makes sterile every creature that is 
 subjected to it. 
 
 Marriage, fixed, settled, faithful, is the very life of 
 nature, — and we find it in even the poorest living 
 tribes on which man's tyranny has not yet imposed un- 
 natural laws. The Roebuck, the Pigeon, that prettiest 
 of the Parrot family, the "Love Bird," and hundreds 
 of other species, which we, in our profound ignorance 
 and fancied learning, despise, have this instinctive love 
 of marriage. You may notice that, even among the 
 other and wilder birds and beasts, the matrimonial tie 
 is inseparable, at least, until the young family is old 
 enough to take care of itself. 
 
 The Hare, in its timid and ever anxious life, the Bat, 
 that strange prowler in the dark night hours, are very 
 very tender of their families. The Orustacese*, even, 
 nay, even the very Poulpes have their marital affec- 
 tion ; take the female and the male is sure to be there, 
 to combat vainly, and to be taken with her. 
 
 How much more, then, shall Love, the Family, Mar- 
 riage, in the true sense of that word, exist among our 
 gentle, truly gentle, till brutally persecuted, amphibious 
 creatures ! Slow, sedentary, attached to hom'e, how 
 natural, how inevitable it is, that, the male should be 
 14 
 
314 man's wab upon the 
 
 true to his mate, — and she to him ! Among them the 
 husband will die for, or with, the wife, either for the 
 young one. And, among them, too, we find what we 
 too often, only in vain look for among what we pre- 
 sumptuously term the higher animals, the young one will 
 boldly leave its shelter and fight for the mother that 
 has previously rescued him. 
 
 Steller and Hartwig mention a strange, an almost hu- 
 man scene enacted in the family of the Otarie, another 
 amphibious creature. The female had allowed her 
 young to be stolen from her. The male, furious, beat 
 her severely, and she grovelled and wept. 
 
 The Whales, which have not the fixed abode of the 
 amphibii, yet cross the Ocean in couples. Duhamel and 
 Lacepede say, that in 1723, two Whales being attacked 
 kept firmly side by side. One of them being killed, the 
 other, with terrible meanings of mingled despair and 
 grief, of sympathy and rage, threw itself upon the dead 
 body of its mate and died, rather than retreat. If 
 there was in the world one being which, even more 
 than any other ought to have been spared, it was the 
 free Whale, that admirable creature so abounding in 
 value ; that most inoffensive of all the creatures of the 
 Oceaii whose very food is different from that of man. 
 Excepting its terribly strong tail, this creatnre has not 
 even a weapon of defence. And, then, the poor thing 
 has such a host of enemies ! Every one and everything 
 
RACES OF THE SE4.. 315 
 
 seems to be hostile to it. Its parasites establish them- 
 selves, not only on, but in its vast gnawing, even its very 
 tongue. The N-arvel, with its terrible tushes, pierces 
 it, the Dolphins gnaw it, and the bold, ever hungry, 
 swiftly swimming. Shark tears huge bleeding morsels 
 from it. 
 
 And, then, there are two blinded and ferocious foes 
 that, in most dastardly fashion, thin that inofifensive 
 race even anticipatively ; killing the pregnant mother. 
 First, there is the horrible Cachalot, whose head makes 
 a full third of its entire frame. This horrid creature, 
 with its crushing jaws, armed with forty-eight teeth, 
 literally eats the unborn young one. Man, still more 
 cruel, causes the poor creature a more prolonged suffer- 
 ing. The cruel harpoon, plunged again and again into 
 that quivering and sensitive body inflicts suffering, such 
 as we cannot even think of, without blushing for that 
 human nature of which we so often and so unblushingly 
 boast. 
 
 Dying slowly, and in the long agony of many wounds, 
 and of many convulsions, she writhes, shudders, lashes 
 the sea into a mad foam with her terrible tail, and, even 
 as she dies, feels about with her poor hand-fins, as 
 though striving once more to embr-ace and caress her 
 little one. Something dreadfully human, as it seems to 
 me, is that death scene of the poor Whale ! 
 
 At this day we can scarcely even imagine what were 
 
816 
 
 MAN S WAR UPON THE 
 
 tlie scenes of butchery some two hundred years ago ; 
 ■while the Whales swam in shoals and every shore 
 swarmed with the amphibii. The enormous massacres 
 polluted the ocean with blood to an extent such as our 
 human battles, from the earliest day, cannot even begin 
 to compare with. In a single day, from fifteen to 
 twenty Whales were killed, and fifteen hundred Sea 
 Elephants ! And this was mere killing for the sake of 
 killing. For what was to be done with so many of 
 those huge creatures, each of which had so much blood 
 and so much oil ? What was the meaning of all this 
 cruel slaughter ? What the result ? Just simply, to 
 redden and pollute so many miles of the pure Ocean ! 
 To have the cold and cruel enjoyment of most brutal 
 tyrants ; to watch, with cruel eye, the lingering agonies 
 and the fierce, but impotent struggles, of one of God's 
 noblest and most inoffensive creatures ! Peron relates, 
 with a disgust which does him honor, that he saw a 
 brutal sailor thus slowly and brutally butcher a female 
 Seal. She groaned and writhed like something human ; 
 and whenever she opened her poor, bleeding mouth, he 
 dashed the oar into it, breaking her poor teeth at every 
 thrust. 
 
 Durville tells us that at the new Shetland isles, in the 
 South Seas, the English and Americans actually exter- 
 minated the Seals in four years ; killing, in their blind 
 rage, alike the newly born and parturient female, and 
 
EACES OF THE SEA. 317 
 
 often they killed only for the skin, losing the vast and 
 very precious amount of oil. 
 
 Such slaughter as that is really a disgrace to our 
 common humanity ; such butchery reveals a terrible, a 
 loathsome, instinct, that makes us shudder as we look 
 around upon even our best and kindliest, and reflect 
 how soon and upon what slight temptation they, too, 
 may become cruel I On a smiling shore and among a 
 notably amiable people, we remember one of these mur- 
 derous massacres to have taken place. Some five or 
 six hundred Tunnies wer-e driven into a lovely bay that 
 they might be ignominiously murdered in a single day. 
 The drag nets, so vast that the capstan and the bars 
 had to be brought into requisition, to heave, rather 
 than draw them in, brought the poor creatures into that 
 beautiful bay, to them, a veritable chamber of death, 
 and all around were bronzed, hardy, and cruel men, 
 armed with harpoons and pikes. And from distances 
 of even twenty leagues around, fair women — shame to 
 our nature ! — yea, women sat or stood to witness that 
 truly brutal butchery. The signal is given and the 
 dastardly butchers strike, and the pierced and bleeding 
 victims writhe, bound, agonize — as though they were 
 human, and pitiless woman applauds the prowess — 
 Godwot ! — of pitiless man ! The waters, agitated by 
 the vain, though mighty struggle of the victims, is pol- 
 luted and discolored with blood and foam, and woman ^- 
 
318 man's war upon the races op the sea. 
 
 Woman looks on this horrid scene and, when the last 
 victim has given its last gasp, sighs deeply and departs, 
 wearied, but not satisfied, and whispers — Is that all? 
 And yet we call ourselves only, " a little lower than 
 the angels ! " 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE LAW OP THE OCEAN. 
 
 A GREAT and deservedly popular writer, Eugene Noel, 
 who throws a bright, broad light upon every subject 
 which he touches, most truly says, in his important work 
 on Pisciculture, the following words : " We might 
 make the Ocean an immense food-factoiy, more produc- 
 tive than even our earth itself, fertilizing and support- 
 ing everything, seas, rivers, lakes, and Lands. Hither- 
 to we have cultivated only the lands — lot us now cul- 
 tivate the waters. Nations ! Attention ! " 
 
 More productive than the land ? Eh ! How is that 
 to be? 
 
 M. Baude explains the matter very clearly, in his re- 
 cently published and very important work on Fishery. 
 He shows very clearly that, of all creatures, the fish 
 consumes the least, and produces the most. Merely to 
 keep that creature alive, nothing, or next to nothing, is 
 required. Rondelet kept a carp three years in a bottle 
 of water, and gave it nothing save what it could ex- 
 
320 THE LAW OF THE OCEAN. 
 
 tract from that water ; yet, in that time, it so increased 
 in bulk that he could not get it out of the bottle ! The 
 Salmon, during its stay, of two months, in fresh water, 
 scarcely feeds at all, and yet in that time scarcely loses 
 flesh. Its stay in salt water, during the same space of 
 time, gives it the enormous increase of six pounds in 
 weight. How little that resembles the slow growth of 
 our land animals ! If we were to pile up into one heap 
 all that it takes to fatten an Ox or a Pig, we should ac- 
 tually be astounded at the amount of food required for 
 the like increase of weight. 
 
 And, accordingly, those people whose demand most 
 urgently presses upon their power of supply, the Chi- 
 nese, with their three hundred millions of ever craving 
 appetites, have directly applied themselves to the art 
 of promoting that great power of reproduction, that 
 richest manufacture of nourishing food. On all the 
 great rivers of China, prodigious multitudes find in the 
 waters, the food which they would but vainly ask from 
 the land. Agriculture is always more or less precari- 
 ous ; a blighting wind, a frost, the slightest accident, 
 can sentence a whole nation to all the horrors of Fam- 
 ine. But, on the contrary, the living and teeming, the 
 exulting and abounding, harvest beneath the waters, 
 nourishes innumerable families, and makes those fami- 
 lies almost as prolific and abounding as itself 
 
 In May, on the great central river of the Empire, a 
 
THE LAW OP THE OCEAN. 321 
 
 vast trade is done in Fish fry, which is bought, sold, 
 and resold, for the purpose of stocking the fish-ponds of 
 private persons, who feed their fish from the mere ofi'al 
 of the household. 
 
 The Romans, — so long ago ! — had the same wise 
 system ; — only they, sometimes, were barbarous enough 
 to feed their fish with slaves ! Bad enough, that, and 
 to spare ; but at least they left us the precious legacy 
 of these words — " The spawn of the sea fish can be- 
 come fish in fresh water." In the last century, a Ger- 
 man, by the name of Jacobi, discovered, or rather, re- 
 vived, the art of artificial fecundation ; and, in our 
 own century, and with still more productive effect, 
 France, copying from England, has done the same 
 thing. A fisherman of Bresse, Remy, has practised, 
 since 1840, the art which has now become European. 
 
 Taken in hand by snch men as Coste, Pouchet, &c., 
 this art has ceased to be merely empirical — it has be-* 
 come a Science. Among other things, it has become 
 known that there are certain regular connections be- 
 tween the salt and the fresh water ; the fish from the 
 former, coming, at certain seasons, to spawn in the lat- 
 ter. The Bel, wherever bred, as soon as it has the 
 ' thickness of a needle, hastens to ascend the river, and 
 in such numbers that it actually whitens the whole 
 stream. This treasure, which, if properly taken care 
 of, would give many thousands of pounds of the most 
 
322 THE LAW OP THE OCEAN. 
 
 nutritious food is unworthily, shamefully, destroyed ; 
 sold as so much mere manure. The Salmon is no less 
 faithful ; invariably it comes from the sea back to the 
 river in which it had its birth. Mark hundreds of them, 
 and not one of them shall be missing. Their love of 
 their native river is such that they will even, (see the 
 Salmon Leaps of Scotland, Ireland, and Northern Eng- 
 land) leap, springing from the tail, over seemingly in- 
 surmounta;ble obstacles ! Such are the Fish ! 
 
 Upon land, we take care of our Horses ; why not 
 PRESERVE THE SEA ? Why not protect the breeding- 
 Season of the Ocean ? The young and the pregnant 
 females, should be held sacred, more especially as to those 
 species which are not superabundantly productive, such 
 as the Cetacae, and the Amphibii. To kill, is a neces- 
 sity of our nature, our teeth and stomach sufficiently 
 testify to that ; but that very necessity obliges us to pre- 
 • serve life. 
 
 On the land, we feed and protect our flocks and herds. 
 But for the food and protection which we give to them, 
 most of them would not exist at all, or would have 
 been devoured by wild beasts. We have a right, or at 
 least, a plausible excuse, for killing them, but we take 
 care to spare the young and the pregnant. 
 
 In the seas there are still more young lives annihila- 
 ted when we depart from this law of preserving that we 
 may the more plentifully kill. We may, if we prudent- 
 
THE LAW OP THE OCEAN. 323 
 
 ly as well as mercifully so will it, make the gcueratioa 
 of the inferior animals, an element almost infinitely pro- 
 ductive. In our seas and rivers, chiefly, it is, that Man 
 appears the Magician. High time it surely is, that he 
 should unite to his power both kindness and wisdom. 
 He is in reality, the opponent of death ; for, though ap- 
 petite compels him to kill, his skill and care can create 
 torrents of teeming life. 
 
 As regards those precious species which, foolishly, as 
 well as cruelly, we have almost annihilated, and espec- 
 ially for that greatest and most precious life of all, the 
 "Whale, there should be an absolute peace, for at least 
 half a century. That great, that really magnificent spe-. 
 cies, will then repair its losses. Being no longer perse- 
 cuted, it will return to the temperate zone, which is its 
 natural climate, where it will find its natural food in the 
 abounding animalculae of the comparatively warm wa- 
 ters. Being thus restored to its natural climate and its 
 natural food, it will regain its old gigantic proportions. 
 I^et the old rendezvous of their Love be held sacred, 
 and again we shall see the Leviathan, the whale of two 
 or three hundred feet long. Let this magnificent crea- 
 ture's haunts be respected, especially in its breeding 
 season, and in half a century it would be as plentiful 
 as of old. Formerly it abounded in a bay of Califor- 
 nia. Why not make that bay sacred to it ? Then it 
 would not seek shelter among the horrid glaciers of the 
 
324 THE LAW OF THE OCEAN. 
 
 pole. Let us respect their reason of Love, and enor- 
 mous will be the benefit to ourselves. 
 
 Peace ! I say again ; peace for the Whale, the Sea- 
 Cow, the Sea-Elephant ; peace for all those precious 
 species which man's inhumanity has so nearly crushed 
 out of existence. A long, a sacred peace should be 
 granted to them ; like that which the Swiss so wisely 
 granted to the Chamois, which, when almost extinct, 
 was thus rendered numerous as ever. For all, whether 
 Fish or Amphibii there is needed a season of perfect 
 rest, like the Truce of God, which in the olden day 
 prevented the chivalry of Europe from butchering each 
 other. 
 
 These creatures themselves instinctively comprehend 
 what we either know not or neglect ; for, at their season 
 of maternity, they lose their timidity, and venture to 
 our shores, as though certain that at such a season, they 
 will be held sacred. At that season, they are in their 
 greatest beauty aid their greatest strength. Their bril- 
 liant color and their flashing phosphorence indicate the 
 utmost vigor of their existence, and in every species 
 that is not menacingly superabundant, that season of 
 reproduction should be respected. Kill them after- 
 wards ? By all means — but pray do not anticipatively 
 kill in the one fish a whole shoal of fishes. 
 
 Every unoffending creature has a right to the mo- 
 ment of happiness, to that pioment when the individual, 
 
THE LAW OP THE OCEAN. 325 
 
 however lowly placed, goes beyond the narrow limits 
 of his individual Self, and from his dark individuality, 
 glances into and feels the Infinite Future. 
 
 And let us aid Nature ; then shall we be blessed, 
 from the lowest depths to the starry heights ; then shall 
 we receive the blessing glance of that God who hath 
 made both great and small, and who has commanded us 
 to imitate Him. 
 
BOOK FOURTH. 
 THE RESTORATION OF THE SEA. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 ORIGIN OP SEA BATHING. 
 
 The Sea, so ill treated by man, in this pitiless warfare, 
 has been to him most generously kind. When Earth, 
 which he loves so much, when that rude Earth wears, 
 weakens, exhausts him, it is that so much feared, so 
 much abused Sea, which takes him to her bosom, and 
 restores him to new life. 
 
 And, in fact, is it not from her that life primitively 
 sprang ? She contains within her all the elements of 
 life in a quite marvellous plenitude. Why, then, when 
 we feel ourselves sinking, do we not repair for restora- 
 tion to the abounding source of life ? 
 
 That source has space and kindness enough for all, 
 but is especially kind to the too civilized children of 
 men, for the sons and daughters who are suffering for 
 the fathers and mothers, victims of mistaken or sinning 
 Love, less culpable than the sinning parents, yet a 
 thousand fold more punished. The Sea, that vast 
 female, delights to restore them ; to their weakness she 
 
330 
 
 ORIGIN OP SEA BATHING. 
 
 gives her strength ; and restores them young, beautiful, 
 healthful, from the boundless stores of her wide expanse 
 and fathomless depths. Venus, who was born of Ocean, 
 is from Ocean reborn every moment, and not a sick, 
 suffering, peevish, pale, and melancholy Venus, but the 
 triumphant, Venus full of passion and certain of fecun- 
 dity. 
 
 How between this great and salutary, but somewhat 
 rude, strength and our weakness, can there be any con- 
 nection ? What union can there be between elements 
 so greatly disproportioned ? That was a serious and 
 difficult question ; to solve it required an art, an initia- 
 tion. To understand that question thoroughly, we 
 must make ourselves acquainted with the time and oc- 
 casion when this art first revealed itself. Between two 
 ages of strength, the strength of the age of the Renais- 
 sance and that of the Revolution, there was a period of 
 depression both moral and physical. The old world 
 had died, the new one was not yet born, and the mis- 
 begotten children of worn out parents were weak and 
 unhealthy. On the one hand, the excessive indulgence 
 of the rich ; on the other hand, the awful privations of 
 the poor, decimated the nations, and most decimated, 
 precisely those nations which most boasted their civiliza- 
 tion. France thrice ruined, from base to apex, in a single 
 century succumbed beneath the orgies of the Regency. 
 England triumphed over our ruin, yet had death and 
 
ORIGIN OP SEA BATHING. 331 
 
 destruction within her own bosom. Her Puritan idea 
 had departed, and another had not yet come. Weak- 
 ened by the fierce lusts of Charles 11., she was still 
 farther degraded by the paljtry briberies of Walpole ; 
 and in the debasement of the Public the worst passions 
 of the Individual came to light. The fine book of 
 Robinson exhibits the horrors of the terrible Lust of 
 Strong Drink ; — a terrible book, that, in which Medi- 
 cine calls to its aid all the denunciations of Religion, 
 and denounces the gloomy suicide of celibatism. 
 
 Anxieties, evil habits, effeminate and unwholesome 
 life ; — all these betray themselves in the softened tis- 
 sues, the meagre forms, the horrid scrofula. Lovely 
 complexions cover the most vile diseases. Anne of 
 Austria, renowned for her extreme clearness of com- 
 plexion, died of loathsome ulcer ; the Princess of Sou- 
 bise, that dazzlingly fair beauty, rotted, so to speak, 
 into her grave. In England, the Duke of Newcastle 
 asked the learned Doctor Russell why it was that the 
 beautiful Lily and Rose concealed so much of scrofula. 
 
 It rarely happens that a worn out race recovers it- 
 self; but the English did so. For some seventy or 
 jighty years it recovered a wonderful strength of 
 activity. Partly it owed its recovery to its political 
 and social disturbances, — for there is nothing so con- 
 ducible to health as movement ; but it must be confessed 
 that the chief cause of its renovation was its change of 
 
332 
 
 OBIGIN OP SEA BATHING. 
 
 habits. It changed in everything, — education, food, 
 medicine ; all were changed, for all felt that health and 
 strength were necessary to success in anything and 
 everything. 
 
 There needed no great genius for such a Reform; 
 the true theory had been propounded ; all that was ne- 
 cessary was to make the Science an Art, to practise 
 what hitherto had only been preached. The Moravian, 
 Comenius,, writing a century before Rousseau, said: 
 "Return to Nature; educate according to Nature;" 
 the Saxon Hoffman said: "Return to Nature; make 
 her your Physician." Hoffman appeared just in time 
 to combat the evils caused by the orgies of the Regen- 
 cy, evils in which the remedies were as bad as the 
 disease, the Physician as fatal as the Quack. Hoffman 
 truly said to his age — " Leave Doctors alone ; live 
 temperately, drink water, and you will need no medi- 
 cines." That was a true moral reform. And thus 
 among ourselves, Priessnith in 1830, after the Baccha- 
 nalia of the Restoration imposed upon the luxurious 
 aristocracy of Europe the coarse food of the peasant, 
 and, in the hard northern climate, the open air bath, in 
 snow water ; that Hell of cold which, in its reaction, 
 gives such a glow of heat. And the rich and the deli- 
 cate submitted to this hard discipline ; so great is our 
 human love of life and fear of death. 
 And, in fact, why should not water be the safety of 
 
ORIGIN OF SEA BATHING. 333 
 
 man ? Berzelius assures us that four-fifths of our living 
 frames are water ; just as four-fifths of our globe are 
 covered by Oceans, Seas, Lakes, and Rivers. For our 
 arid Earth the Sea is a constant Hjdropathist, curing it 
 of its otherwise deadly dryness, and nourishing and 
 beautifying its fruits and flowers. Strange and pro- 
 digious magician, that same water! With so little, 
 making so much ; with so little, destroying so much — 
 destroying so slowly, but so surely ! 
 
 Gutta lapidem cavat, non vi, sed seepe cadendo ; 
 " The plastic globule wears the rugged rock, 
 By frequent &Uing, not by sudden shook." 
 
 Water is at once the most potent and the most elastic 
 of all forces, lending her aid to all the metamorphoses 
 of our globe, covering, penetrating, transforming all 
 around us. 
 
 Into what frightful desert, into what gloomy forest, 
 will not man penetrate in search of the healing springs 
 which boil up from the bosom of the earth ? What a 
 perfectly superstitious belief we have in those springs 
 which bring to us the hidden and Uealing virtues ! I 
 have seen fanatics who had no Deity but Carlsbad, that 
 wonderful meeting of the most contradictory waters. I 
 have seen the worshippers of Bareges, and I confess 
 that I have myself submitted to the gushing and sulphu- 
 reous waters of Acqui in their strange and almost 
 animal pulsations. The hot baths of earth have no me- 
 
334 ORIGIN OP SEA BATHING. 
 
 dium in their action ; they are either certain health or 
 certain death. How many sufferers who might have 
 lingered through weeks, months, or even years, have 
 been quickly slain by them! Frequently, those potent 
 waters give a sudden revival, and, together with health, 
 bring back the very passions which caused disease ; 
 passions hot as the waters which revived them. The 
 very atmosphere above these sulphureous waters is in- 
 toxicating, the aura of the Sybil that maddened her 
 into Prophecy ! An outburst which compels us to 
 speak that which we would most conceal. And how 
 terribly self-revealing we are in those Babels to which, 
 under the plea of seeking health, we resort to throw 
 aside the conventionalities, in too many cases the very 
 decencies of Society. There, pale, worn sufferers, of 
 both sexes, sit at the gaming table in eager passion to 
 win gold, and, in reality, winning only an earlier 
 Death. 
 
 Very different is the saving breath of the great Sea ; 
 in itself it is a purifier. That never ceasing inter- 
 change of the ocean of air, and the ocean of water, for- 
 bids life ever to languish. Early and late, those oceans 
 of air and sea are at work. At every instant each 
 passes through the crucible of death — and at every 
 instant revives. The whirlwind and the water spout 
 give newer and stronger life to the vexed ocean. 
 
 To live on land is to repose ; to live on sea is to 
 
ORIGIN OP SEA BATHING. 335 
 
 combat, and to combat savingly ; — for those who can 
 bear it, a Spartan training in which many perish, but 
 those who snrvive are very strong. 
 
 In the middle ages there was a perfect horror of the 
 Sea. They libelled the great Sea, they called that fer- 
 tile mother " the kingdom of the prince of the powers 
 of air" — the very name which was given to Satan. The 
 nobility of the seventeenth century would by no means 
 consent to have its palaces near the huts of the rude 
 seamen. The frowning castle, with its ugly and formal 
 garden, was almost always built, as far as possible from 
 the sea, on some place destitute of sun and air, but 
 marvellously rich in fog and miasmata. In England 
 it was just the same. If the manor house was on a hill, 
 the advantage of the situation was sedulously provided 
 against by a forest of tall trees, and quite as often, in- 
 stead of being on the hill, it was in the pestilent marsh 
 below. At the present day, England, wiser than of 
 old, builds by the sea side, rejoices in sea baths even in 
 winter, and is rewarded by strong health. The people 
 of the sea coasts better knew, even in earlier times, the 
 life-giving power of the sea. Its purifying power first 
 struck them ; they observed its power in curing scro- 
 fula of its disgusting sores, and they well knew the 
 power of its bitterness in killing the parasite worms 
 which, otherwise, would kill the child. They ate the 
 
336 ORIGIN OP SEA BATHING 
 
 Sea weed and the Halcyonia, well knowing that the 
 iodine that they contain contracts and makes firm the 
 flesh. Eussell, who heard and noted these popular 
 recipes, was thus enabled to answer the question of the 
 Duke of Newcastle, and did so in his excellent book, 
 published in 1750, on the use of Sea water in cases of 
 glandular wasting. 
 
 There is a great force in his sentence — " The great 
 want is not how to cure, but how to repair, to create." 
 
 He proposed a miracle, but a quite possible one ; to 
 make new flesh, new tissues. And he proposed to do 
 that chiefly with the child, who, though born of polluted 
 parents, might yet be re-made. 
 
 It was at the same time that Bakewell, the Leicester- 
 shire farmer, created meat. Up to that time horned 
 cattle were chiefly valued for their milk, from his day 
 forth they are made to yield a more generous food. 
 The poor milk diet, in fact, had to be abandoned by 
 men who are compelled to be so active, so laborious, so 
 untiring. Russell's little book, in 1750, created Sea 
 bathing ; it is not too much to say he created it, for it 
 really was he who made it in vogue. 
 
 This whole grand theory may be summed up in a very 
 few words : 
 
 " It is necessary to drink sea-water, to bathe in sea- 
 water, and to eat sea-weed ; clothe your children as 
 
ORIGIN OF SEA BATHING. 337 
 
 lightly as possible, aud let them have plenty of air. The 
 Ocean breeze, and the Ocean water ; there you have 
 the sure cure." 
 
 That last advice seems very bold. To have the half 
 naked child exposed to the open air in a damp and va- 
 riable climate, is, no doubt, anticipatively, to lose the 
 weak ; but the strong will survive, and their posterity 
 will be the better brought up. Let us add that busi- 
 ness, and navigation, by earlier relieving the boys from 
 school, from the sedentary life of the young nobles at 
 Oxford or Cambridge, make them a new race. 
 
 In his ingenious book, guided only by popular tradi- 
 tion, Russell doubtless was far enough from suspecting 
 how, in a single century, all science would come to the 
 aid of his theory, and that each would aid him in mak- 
 ing of the Sea a perfect system of Therapeutics. ' 
 
 The most valuable elements of terrestrial life are 
 abundantly in the sea ; and science may well say to us — 
 " Hither ! Hither, worn and wearied nation, swinked 
 laborer, failing woman, young child, fading because your 
 parents sinned ; hither ! to the Sea, and the Sea shall 
 cure you ! " The universal base of life, the embryonic 
 mucus, the living animal jelly in which man continually 
 takes and retakes the marrowy substance of his being, 
 is so abounding in the sea that we may call it the sea 
 itself. Of that mucus, both marine animals and marine 
 vegetables are made. Her generosity puts earth to 
 15 
 
338 ORIGIN OF SEA BATHING. 
 
 shame. She is liberal to give, be ye therefore, willing 
 to receive. 
 
 " But," it maybe said, " we are attacked in the very 
 foundation and support of our being. Our bones bend, 
 bow, and we are weak, and tottering from their insuffi- 
 cient nurture." Well ! The lime which they need 
 abounds in the sea ; so abounds that her madrepores 
 build islands of it, and are at this moment building 
 whole continents. Her fishes carry it hither and thith- 
 er in such vast quantity that, washed upon every shore, 
 it serves as a manure. 
 
 And you, young female, you who, visibly, are wasting 
 into an early grave, repair to the sea, where every 
 breath you draw shall be a restorative. That restora- 
 tive iodine, is in every breath that blows, in every wave 
 that heaves, in every fish that swims. The Cod alone 
 have enough to iodise the entire earth. 
 
 Is it animal warmth that you lack ? The sea afi"ords 
 you the most perfect, the most equable, the most wide- 
 ly difl'used warmth ; warmth so great, in fact, that were 
 it not diffused, it . would melt the earth from Pole to 
 Pole, and make each Pole another Equator. 
 
 The rich, warm, red blood, is the triumph of the 
 Sea ; by it she has animated and armed with mightiest 
 strength her giants, so much mightier than mightiest 
 giants of the earth. She has made that element, and 
 she can remake you, poor, pale, drooping flower. She 
 
ORIGIN OF SEA BATHING. 339 
 
 abounds, superabounds, in that rich red blood ; in her 
 children it so abounds that they give it forth to every 
 wind. 
 
 And there is the revelation of the whole mystery. 
 All the principles, pale mortal, that are combined in 
 you, she has in separation. She has your bone, your 
 blood, your sap and your heat — in one or the other of 
 her creatures, she has them all. 
 
 And she has, also, what you have not, a superabun- 
 dant strength. Her breathing gives I know not what 
 of inspiring excitement ; of what we may call physical 
 heroism. With all her violence, the great generating 
 element inspires us with the same fiery vivacity, the same 
 wild love, with which she herself palpitates. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 CHOICE OF COAST. 
 
 Earth is her own doctor ; every climate has its own 
 remedy. More and more will Medicine lie in Emigra- 
 tion. But it must be an Emigration of foresight, not one 
 of those mad-cap, rapid, and most mischievous journeys 
 in which the patient rushes from one extreme of climate 
 to another, but prudently calculated to the obtaining of 
 those vivifying aids which nature every where holds in 
 store for those who know how to profit by them. The 
 youth, that is yet to be born, depends upon these two 
 things — the Science of Emigration and the Art of Ac- 
 climatization. Hitherto, man has remained a prisoner 
 like an oyster on its rock. If he occasionally emigrates 
 to some small distance from his temperate zone, he, for 
 the most part, goes to die. He will only become free, 
 really brave, when the science and art of Emigration 
 and Climatization shall make him free of the whole 
 globe. 
 
CHOICE OF COAST. S4l 
 
 Few diseases are cured in the place and under the 
 circumstances which have given rise to them ; they hold 
 to certain habits which the localities perpetuate and 
 render unconquerable. There is no Reform, physical 
 or moral, for those who persist in the originating vice. 
 
 Medicine, guided by the auxiliary sciences, directs 
 us in the new road to the desired end. Our emigra- 
 tions must be made prudently and gradually. Can we, 
 safely, without preparation, without alteration of diet 
 and of habits, be suddenly removed from an inland to a 
 maritine abode ? Can we prudently take to the sea-bath 
 until the sea breeze shall have trained our physical 
 frame? Can we suddenly and without preparation en 
 counter the severe shock, the horripilation of the really 
 tremendous shock of the cold water bath in the cold 
 open air ? These questions we are glad to say are more 
 and more being put and answered by our physicians. 
 
 The extreme rapidity of our railroad journeys is very 
 mischievous even to the strong; — in many cases fatal 
 to the ailing. To pass, as so many do, from Paris to 
 the Mediterranean in twenty-four hours, passing at 
 every hour into a different climate, is as perilous a thing 
 as a nervous person can do. You arrive agitated, 
 giddy. When Madame de Sevign^ took a whole month 
 to travel from Brittany to Provence, she proceeded 
 by slow and calculated degrees from one climate to 
 another, and its opposite. She proceeded, by slow de- 
 
342 CHOICE OF COAST. 
 
 grees, from the maritime climate of the West into the 
 inland climate of Burgundy. Then, travelling slowly 
 by the upper Rhone into Dauphiny, she, with the 
 greater safety and comfort, braved the free winds of 
 Valence and of Avignon ; then, halting awhile, and 
 resting at Aix, in the interior of Provence, far from the 
 Rhone and from its shores, she made herself Proven gal 
 in lungs. 
 
 France has the enviable advantage of being between 
 two seas, and thence the facility of alternating, as the 
 disease may require, between the saline tonicity of the 
 Mediterranean and the moister and —except in case of 
 tempest — the far milder air of the Ocean. 
 
 On each of the two coasts there is a graduated scale 
 of stations, more or less mild, more or less strengthen- 
 ing. It is very interesting to observe, and very useful 
 to follow, this double scale, — proceeding, as a general 
 thing, from weaker to stronger. 
 
 The climate of the Ocean parting from the strong, 
 rough, ever-heaving waters of the channel, becomes 
 extremely mild at the South of Brittany, milder still in 
 the Gironde, and mildest of all in the land-locked basin 
 of Arch aeon. 
 
 The air of the Mediterranean, which we may call 
 circular, has its highest note in the dry, though keen, 
 climate of Provence and Genoa, becomes more mild as 
 you approach Pisa, milder and less variable in Sicily, 
 
CHOICE OF COAST. 343 
 
 and at Algiers attains a wonderful mildness and regu- 
 larity. And on your return bo sure of a balmy air at 
 Majorca and the little ports of the Rousillon, so well 
 sheltered from the harsh north wind. 
 
 The Mediterranean commands our admiration by 
 two characteristics ; the beauty of its shores and the' 
 brilliant purity of its sky and atmosphere. Very salt, 
 very bitter is that sea ; but what a glorious blue sky is 
 above it ! It gives out by evaporation about thrice as 
 much water as it receives from all its tributary rivers. 
 It would become all salt, like that terrible Dead Sea, 
 but for the lower currents, the under- tow, like that from 
 Gibraltar, for instance, were not constantly tempering 
 it with the waters of the Ocean. 
 
 All that I have seen of its shores are beautiful, 
 though somewhat stern. Nothing common-place about 
 those shores. The volcanic, the lurid bale fires of the 
 lower earth, have everywhere made their mark upon 
 the upper earth ; those dark Plutonic rocks are never 
 tiresome like the marshy sands of other shores. If the 
 famous Orange woods sometimes seem somewhat monot- 
 onous, they compensate you when here and there, a 
 sheltered spot, you find the true African vegetation, the 
 Aloe and the Cactus, the hedge of Myrtle and Jessamine, 
 and the wild and perfumed landes. Above, it is true, 
 bald and frowning mountains loom, and their long off- 
 shoots run even into the very sea. 
 
344 CHOICE OF COAST. 
 
 " It seemed to me," said a traveller, " that I was 
 between two atmospheres ; the air above, and the air 
 below." He describes the varied world of plants and 
 animals which were reflected by the crystal mirror of 
 that deep blue sea of Sicily. I was less fortunate off 
 » Genoa, where, gazing into the depths, I saw nothing 
 but a desert. The dry and sterile rocks, the volcanic 
 framing of the shores, dark as- midnight, or of a still 
 sadder and more ghastly and ghostlike white, showed 
 me nothing but antique sarcophagi — reversed churches, 
 reminding one, at times, of the cathedrals of Florence, 
 or the leaning tower of Pisa. Sometimes, also, I 
 seemed to see " strange monsters of the deep." Whales ? 
 Elephants ? I do not know ; but of real life npt a 
 trace. 
 
 Such, however, as that beautiful sea is, it admirably 
 nerves and hardens the dwellers on its shores, and the 
 sailors on its bosom ; it makes at once the most fiery 
 and the most solid of races. Our giants of the North, 
 are, perhaps, stronger, but certainly are not more en- 
 during, and, as certainly, they do not so readily, or so 
 safely acclimatise, as the seamen of Genoa, of Calabria, 
 or of Greece, bronzed as they are, not by an accident 
 of the skin, but by the permeation, the imbibation of 
 the Sun's rays. A friend of mine, a learned physician, 
 sends his pale patients from Paris or Lyons to take their 
 Sun-baths in the South, and himself lies nude on the 
 
CHOICE OF COAST. 345 
 
 rocks, for hours together. He has only his head cov- 
 ered ; as to all the rest of his person, he is bronzed as 
 an African. 
 
 The really sick will go to Sicily, to Algiers, to Ma- 
 deira, in search of health. But the restorative of the 
 pale, worn populations of our great cities, is best to be 
 found in the more varied and more strengthening cli- 
 mates of the country which has given to Earth its most 
 iron humanity, its heroes by sea and by land, and in the 
 council chamber — that truly iron race of the Colum- 
 buses, the Dorias, the Massenas, — and the Garibaldis. 
 
 Our extreme Northern ports, Dunkirk, Boulogne and 
 Dieppe, where the winds and waters of the Channel 
 meet, are also a great nursery of renewed life, and re- 
 stored strength. That great breeze and that great sea, 
 might recal one from the grave. You may see there 
 perfectly incredible recoveries. Go there without any 
 real and vital wound, and you recover on the instant. 
 The whole human machine acts strongly ; digests well, 
 breathes freely. You need not even strive for health 
 when there, for nature says to you, as TuUy said to At- 
 ticus, Jubeo valere, — / command you to be well. The 
 sturdy vegetation that flourishes upon the very margia 
 of the sea, seems to rebuke our weakness. Each of 
 the little ports which pierce our Norman coast, is swept 
 by the nor' westerly wind, which strengthens ~ and re- 
 
346 CHOICE OP COAST. 
 
 vives us ; but grows less violent, tliough not less salu- 
 brious, at the mouth of the Seine, beneath the fruitful 
 orchards of Honfleur and Trouville. The good river, 
 sweeping away to the left, carries with it a softer and 
 gentler air. Higher up, you meet the strong, the some- 
 times really terrible, sea of Granville, Saint-Maloes, 
 and Cancale, about the best of naval schools for young 
 folks, a school which will make\he strong still stronger. 
 But if, on the contrary, we have to deal with some 
 weakling, some young child, born to weakness, or soipe 
 young mother, made weak by too frequent parturition, 
 we must select some milder shelter. And such a warm 
 and always calm shelter, you will find, without 
 going further South, among the sleepy little isles 
 and peninsulse of Morbihan-. These isles form a 
 labyrinth more perplexed than that in which the English 
 king sheltered his fair Rosamond. Entrust your own 
 treasure to that shelter, and none shall know of her 
 save the Druidic rocks and the handful of fishermen 
 who inhabit those at once wild and gentle shores. Does 
 some gentle patient ask us on what people live, in those 
 marine solitudes ? We reply, upon Fish, Pish — still 
 Fish ! It is not far from St. Gildas, where the Bretons 
 assure you that Heloise sought her Abelard. They con- 
 trive to live there as cheaply and as well as Robinson 
 Crusoe and his man Friday. 
 
CHOICE OF COAST. 347 
 
 Places more civilized and attractive aie to be found 
 farther South, such as Pornice, Royan, Saint George, 
 Archacon, &c. 
 
 I spoke elsewhere of Saint George's, bordered l)y 
 many a bitter and precious plant ; and Archachon, too, 
 is as attractive, with its resinous and wholesomely pleas- 
 ant odor of its pine woods. But for the worldly rush 
 from that great and il^ealthy Bprdeaux, but for that 
 flood of health seekers, which pours into it at certain 
 seasons, it is at Archachon that we would shelter the 
 dearly beloved patient, that dear and delicate creature 
 for whom we fear the rush and crush of the hard work- 
 ing day world. That place, as long as we contemplate 
 it only within the inner basin, offers the contrast of an 
 absolute and very deep calm with a terribly rough sea 
 close by. Beyond the lighthouse is the terrible Gascon 
 sea, within the bay. a lazy tide, so lazy that you cannot 
 hear its murmurs, as low, as light, as the quiet tread of 
 lady's gentle footstep on the sea-weed carpet of that 
 strand. 
 
 In an intermediate climate which is neither North nor 
 South, neither Brittany nor Vendee, I have visited 
 again and again, and always with pleasure, the pretty 
 and staid shelter of Ponice, with its frank seamen and 
 its pretty girls, with their conical hats. It is a pretty 
 quiet little place, which, protected as it is by the island 
 (rather the peninsula) of Noirmantiers, receives only a 
 
348 CHOICE OP COAST. 
 
 slanting and exceedingly well behaved sea ; that enters 
 silken in its softness. And in that bay of several 
 leagues, these creeks, with sloping shores, made, as it 
 would seem, on purpose for baths for women and chil- 
 dren, they are so sheltered and so safe. Those nice 
 sandy beaches, parted by such sheltering rocks, conceal 
 so much, and yet reveal so much of the sea life, the 
 plain, blunt, yet ever kindly and courteous life of the 
 seaman ! But if those sheltering rocks do much good, 
 they also do no little injury. The sheltered creek and 
 safe haven, keeps out the Tempest ; — but, it also keeps 
 out the fishes. By little and little, but very regularly, 
 the grand rush and the grand murmur of the sea are 
 kept out, and yet, that half silence has a very great 
 charm. No where else have I so much welcomed, or 
 so richly enjoyed, that great luxury of the undisturbed 
 Day-dreaming. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE HOUSE. 
 
 Permit an ignoramus who, yet, has paid a pretty high 
 price for what he does know, to give you some quiet ad- 
 vice upon certain points upon which books, hitherto, 
 have told you little and Doctors nothing. That this 
 advice may come the more directly to both head and 
 heart, I will address them to an imaginary patient. 
 Imaginary ? Not so ; I have met such a patient many 
 times. 
 
 Ton meet a young lady seriously ill, or manifestly 
 about to be so, she is very weak, and her young child is 
 weaker still. The Winter has been hard upon them, 
 and the Spring still harder. Yet it is only weakness ; — 
 lassitude, the tedium vitce which Byron truly calls " more 
 terrible than death itself." And she is sent to the sea- 
 side for the Summer. 
 
 A great expense, that, for a fortune below even me- 
 diocrity ; painful moving for the mistress of a family ; 
 hard separation, above all, for husband and wife who 
 
350 THE HOUSE. 
 
 truly love each other. They bargain, they would fain 
 shorten that separatio'h. Would not one month be 
 enough ? But the wise Physician knows better, and 
 says it would not; he well knows that a very short so- 
 journ at the sea side is far more likely to injure than to 
 benefit. The sudden, the severe shock of the sea bath 
 is likely enough to injure even the strong ; to the feeble 
 it is simply murderous. You should first breathe the 
 sea air ; — acclimatize yourself Do this during the 
 month of June, then you shall have July, August, Sep- 
 tember, and, in some seasons, even October for your 
 baths, and the bath and the great, strong, keen winds 
 will harden your frame against the fast approaching 
 Winter. 
 
 Few men are free during the whole Summer ; happy 
 the husband who can be away from the thronged city 
 to pass a couple of the Summer months at the sea side 
 with his suffering wife. However much ho may feel in- 
 clined to sacrifice every secondary interest for her, it is 
 for her interest that he must remain in the counting 
 house or the factory. There are strong links in the 
 chain of our daily life which we may not, which we 
 cannot, break. Therefore, the wife must go alone ; and, 
 for the time, behold them loving, and yet divorced. 
 Shall I give you my opinion ? Let her go alone ; bet- 
 ter for her than if she went in the train of some rich 
 luxurious family. 
 
THE HOUSE. 351 
 
 That gregarious travel and gregarious abode have 
 their pleasures, no doubt ; but, also, tliey have their 
 evils. In such cases we are apt either to becorQe ene- 
 mies, or, which is still worse in the case of woman, to 
 become too friendly. The style of life at a watering 
 place sometimes, and not seldom produces results which 
 we regret through the whole remainder of life. In my 
 opinion the smallest inconvenience of that gregarious 
 watering-place life (smallest but very far from small) is 
 that the very people who alone would be both morally 
 and physically benefited by the sea, lose all that benefit 
 by carrying to the solemn shore the frivolity, the late 
 hours, the false gaiety of the great town. 
 
 Alone we think ; in the crowd we gossip and scanda- 
 lise. The great and the rich lead the young and suffer- 
 ing female into their own dissipations, and the conse- 
 quence is that she hasby the sea shore a really more 
 mischievous excitement than she would have had in 
 Paris, or London, Saint Petersburgh or New York, and 
 will entirely lose the end for which, loving husband, you 
 sent her thither. Reflect upon it, young woman, be 
 courageous, but also be prudent. It is in an innocent 
 solitude that you may, if you will, enjoy with your child, 
 that you will most surely find the renewed health and 
 strength that you so much desire. In that infantine, 
 pure, but noble and poetic life, I again assure you, it is 
 that you will find restoration. Believe me the delicate 
 
352 
 
 THE HOUSE. 
 
 and tender justice which makes you fear expense, while 
 he at home is toiling so hard, will well repay you. The 
 old Ocean will love you the better if you love only it, 
 and will lavish upon you its great treasures of health 
 and youthfulness. Your child will flourish like a young 
 bay tree and you shall increase in grace and beauty ; 
 and you will return to your far home youthful and 
 dearly beloved. 
 
 She resolves, she departs, for a place, the waters of 
 which are well known by chemical analysis to have the 
 qualities suited to her case. But there ar& many local 
 circumstances which cannot be known or even guessed 
 at from a distance. The Doctor who recommends par- 
 ticular waters seldom knows the place, though he 
 knows the waters. 
 
 Tor some of the more important watering places 
 Guides have been published which are not without 
 merit, so far as they point out the particular diseases for 
 which particular waters are suited. But very few give 
 details which enable one to choose between a healthy 
 and unhealthy, a pleasant and an unpleasant, situation. 
 They do not venture upon such particulars as would 
 enable one to choose between places as well as between 
 waters, but confine themselves to so general a eulogy 
 of the latter as to leave us in the dark as to the former. 
 
 What is the precise exposition ? Look at the map 
 and you perceive that the coast slopes to the South, but 
 
THE HOUSE. &53 
 
 even this tells you nothing ; for it may chance that a 
 peculiar curve of the land may place your house under 
 a cold or damp influence, from a Northern or Western 
 exposure. 
 
 Are there any marshes in the neighborhood ? In 
 most cases the answer must be, yes. But the difference 
 is very great whether the marshes be salt and renewed, 
 and made salubrious by the sea, or whether they be 
 stagnant marshes of fresh water which after droughts 
 emit feverish miasmata. 
 
 Is the sea very pure, or mixed ? And in what pro- 
 portion ? A great mystery. For nervous persons, 
 however, for novices just commencing with salt water 
 bathing, the mildest are the best. A sea, somewhat 
 mixed, an air less salt and keen, and a less desolate 
 shore, having some of the charms of the country, are the 
 best recommendations. 
 
 A grave point is the choice of a house ; and who 
 shall direct you as to that ? No one. You must see 
 for yourself; you must observe all the particulars on 
 the spot. You will learn little from persons who have 
 visited or even lived there. They praise or condemn 
 this or that place not on account of its real merit, but 
 according to the pleasure they have enjoyed or the 
 friends they have made there. They recommend you 
 to some of those friends who receive you admirably ; at 
 first you are delighted, but in a short time you discover 
 
354 THE HOUSE. 
 
 many inconveniences, and sometimes the house is even 
 dangerously unhealthy. Yet you do not like to leave 
 it, lest you should mortify both those who recommended 
 you and the kind and amiable family who so hospitably 
 received you. 
 
 " "Well, then," you say, " I will ask no recommenda- 
 tion, but on reaching the place I will consult an honest 
 and skilful doctor who will be able to enlighten me." 
 Honest ! that is not enough, he must also be very in- 
 trepid to tell you frankly any of the bad qualities of 
 the place, for he would be a ruined man, he would take 
 leave of the whole place, would live as solitary as a 
 wolf; and, indeed, would be lucky if some personal 
 injury were not done to him. 
 
 I have a perfect horror of the absurdly flimsy houses 
 which speculators build in our variable climate. These 
 pasteboard erections are so many dangerous traps. In 
 the full heats of Summer such bivouacs are all well 
 enough, but often one has to remain in September and 
 October amid the high winds and the torrents of rain. 
 
 For themselves the landlords build good substantial 
 houses, but for poor patients they build chalets of wood, 
 ill closed, and not even moss-covered, like the Swiss 
 chalets. It really is treating us quite too ill. 
 
 In those villas, apparently luxurious, but in reality 
 wretched, no provision is made for comfort.* Drawing- 
 rooms for show, — and commanding a view of the sea, 
 
THE HOUSE. 355 
 
 they have, but no provision is made to gratify that feel- 
 ing of home comfort, so dear to the sick, and more es- 
 pecially so to woman. She feels unsheltered, as though 
 constantly exposed to half a gale of wind, and con- 
 stantly passing from one temperature to another. 
 
 On the other hand, the solidly built house of the 
 Fisherman is often low, damp, and inconveniently ar- 
 ranged in its interior. Often, it has not even a double 
 ceiling, but mere planks, which admit cold draughts in- 
 to the upper rooms, inflicting coughs, rheumatism, and 
 a score of other diseases. 
 
 Whatever may bo your choice, Madame, between 
 these two kinds of house, do you know what I heartily 
 wish for you ? Laugh, if you please. What I wish 
 you to have, even in June, is a good fire-place, with a 
 very excellent chimney, well closed against the wind. 
 In our beautiful Prance, with its cold northwest and its 
 rainy southwest, which occasionally predominates for 
 nine months, a good fire may be necessary, even in 
 June. On a damp evening, when your child returns 
 shivering from his promenade, a fire is necessary, to 
 warm him, before he goes to bed. 
 
 Two things ought to be especially looked after, wher- 
 ever you lodge, fire and good water, the latter a thing 
 rarely to be found near the sea. If it is altogether bad, 
 endeavor, by the use of beer or tea, to dispense with 
 
356 THE HOUSE. 
 
 drinking the plain water, or if you must use it, let it 
 previously be boiled. 
 
 Why cannot I, with a single word, build you just 
 such a villa as I have in my mind ? I do not speak of 
 the show-house, the almost castle, such as the wealthy 
 build at the sea side, but of the humble house, fitted for 
 humble fortunes. It is an art which is yet to be creat- 
 ed, and one which no one seems to suspect, that of 
 building a house, at once small and substantial. The 
 houses which are built for us, especially at the sea side, 
 are built in direct contradiction with our needs in so 
 changable a climate. Those Kiosks, with their flimsy 
 ornaments, may do well enough for well-sheltered situ- 
 ations, but make one fancy that the wind must needs 
 blow them into the sea. The Swiss chalets have im- 
 mense overhanging roofs, which so well protect from the 
 snow, but also have the serious defect of excluding the 
 light. The sun, in our northern seas, should not be ex- 
 cluded, but most cordially received. As to the imita- 
 tions of- chapels, gothic churches, and the like toys, we 
 need say nothing about them, they are really beneath 
 notice, so absurdly ill calculated as they are for com- 
 fortable homes. 
 
 The first necessity for a seaside house, is great 
 strength, a solid thickness of walls, which will obviate 
 that rocking which we always feel in slight buildings. 
 
THE HOUSE. 357 
 
 We want such a solidity of construction as even in the 
 greatest tempests will give courage to a timid woman, 
 and enable her to say with a smile of pleasure. " How 
 very comfortable we are in here, while such a storm 
 rages without ! " 
 
 The second point is that on the land side, the house 
 should be so perfectly sheltered that on that side we 
 can sit and forget the sea, and in the neighborhood of 
 that great movement find the most complete repose. 
 
 To meet those two needs, I prefer the form which af- 
 fords least hold to the wind, the crescent form, with the 
 convex front to the sea, so that every window will in 
 tarn receive the Sun. 
 
 The concave portion of this half circle would be 
 sheltered by the horns of the crescent, so as to enclose 
 the pretty flower garden of the mistress of the house. 
 Stretching from this flower garden, the progressive slop- 
 ing of the soil would allow of a kitchen garden of a 
 certain extent, well sheltered from the wind. 
 
 We are told that " Flora shuns the sea ; " what she 
 really does shun, is not the sea, but man's negligence, 
 ignorance, or indolence. At Eteretat, before a very 
 heavy sea, on the high overlooking beach, and exposed 
 to heavy winds, there is a farm, with an orchard of su- 
 perb trees. What precautions have been taken ? A 
 simple hedge-crowned bank, five feet high, and behind 
 that a row of elms, which shelter all the rest. Many 
 
358 
 
 THE HOUSE. 
 
 places Brittany would furnish us with like instances. 
 Who does not know that Roscoff raises fruit and vege- 
 tables in such profusion as to sell them cheaply, even in 
 Normandy ? 
 
 But to return to our building. I want it low-pitched ; 
 only a ground floor, and over that the bed-chambers. 
 Our house, therefore, will be but small ; but, on the 
 other hand, it must be very thick, must have two rows 
 of chambers, an apartment looking out on the sea, and 
 another on the land. 
 
 The ground floor apartment, looking towards the 
 land, would be somewhat sheltered by the upper story, 
 which would project about five feet. This would make 
 the interior crescent a sort of gallery for use in bad 
 weather. The lower rooms would be a dining room ; — 
 a small room for our books (voyages and travels, and 
 natural history) and a bathroom. I do not mean an 
 actual library or luxurious bath. The necessary, and 
 the very plain, the convenient, and nothing more. 
 
 On very rough days, when the beach is hardly the fit 
 place for delicate patients, I should wish to see the lady 
 reading or working in her pretty parterre. She would 
 have some life there, flowers, an aviary, and a little 
 tank of sea water to receive the little creatures which 
 the fishermen would be sure to give licr. Of course 
 she would also have an excellent compound microscope. 
 
 For the aviary, I should prefer the free one which I 
 
THE HOUSE. 359 
 
 have advised elsewhere, into which the birds come at 
 night for protection and a little food. It is closed upon 
 them at night, to protect them from birds of prey, but 
 opened for them very early in the morning. They re- 
 turn to this aviary very regularly. I believe, even, that 
 if the aviary were large enough, and the tre§ which 
 they most affect were enclosed, they would freely breed 
 there, and confide their little ones to your protection. 
 
 Delightful, and yet serious life, this, that we have 
 planned for our fair patientand her sole child. What 
 charming solitude in this short widowhood. How new 
 the situation. No housekeeping, no business. With 
 her boy, she is even more alone than she would be with- 
 out him. But for him she would be intruded upon by 
 reverie and vain fancies. But her innocent guardian, 
 her boy, keeps all such fancies away. He occupies 
 her, causes her to talk, and talks to her of home, and 
 he thus constantly reminds her of him who, in their 
 far off home, is toiling for them, and she counts the days 
 to her return. 
 
 Flourish, pure and amiable woman. You are now 
 even younger than ever, you have become a girl again, 
 free, sweetly free, under the guardianship of your boy. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 FIRST ASPIRATION OP THE SEA. 
 
 It is a great and sudden transition to leave Paris in the 
 beautiful month of June when the great city is resplen- 
 dent with its magnificent gardens and its chestnut trees 
 in bloom. June would be delightful on the coast if one 
 had a single companion and the crowd had not arrived. 
 But when one is alone on the deserted, with the great 
 sea, we are touched with a sort of melancholy. 
 
 On a first visit to the coast the impression made is not 
 very favorable. There is aridity, there is wildness, 
 and yet there is a certain monotony. The novel gran- 
 deur of the spectacle makes us feel, by contrast, how 
 weak and small we are, and that thought thrills the 
 heart. The delicate chest that so lately was confined 
 in a chamber, and now finds itself suddenly removed to 
 this vast open chamber of the universe, with the sun 
 shining so brightly and the sea breeze blowing so 
 strongly, feels oppressed. The child comes, goes, and 
 the mother sits down, shivering in the free fresh breeze. 
 
FIRST ASPIRATION OF THE SEA. 361 
 
 The warmth of the home she has but just left comes to 
 her mind and she saddens. But hei* boy frolics gaily 
 and that soon consoles' her. 
 
 All this will soon pass away Madame. Be resolute ; 
 your impressions will be very diflFerent when you become 
 better acquainted with the Sea and think of its myriads 
 of inhabitants. And that painful constriction of the 
 lungs will pass away too, when you become accustomed 
 to the free atmosphere of the sea. You require time to 
 accustom yourself to it, by and by, not thinking about 
 it, as your boy plays with you in sheltered nooks, you 
 will breathe freely and your chest will dilate without 
 pain and without conscious effort. But, just at first, I 
 advise you not to stay too long at a time on the beach, 
 but rather to take your walk inland. 
 
 The land, your accustomed friend, recals you. The 
 pine woods rival the sea in healthful emanations ; and 
 theirs have less of harshness. They penetrate all our 
 being, enter by every pore, modify and purify the 
 blood, and perfume us with their subtle aroma. In the 
 Landes behind the pine woods, the herbs and even the 
 coarse grass on which you tread, yield perfumes not 
 enervating or intoxicating as the dangerous roses, but 
 agreeably bitter. Seat yourself among them and you, 
 like them, will be sheltered by this slight slope of land. 
 Might you not, now that y6u are thus sheltered, fancy 
 16 
 
362 FIRST ASPIRATION OP THE SEA. 
 
 yourself S hundred leagues from the sea ? Drink in 
 the sweet breathings, the pure spirits, the very soul of 
 these wild flowers — that, in purity, are your very sis- 
 ters. Gather them if you will, Madame ; they ask for 
 nothing better. Somewhat rude, perhaps, and yet so 
 beautiful ; and in their virginal perfume they have that 
 singular mystery of calming and strengthening. Do 
 not fear to hide them in your fair bosom and upon 
 your beating heart. 
 
 Let us not forget that these sheltered landes are, at 
 certain hours, burning hot. They so absorb and con- 
 centrate the rays of the sun. The weak woman is 
 wilted there. The young girl, full of vigorous life, feels 
 her pulses boiling and has redoubled power ; her brain 
 swims and she has strange and dangerous day dreams. 
 If you wish to go there let it be on some moist and 
 rather cloudy day ; or, still better, rise at a very early 
 hour when all is cool, when the wild thyme still keeps 
 somewhat of its dew, and while the Hare is still abroad. 
 
 But let us return to the Ocean. At ebb-tide he 
 manifests, and, in some sort, presents to you, the rich 
 life that he nourishes. You must follow, step by step, 
 the retiring waves, though the wet sand will sink some 
 little beneath your feet. Fear not. The gentle wave 
 will, at the most, kiss your feet. If you look closely 
 you will perceive that the sand is not, as you at first 
 
FIUST ASPIRATION OP THE SEA. 
 
 thougbt it, dead, but is tere and there moved by numer- 
 ous lingerers that the ebb-tide has left behind. On 
 certain beaches, small fish are thus hidden in the sand. 
 At the mouth of the rivers the Eel's writhing movement, 
 throws up the sand in mimic earthquakes. The Crab, 
 too eagerly engaged in feeding, or fighting, has now to 
 hasten back to the sea, and in his flight he leaves an odd 
 mosaic, a zigzag line marking his oblique travel, and 
 at the end of that line you will -find hira lying in wait 
 for the coming in of the tide. The Solen {Manche 
 deCouteau), that razor-shaped shell fish, has plunged 
 deep into the sand, but betrays himself to you by the 
 breathing holes that he has left. The Venus you can 
 just as certainly trace by the fucus attached to its shell, 
 but floating on the surface ; and the undulations of the 
 soil betray to you the covered ways of the warlike an- 
 nelides, and viewing them with the aid of your micro- 
 scope you will be charmed with the rainbows of their 
 changing colors. 
 
 But the finest sights are caused at the first low ebb, 
 which always follows the high Spring tide. At such 
 ebbs, immense and unexplored spaces are left bare, and 
 we can survey that mysterious bottom of the sea, on 
 which we have so often speculated and dreamed. There 
 you discover, in motion, in life, in all the secrecy of 
 their retreats, astonished populations, which fancied 
 
364 FIRST ASPIRATION OP THE SEA. 
 
 themselves secure, and which rarely, if ever before, had 
 been looked upon by the sun, and still more rarely by 
 the eye of man. Be not alarmed, swarming populations 
 of minute creatures, you are seen only by the inquisi- 
 tive but compassionate eye of a woman ; it is not the 
 cruel and coarse hand of a fisherman that invades' your 
 retreat. But you ask, what does she want with you ? 
 Nothing but to see you, salute you, show you to her 
 boy, and leave you in your natural element, and with 
 every kindly wish for your health and prosperity. At 
 times wo need not wander far ; at such times in a cleft 
 of the rock, we may find every minute species, old 
 Ocean having diverted himself with lodging a whole 
 world of minute creatures within the space of a few 
 square feet. We sit and we watch, and the longer and 
 the more closely we watch, the more do we see of life, 
 at first imperceptible. And so interested are we thai 
 we should sit there for an indefinite time, were we not 
 chased to shore by that imperious master of the beach, 
 the flood Tide. 
 
 But to-morrow, at ebb, she will return to the beach, 
 that school, that Museum, that inexhaustible amusement 
 for both mother and child. There the delicate and pen- 
 etrating sense of, woman and the tenderness of her 
 heart seize and divine all. Maternity tells her all the 
 secrets of increasing, diminishing, and recreating life. 
 
FIRST ASPIRATION OP THE SEA. 365 
 
 Do you ask why her instinct so quickly reveals crea- 
 tion to her ; why she enters as one so thoroughly at 
 home, into the great mystery of Nature ? It is because 
 she is Nature herself. 
 
 In the depths of the unctuous waters the small algae, 
 small, but unctuous and nourishing, and other little 
 plants of delicate and pretty figures, form a miniature 
 prairie which is browsed by a vast herd of molluscae, 
 Limpets, Whelks, and a hundred other species, watch, 
 wait, feed, there, and to-morrow you will find them 
 there still. But do you therefore suppose that they are 
 utterly inert ? That they have no confused idea of Love 
 and the Unknown ? Of some benevolent thing which 
 at certain hours returns to refresh and nourish them ? 
 Oh yes, they both think of it and expect it ; those Wid- 
 ows of the great Ocean well know that he will return 
 to caress the earth. Anticipatively they look towards 
 the Ocean, and even those which have a fixed abode, 
 turn from the rock and open their shells towards the in- 
 coming tide. And if it come in somewhat strongly 
 they are all the more delighted ; too happy to hail that 
 living wave that advances so strongly, as in haste to ca- 
 ress them. 
 
 " See my child " says the young mother, " at our ap- 
 proach the motionless ones remain, but the quicker have 
 fled. Now see, they take courage again. The active 
 
366 PIEST ASPIRATION OF THE SEA. 
 
 shrimp, with its fine feelers, rainbowed by the water, 
 creates a great commotion in that mimic and miniature 
 sea, and the slow and hesitating sea spider, at once 
 timid and daring, saves herself by ascending to the 
 warm surface, and the crab advancing and surveying, 
 suddenly returns into his miniature forest of sea weed. 
 
 " But what do I see now ? "What is that ? A large, 
 motionless shell suddenly takes life, and moves. Oh, 
 but that is not natural, and the impostorbetrays himself 
 by his awkward gait and his many stumbles. Yes, yes, 
 we detect you now, you most cunning of all cunning 
 crabs, Sir Bernard the Hermit, who would fain pass 
 yourself off for an innocent mollusc ! Your bad con- 
 science agitates you too much." 
 
 On the shore of our ocean, strangers to these move- 
 ments, the animated flowers expand their coroUae. 
 Near to the heavy anemone those charming little ann- 
 elides appear in the sunlight. Prom a tortuous tube 
 rises a disc, an umbrella, white or lilac, sometimes flesli 
 color. Thrown, itself, a little on one side, it casts off 
 from itself an object which has nothing comparable to 
 it in the whole vegetable world. Not one of these is 
 like its sister, and all are admirable for their velvety 
 delicacy. 
 
 See one of them, without umbrella, which throws off 
 a whole cloud of light cottony threads, scarcely tinted 
 
FIRST ASPIRATION OP THE SEA. 367 
 
 ■with a silver grey, while five longer filets are of the 
 richest cherry color. They wave, they entwine, they 
 untwist, and their silvery heads form beautiful images 
 in the water. To the coarse senses of man, such a 
 sight as that would suggest no serious thought ; but 
 to the nervous and delicate woman, it is much. At 
 those colors, by turns flashing and fading, she reflects 
 on her own young life that now flashes, now fades, and 
 now threatens to expire. Affecting thought ! Again 
 she looks into the pretty miniature Ocean of a few feet 
 square, and there she better discerns Nature, the fertile 
 mother, but the stern mother too. 
 
 And our fair patient is plunged into an oppressive 
 reverie. Woman would cease to be woman, that is to 
 say, the charm of the world, if she had not that touch- 
 ing gift of Tenderness for everything that lives ; pity, 
 and loving tears. 
 
 She has not wept as yet, our fair patient, but she has 
 been so near to doing so ! Her boy perceives it. Be- 
 ing already attentive and quick, he remains silent ; and, 
 silently they return. That was the amiable first day 
 when she first began to spell with her heart the lan- 
 guage of Jfeture. And at her very first lesson that 
 language had so stirred the tenderness of that poor 
 heart ! The daylight was dying, the sea bird, on rap- 
 id wing, approached the shore and sought his nest. 
 
368 FIRST ASPIRATION OP THE SEA. 
 
 And as our patient and her boy entered their already 
 dark garden, the cry of the night bird was heard. But 
 the aviary was well closed, and the innocent little ref 
 ugees within were asleep with heads under wings. 
 Having herself seen that all was thus safe, she relieved 
 her heart with a sigh, and embraced her son. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 BATHS — RESTORATION OP BEAUTY. 
 
 If, as certain French physicians maintain, sea-water 
 baths have only a mechanical action, infuse no new- 
 principle into the blood and are merely a simple branch 
 of hydropathy, it must be confessed that of all the 
 forms of hydropathy they are the harshest and most 
 hazardous. Let it once be clearly shown that that sea- 
 water, so rich in life, bestows no more of vitality than 
 fresh water and we must confess that it is little less than 
 madness to take sea-baths in the open air and at all the 
 risk of the wind, the sun, and the thousand possible 
 accidents. 
 
 Whoever has seen a poor creature come out of the 
 water after taking his first bath, whoever has seen him 
 come out pale and shuddering, must perceive how dan- 
 gerous such experiments are to certain constitutions. 
 Be assured that none of us would submit to so much 
 suffering if health could be as readily secured with- 
 16* 
 
370 BATHS. 
 
 out suffering and jyithout danger, in one's own house, 
 and by common fresh water hydropathy. 
 
 And, as though the impression of a first sea-bath were 
 not suf&ciently strong, it is aggravated for a nervous 
 woman by the presence of the crowd of bathers. For 
 her it is a cruel exhibition to make before a critical 
 crowd, before rivals, delighted to see her ugly, for once ; 
 before silly and heartless men, who, with telescope in 
 hand, watch the sad hazards of the toilette of the poor 
 humiliated woman. 
 
 To brave all this the patient must have faith, great, 
 surpassing faith, in the Sea. She must believe that rio 
 other remedy will meet her case, and must determine 
 that, at whatever risks, she will be permeated by the 
 virtues of the sea water. " And why not be thus iper- 
 meaied ? " ask the German physicians. " If at first en- 
 tering the water you contract and close up your pores, 
 reaction brings almost immediately a warmth that re- 
 opens them, dilates the skin and renders it very capa- 
 ble of absorbififf the life of the sea." 
 
 The two operations, the closing and the reopening of 
 the pores, the first chill and the succeeding glow, almost 
 always take place in five or six minutes. To stay in 
 longer than the latter space of time, is almost always 
 injurious. 
 
 Moreover, we should not venture upon this violent 
 emotion of the cold bath without a preliminary course 
 
BESTOKATION OF BEAUTY. 371 
 
 of warm bathing, 'to facilitate absorption. Our skin 
 which is entirely composed of the little mouths which 
 we call pores, and which, in its way, both absorbs and 
 'digests, as the stomach does, wants time to get accus- 
 tomed to such strong nourishment as the mucus of the 
 sea, that salted milk with which the sea makes and re- 
 makes such myriads of creatures. By a graduated 
 course of baths, hot, warm, lukewarm, and almost cold, 
 the skin acquires this habit, and, so to speak, this ap- 
 petite ; and " increase of appetite grows by what it 
 feeds on." 
 
 For the hard ceremony of the first cold sea-water 
 baths, at least, the odious gaze of a mob of people is to 
 be avoided. Let them be taken in private and with no 
 one present but a perfectly reliable person who, at need, 
 will help the nervous patient, and rub her with hot 
 cloths and revive her with warm drinks containing a 
 few drops of the potent elixir. 
 
 "Butj" it may be said, " the presence of other bath- 
 ers lessens the danger ; we are far different from Vir- 
 ginia, who, in an extreme danger, preferred drowning 
 herself to taking a bath." A great mistake ; we are 
 more nervOus now than ever we were. And the im- 
 pression of which I speak is at once so vivid and so 
 revolting — I mean for nervous people — that it is quite 
 capable of killing, by aneurism or apoplexy. 
 
 I love the people, but I hate a mob ; especially a 
 
372 
 
 BATHS. 
 
 noisy mob of fast livers who come to saddeu tbe great 
 Sea with their noise, their fashions, and their absurdi- 
 ties. What ! Is not the land large enough ? Must such 
 people come to the Sea to martyrize the sicli and to' 
 vulgarize the majesty of the Sea,, that wild and true 
 grandeur ? 
 
 I once had the ill luck to run from Havre to Honfleur . 
 in a craft loaded with such fools. Even in that short 
 trip they found time to grow weary of quiet, and to get 
 up a ball. One of them — probably a dancing master 
 -^ had his Kit with him and played all sorts of dances 
 in the presence of that great Ocean. Happily one 
 could not hear much of that small music ; scarcely now 
 and then could a shrill note or two rise above the sol- 
 emn, tl^e truly solemn bass of the Sea's roar. I can 
 easily imagine the sadness of the lady who, in July, 
 suffers under the invasion of a mob of these fops, fools, 
 and gossips. All liberty is then at an end. Even in 
 the most retired spot the drowsy ear of night is vexed 
 by the boisterous echoes from saloon, and dancing 
 room, coffee-room and Casino. In the day the host of 
 yellow gloves and varnished boots crowds the shore. 
 One lady is observed alone, with her boy. Why is 
 that ? Impertinents wish to know, they approach, and, 
 gathering sea shells for the child, endeavor to force their 
 conversation on the mother. The lady is embarrassed, 
 bored to death, and has to confine herself to her 
 
RESTORATION OF BEAUTY. 373 
 
 lodging or venture out only in early morning, while the 
 empty pated revellers are still sleeping off the effects of 
 the last night's follies. Then, from her seclusion flow 
 a thousand ill natured comments. She becomes alarmed, 
 for some of these idlers have influence and may, possi- 
 bly, injure her husband. 
 
 Nowhere more than at the sea side, are we inquisi- 
 tive, and the poor woman becomes- agitated and sleep- 
 less during the long hot nights of July and August, and 
 if, towards morning, she at length sleeps, she is not much 
 more tranquil. The baths, far from cooling, add the 
 saline irritation to the fierce heat of the dog days. 
 Prom her youth she derives, not strength, but fever ; 
 and, weak and highly nervous, she is all the more dis- 
 turbed by that interior storm. 
 
 Interior, but yet not hidden. The Sea, the pitiless 
 Sea, brings to the skin the proofs of that excitement 
 which the sufferer would fain keep hidden. She be- 
 trays it by red blotches, slight efflorescences. All these 
 petty annoyances, which still more afflict the children, 
 and which in them the mother looks upon as signs of 
 returning health, the mothers feel as humiliations when 
 seen on their own faces. They fear that they will 
 therefore be less loved. So little do they know of the 
 heart of man. They know not that the sharpest spur 
 of love is not beauty, but suffering. 
 
374 
 
 BATHS. 
 
 " Oh ! If he should find me ugly ! " is the poor wo- 
 man's morning thought, as she looks in her glass. She 
 at once fears and desires the coming of her husband. 
 And yet she feels so lonely, and fears, she knows not 
 what, amidst that noisy crowd. She dares not go out, 
 she becomes feverish, and at length is confined to her 
 bed. In little more than twenty-four hours, the belov- 
 ed one is by her side. 
 
 Who has summoned him ? She certainly has not. 
 But, in his great straggling handwriting, her boy has 
 written to his father thus : " My dear Papa, come 
 quickly. Mamma is confined to bed, and the other day 
 she said ' oh if he were here ! ' " And accordingly he 
 was there, and immediately she felt herself recovering. 
 And he, how happy he is ! Happy to see her restored, 
 happy to be necessary to her, and happy to see her look- 
 ing so beautiful. She is somewhat sun burnt, but how 
 young she looks ! What life in her glance, and in her 
 flowing and silky hair ! 
 
 Is this mere fiction, this so prompt restoration of life, 
 beauty, and tenderness ; this delightful incident of find- 
 ing in a wife, a young mistress, so happy in being re- 
 joined by a husband ? Not at all. It is an agreeable 
 sight which right often may be witnessed. If rare 
 among the very rich, it is not so among the laborious 
 families whose labor makes them, during most of their 
 
RESTORATION OF BEAUTY. 375 
 
 lives, close prisoners. Their forced separations arc 
 painful, and their reunion has a charm, a rapture, which 
 they do not even try to conceal. 
 
 When we consider the prodigious tension of moderp 
 life, for toiling men, (that is to say, for every one but a 
 few idlers) one cannot but be glad to witness those 
 scenes of joy, when a reunited family expand their 
 hearts. Those who have no hearts, call all tliis vulgar 
 and prosaic. But, the form matters little, where the 
 substance is so surpassingly good. The careworn 
 merchant, who, from three months to three months, has 
 only with utmost difficulty saved the bark in which the 
 destiny of his wife and children is exposed to ship- 
 wreck ; the administration victim ; the employ^, worn 
 well nigh to death by the injugtice and tyranny of the 
 offices — these suffering captives, are released, for a 
 brief space, from their galling chains, and the tender 
 family, the mother and child, endeavor to make the 
 husband and father forget his cares. 
 
 And well able are wife and child to wile the worn 
 man into that sweet temporary oblivion. Their gaiety, 
 their caresses, and the distractions of the sea-side, soothe 
 his wearied soul, and fill his mind with other and hap- 
 pier thoughts. It is their triumph. They hurry off to vis- 
 it their beach, to contemplate their sea, and to enjoy his 
 admiration, which he, worthy man, just a little exagger- 
 ates, because he wishes them to be pleased. Yes ! it is 
 
376 BATHS. 
 
 their sea ; having bathed in it, they have taken posses- 
 sion ; and he, the toilworn husband and father, must 
 share with them in their vast possession. The young 
 woman no longer fears that crowd which formerly so 
 much annoyed, and even alarmed, her ; now that he is 
 beside her she is not merely safe, but bold, daring ; to 
 say the truth, just a little presumptuous. She is quite 
 familiar with the sea ; familiar enough to be determined 
 to learn to swim. At first she is supported by her ac- 
 tive and bold boy. Supported by him, she swims — 
 but I fear if left to herself her native timidity would 
 return, and she would sink. Yet she is in love with 
 the sea ; yea, jealous of the sea. For, in fact, the sea 
 inspires no moderate passions. There is I know not 
 what of electric inspiration, of all-absorbing passion 
 for the Sea, in all who truly know it. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE BESTOEATION OP HEART APfD BEOTHEEHOOD, 
 
 There are three forms : of Nature which especially ex- 
 pand and elevate our souls, release her from her heavy 
 clay and earthy limits, and send her, exulting, to sail 
 amidst the wonders and mysteries of the Infinite. 
 
 First ; there is the variable Ocean of Air with its 
 glorious banquet of light, its vapors, its twilight, and 
 its shifting phantasmagoria of capricious creatures ; 
 coming into existence only to depairt on the instant. 
 
 Second ; there is the fixed Ocean of the earth, its 
 undulating and vast waves as we see them from the 
 tops of " earth o'er gazing mountains," the elevations 
 which testify its antique mobility, and the sublimity of 
 its mightier mountains clad in eternal snows. 
 
 Third ; there is the Ocean of waters, less mobile than 
 air, less fixed than earth, but docile, in its movements, 
 to the celestial bodies. 
 
 These three things form the gamut by which the In- 
 finite speaks to our souls. Nevertheless, let us point 
 
378 THE RESTORATION 
 
 out some very notable differences. The air-Ocean is so 
 mobile that we can scarcely examine it. It deceives, it 
 decoys, it diverts ; it dissipates and breaks up our chain 
 of thought. For an instant, it is an immense hope, 
 the day of an infinity ; — anon, it is not so ; all flies 
 from before us, and our hearts are grieved, agitated, 
 and filled with doubt. Why have I been permitted to 
 see for a moment that immense flood of light ? The 
 memory of that brief gleaming must ever abide witli me, 
 and that memory makes all things here on Earth look 
 dark. 
 
 The fixed ocean of the mountains is not thus transient 
 or fugitive ; on the contrary, it stops us at every step, 
 and imposes upon us the necessity of a very hard, 
 though wholesome, gymnastic. Contemplation here has 
 to be bought at the price of the most violent action. 
 N*evertheless, the opacity of the Earth, like the trans- 
 parency of the air, frequently deceives and bewilders 
 us. Who can forget that for ten years Ramon, in vain, 
 sought ho reach Mount Perdu, though often within sight 
 of itf 
 
 Great, very great, is the difference between the two 
 elements ; the Earth is mute and the Ocean speaks. 
 The Ocean is a voice. It speaks to the distant stars, it 
 answers to their movements in its deep and solemn 
 language. It speaks to, the Earth on the shores, 
 replying to the echoes that reply again ; by turns 
 
OP HEART AND BROTHERHOOD 379 
 
 wailing, soothing, threatening, its deepest roar is 
 pi-eseutly succeeded by a sad, pathetic sigh. And 
 it especially addresses itself to Man. As it is the 
 fecund womb in which creation began and still con- 
 tinues, it has creation's living eloquence ; it is Life 
 speaking to Life ! The millions, the countless myriads, 
 of beings, to which it gives birth, are its words. That 
 milky Sea from which they proceed, that fecund marine 
 jelly, even before it is organized, while yet white and 
 foaming, — speaks. All these mingled together makes 
 the unity, the great and solemn voice of the Ocean. 
 
 And, " what are those wild waves saying ? " They are 
 telling of Life, of the eternal Metamorphosis ; of the 
 great fluid existence, shaming our senseless ambitions 
 of the earth-world. 
 
 They are telling of Immortality. An indomitable 
 strength is at the bottom of Nature, how much more so 
 at Nature's summit, the Soul ! And it speaks of Part- 
 nership, of Union. Let us accept the swift exchange 
 which, in the individual, exists between the diverse 
 elements ; let us accept the superior Law which unites 
 the living members of the same body — Humanity ; and, 
 still more, let us accept and respect the supreme Law 
 which makes us create and cooperate with the Great 
 Soul, associated as we are — in proportion with our 
 powers, — with the loving Harmony of the world — co- 
 partners in the Life of God. 
 
880 THE RESTORATION 
 
 Tho Sea very distinctly, ia that voice that is mis- 
 takenly supposed to be a mere confusion of sounds, artic- 
 ulates those grave words. But man does not easily re- 
 cognize those words, when he first arrives on the shore 
 exhausted by worldly struggles, deafened, distracted, by 
 worldly babble. The sense of the higher life is dulled 
 even among the best of us ; the best of us, to a greater 
 or less extent, resist that sense. And who shall teaCh 
 us to quicken and obey that sense ? Nature ? Not yet. 
 Softened into tenderness by the family, by the inno- 
 cence of the child and the tenderness of the wife, man 
 first takes an interest, real and strong, in the things of 
 humanity, in the cares and studies which tend to pre- 
 serve the family. But woman is earlier and more 
 deeply interested in the Sea, in the Poetry of the In- 
 finite. And thus we see that souls have sexes as well 
 as bodies have. For the man thinks of the seaman 
 more than of the sea's wonders ; he thinks of its dan- 
 gers, of its daily and hourly tragedies, and of. the float- 
 ing destiny of his family. The woman, tender as she 
 is to individuals, takes less interest in classes. Every 
 laborious man, who visits the coast, bestows his princi- 
 pal attention and his principal sympathy upon the hard 
 life of the man of toil, the fisherman and the sailor; 
 upon that hard hard life so laborious and perilous and 
 so little productive of gain. 
 
 Such a man, while his wife rises and dresses her 
 
OP HEART AND BROTHERHOOD. 381 
 
 sweet child, walks upon the beach in the early morning 
 just as the fishing boats return. The morning is cold, 
 the night has been rainy, and the boats have shipped 
 many a heavy sea. The men, and not only men but 
 very small boys, too, are wet to the skin. And what 
 have they brought back ? Not much ; — but they have 
 come back, and that is much. For last night, see you, 
 they shipped many a sea and looked at death closely 
 many a time. Ah ! When the stranger reflects upon 
 the hard life brought immediately under his purview, 
 surely, however much he may have complained of his 
 own lot, he will now learn to say " My lot is far better 
 than theirs." 
 
 In the evening, just when the sun sets, coppery and 
 threatening, into the sinister horizon, these men already 
 have to sail again. And the stranger says to them, 
 " Shall you not have bad weather, think you ? " " Sir," 
 they reply, "we must earn our bit of bread," and they 
 and their sturdy boys push off to Sea. And their wives, 
 more than serious, sad, follow them with their eyes ; 
 and more than one of those wives whisper an earnest 
 prayer. And the stranger, too, whispers his prayer, 
 and says to himself, " They will have a dirty night ; 
 would that they may return in safety," 
 
 And thus it is that the Sea opens the heart, and that 
 even the hardest hearts are softened in presence of tho 
 
382 THE RESTORATION 
 
 great stern mother. In that presence, no matter what we 
 may stiive to think, we become humanized, sympathiz- 
 ing, tender. And Heaven knows how much need and 
 how much occasion there are for sympathy there ! Every 
 kind of want and struggle is to be found among those 
 brave, honest and intelligent marine populations who 
 are incomparably the best of our country. I have lived 
 a good deal on the coast. Every heroic virtue, which 
 an inland population would praise so highly, is there an 
 every day and very common-place matter. And, still 
 more curious ! — there is no pride among these hardy 
 mariners. All our French pride is for the landsmen — 
 the soldiery. But among our marine population the 
 greatest dangers count for nothing ; every one braves 
 such every day, and no one ever thinks of boasting of 
 them. I have never met with men who were milder or 
 more modest (I had almost said more timid) than our 
 Gironde pilots who, from Royan and from St. George's 
 gallantly put out, to face all that Cordouan has of peril. 
 There, as at Granville, and every where else on that 
 coast, it is the women alone who have anything to say, 
 or any business to do, on land. The brave pilots, when 
 once on shoi-e, never say a word in the way of command ; 
 peaceable as their valiant wives are superbly noisy, the 
 men leave the women full authority to administer the 
 poor income and to rule (occasionally with a pretty 
 
OP HEART AND BROTHErwHOOD. 383 
 
 hard hand) the youngsters of the household. The hus- 
 band, in fact, though he reads no Latin, literally and 
 practically translates the Latin poet : 
 
 " Happy, when in mine own house I am as nobody." 
 
 Their wives, greatly interested about the foreigner, 
 had, nevertheless, let it be boldly as truly said, a royal, a 
 magnificent, a generous, kindly feeling. At St. Georges, 
 they cut up, and scraped up, all their linen to make lint 
 for the wounded at Solferino. At Entretat, three En- 
 glishmen being wrecked, and in awful danger, the whole 
 population, men, women and children, rushed to the 
 rescue, and dragged them to land with all the outward 
 and visible signs of a real and a ^violent sensibility. 
 And they were fed, and clothed, and tended, and re- 
 lieved, even as though they had been compatriots, and 
 very dear friends. This occurred in April, 1859. 
 
 Oh ! Those kind French people ! And yet, how hard, 
 hitherto, has been their life ! In our regime of Classes 
 (so useful, however, in itself, and from which we de- 
 rive so much of giant strength) the sailor is compelled, 
 at any moment, to leave the merchant service for the 
 war ship, daily and hourly growing more severe, more 
 crushing, in its hard discipline ! Forty years ago the 
 sailor sang, as he worked at the capstan bar ; nov he 
 heaves in silence. (lal. Arch IL 522). And in the 
 merchant service, the great fisheries are almost worked 
 out. The profits of the Whale Fishery belong, almost 
 
384 THE RESTORATION 
 
 entirely, to the outfitter. (Boitard, Diet. art. Cetacese, 
 Whales, &c.) The Cod has diminished, the Mackerel 
 grows more and more scarce. A very precious little 
 book (TAe Story of Rose Duchenin, by herself) gives 
 a most touching picture of this great destitution. Al- 
 phonse Karr, that admirable writer, had the good sense 
 to write that book from the dictation of that Fisher- 
 man's Wife, without altering a word of hers, or adding 
 a word of his own. 
 
 Etretat is not, properly speaking, a port. Situated 
 little, if any, above the level of the Sea, and defended 
 only by the pebbly bar which the sea has washed in, it 
 is but poorly sheltered. And consequently, it is ne- 
 cessary that, according to the old Celtic custom, every 
 vessel that runs in there, must be hauled up to the Quay 
 by the cable and the capstan ; the capstan bars being 
 handled by the women, for the lads are all at sea. The 
 labor and the difficulty will be easily understood by all 
 who read this. The lubberly craft, as it is drawn up, 
 hits hard from boulder to boulder, and ascends only by 
 leaps, violent and damaging, and still more threatening 
 than either. And at every leap and every shock, 
 those poor women suffer from the hard blow to their 
 necks and from the bitterly painful emotions of their 
 poor hearts. 
 
 When I first witnessed this terrible labor, I was 
 wounded, saddened in mine inmost heart. My first 
 
OF HEART AND BROTHERHOOD. 385 
 
 inftpulse was to bear a hand and lend my aid. But the 
 thing would seem so singular, I thought, that a some- 
 thing, I know not what, of false shame, arrested me. 
 But every day I lent a hand, at least with my wishes 
 and my prayers. I went, and looked. Those young 
 and charming, though anything but pretty, women and 
 girls did not sport the short red petticoat of the coasts, 
 but long robes ; and for the most part, they had the re- 
 fined and delicate aspect of the young lady of the great 
 city. Bending to that hard toil (a filial, and, therefore, 
 a noble toil) they had a certain mingled grace and 
 pride, and, in all that hard toil, not a complaint, not 
 even a sigh, escaped them. 
 
 That very small Quay of Boulders, small as it is, yet 
 is too large. I saw there a number of vessels, aban- 
 doned, useless. For, see you, the Fishery has become 
 so unproductive I The fish have fled that shore. En- 
 tretat languishes, perishes, so near to languishing, and, 
 but for its sea-bathing, perishing, Dieppe, which owes 
 its present existence — such as it is ! — to the greater 
 or less number of visitors, who render Dieppe in one 
 season prosperous, and in another as nearly as possible, 
 bankrupt. And this very influx from Paris, worldly 
 Paris, is, after all, morally, at least, a real scourge to 
 that marine popula-tion. 
 
 Our Noinian populations who discovered America, 
 
 and who, ever since the fourteenth century, have known 
 17 
 
386 THE RESTORATION 
 
 Africa, are every year becoming less and less in love 
 with the sea, so that, year by year, more and more of 
 them are turning their faces inland. The descendant 
 of the bold fellow who formerly harpooned the Whale, 
 is now a pale cotton-spinner of Montville or of Balbec, 
 
 It is for Science, it is for the Law, to put a stop to 
 this fearful decay. The former with its skill, its sound 
 advice will, — if such advice be resolutely acted upon, 
 economJ.se tlie Sea and revive that Fishery which is 
 the very nursery of Seamen ; and in the next place, 
 the Law, less exclusively caring for the interests of the 
 real elite, the real flower and elect of the country, in no 
 wise to be compared to those great masses from which 
 we draw our soldiery, but who, under given circum- 
 stances, will be able to cut the Gordian knot of the 
 world. 
 
 Such were my reflections, on the little wharf or Quay 
 of Etretat, in the cloudy and rainy summer of 1860, 
 while the capstan bar was heaved at by young females, 
 while the capstan screamed at every turn, and while the 
 whole scene put one in mind of desolation for the pre- 
 sent, and ivorse to come. 
 
 And thus is it with our century. Ever since 1730, 
 and so in the present day, labor, fatigue, and slowness 
 have been upon us. Let us all, of no matter what rank, 
 put hand and strength to the capstan bar ! But, alas ! 
 how many of us prefer picking vp pebbles on the wild 
 sea shore ! 
 
OP HEART AND BROTHERHOOD. 887 
 
 We read that Scipio, stern conqueror of Carthage, 
 and Terence, the lucky refugee from that shipwreck of a 
 world, amused themselves in picking up shells on the 
 sea shore ; capital friends in their forgetfulness of the 
 past. They enjoyed the dolce far niente ; they were 
 luxurious in their enjoyment of the illusion of being 
 boys once more. But let not that be our wish. We 
 will not, we must not, we dare not, forget our duty ; no, 
 with persistent labor, with uncooling ardor, we will put 
 our hands to the capstan bar, and help to warp up this 
 great, but worn and much tried century. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE NEW LIFE OF THE NATIONS. 
 
 Just as I was finishing this book, in December, 1860, 
 resuscitated Italy, that great and glorious mother of the 
 modern nations, sent me tidings, in the shape of a small 
 book, a mere pamphlet. It was my " New Year's gift 
 for 1861." 
 
 And from that Italy how often have we had great 
 and beautiful tidings ? In 1300 news from Dante ; in 
 1500 news from Americus Vespucius ; in 1600 from 
 Galileo. And what are our present tidings from Flor- 
 ence? 
 
 Apparently, but small. But who knows ? Perhaps 
 the results will be immense ! It is a discourse of but a 
 few pages, a medical pamphlet, and its very title is 
 more likely to repel than to attract. And, yet, in 
 those few pages there is matter which, duly acted upon, 
 may change the whole destiny of our great, but weak, 
 our often wise, but still more often mistaken Humanity. 
 
 Opposite to the Title I find two portraits, one a 
 
THK NEW LIFE OP THE NATIONS. 389 
 
 deceased boy, and another dying. The author of the 
 pamphlet is a Doctor, who, very unusual thing ! has 
 been so terribly impressed by the fate of his poor un- 
 known and, but for him, uncared for children, that he 
 has been led to write for our instruction, his pain and 
 his regret. 
 
 .The elder of these children, of a fine and high na- 
 ture, in the bitterness, as it would seem, of a great des- 
 tiny cut short, has a bouquet upon his pillow. His 
 mother, — poor, poor, mother ! has given it to him this 
 morning, having nothing else to give, and the nurses, 
 seeing the quite religious love with which he cared for 
 the poor gift of that poor mother, have allowed him to 
 keep it. 
 
 The second, still younger, in all the tender grace of 
 his four or five years, is evidently dying ; his eyes are 
 fast veiling beneath the death film. Each of these poor 
 boys had shown sympathy for the other. When they 
 could no longer speak their sympathy, they looked it 
 in their tender glances, and the good kind Doctor, 
 (blessings on him for the kindly thought ! ) had them 
 placed opposite to each other, and his engraying shows 
 them to us (touching sight), just as, dying, they 
 exchanged their sympathizing glances ! 
 
 The whole is truly, and nobly, Italian. In any other 
 country a man would fear to be laughed at in showing 
 himself thus truly tender. Not so in Italy. The 
 
390 THE NEW LIFE OF THE NATIONS. 
 
 Doctor wrote to his Italian public, just as he might 
 soliloquise in the privacy of his own study ; and he 
 unreservedly pours out all his feelings with an intensity, 
 with a perfectly feminine sensibility, which will make the 
 worldly man laugh, and the kindly man weep. And it 
 must be confessed that his native language has much to 
 do with his power over our feelings ; it is the language 
 of women and children, at once so tender and so strik- 
 ing, beautiful even in its terrible accent of grief and 
 suffering. It is a shower of mingled tears and roses. 
 
 And then he suddenly stops himself .and apologizes. 
 He would not have written thus, but for sufi&cient cause, 
 and that cause is that " Those poor children would not 
 have died if they could have been sent to the sea-side." 
 And, the inference ? That at the sea-side we must have 
 Hospitals for children. Now here, if you please, is a 
 really skilful, as well as greatly humane, man. He 
 touches the heart ; and the rest necessarily follows. 
 Men listen attentively and are touched ; women burst 
 into an agony of tears. They beg, they pray, they in- 
 sist — and who is to resist them ? Without waiting for 
 government action, or government aid, a voluntary 
 society has founded a " Children's Sea-Bathing Hospi- 
 tal " at Viareggio. 
 
 All who have been there admire the crescent-like 
 sweep, made by the Mediterranean, when it quits 
 Genoa passes the magniiicent road of Spezzia and 
 
THE NEW LIFE OF THE NATIONS. 391 
 
 reaches the Virgilian Olive Groves of Tuscany. About 
 half way from Leghorn a cape, stolen from the Sea, is 
 the site, henceforth the sacred site, of this truly 
 admirable foundation. 
 
 Florence, by the way, has preceded all Europe in the 
 way of charitable foundations ; she had hospitals be- 
 fore the close of the tenth century, and in the year 
 1287, when Beatrice inspired and maddened Dante, her 
 father, the cruel persecutor of the greater, far greater 
 Dante, founded the hospital of St. Maria Nuova. Even 
 Luther, though in his travels he saw little to admire in 
 Italy, did admire, and very heartily, its Hospitals and 
 the beautiful Italian women, who, veiled, stood by the 
 bedsides of the sick sinner and the dying pauper. 
 
 This new foundation, of which we have spoken, will, 
 we trust, be a model for Europe. We owe that much 
 to children ; for upon them it is that fall the worst ef- 
 fects of our murderous toils and our still more murder- 
 ous excesses in every kind of bad life. 
 
 It is impossible not to perceive the visible and terri- 
 ble deterioration of our Western races. The causes of 
 it are numerous and very various. The chief of them 
 all is the immensity and the constant and rapid increase 
 of our hours of labor. For the most part, it is compul- 
 sory ; compelled by trade regulations and trade neces- 
 sities. But even where no such compulsion exists, 
 
392 THE NEW LIFE OP THE NATIONS. 
 
 there the same ardor of long hours and hard toil exists. 
 I know not what demoniac fire exists in our modern 
 temperament. Compared to ourselves, all former cen- 
 turies have been positively idle. Our results, no doubt, 
 arc immense. From our prolific brain and iron hand, 
 proceeds such a marvellous flood of art, science, inven- 
 tions, productions, and ideas, that we are actually glut- 
 ting the markets, not only of the present, but also of 
 the future. But at what cost are we doing all this ? 
 At the price of an awful expenditure of strength, and 
 of nerVtous energy ; we are enervating ourselves, our 
 works are prodigious, and oiir children are miserable. 
 We condemn them to disease, suffering, and premature 
 death even before they are born. Our spendthrift 
 waste of energy entails feebleness and early death up- 
 on them I 
 
 And let it be remembered that this immense amount 
 of production is the work of only a comparatively small 
 number. America does little of it, Asia next to noth- 
 ing, and even in Europe all, or nearly all, is done by a 
 few millions in the extreme West. The others laugh 
 to see the really working peoples thus wear themselves 
 out. Poor Barbarians ! Do you fancy, then, that this 
 Russian or that Backwoodsman, can replace, at need, a 
 mechanic of London or an optician of Paris ? No ; 
 we have become such by the education and the practice 
 
THE NEW LIFE OP THE NATIONS. 393 
 
 of long centuries. A whole and a very long tradition 
 is in us. What would become of you if we should die ? 
 None of you are ready to succeed us. 
 
 But this same murderous toil, this absolutely suicidal 
 production, if we be willing to accept it for ourselves, 
 it is our duty not to accept it for our children ; we have 
 no right thus to add murder to suicide. And, yet, that 
 is what we really are doing. They are born already, 
 with our fatigue, our cerebral exhaustion. With a per- 
 fectly frightful precocity, they know, they can, they will, 
 and they do. But how long ? The grave opens for 
 them so early ! 
 
 The human infant, like the young plant, needs rest, 
 air, and a sweet liberty. Do we give our children any 
 of these ? No ; our very virtues, as well as our vices, 
 deny them all. Everything seems to combine to kill 
 them early. Do we love them ? No doubt ; and yet 
 our worst malice could not do more than we do to kill 
 them early or to cause them to live miserably, pitiful]}', 
 sufFeringly, effeminate. Such a society as ours, so over- 
 worked, so over excited, so constantly agitated, is, 
 (whether society will confess it or not) a real, and a 
 murderous war upon our children. 
 
 Especially there are times and seasons in the course 
 of the child's growth when his life quite literally hangs 
 upon a thread. Life, at those times, seems to borrow 
 human voice, and to ask, — " Can I possibly last ? " 
 
394 THE NEW LIFE OP THE NATIONS. 
 
 At those critical times, see you, the contact of so many, 
 the close, sedentary, and imprisoned life of cities, is 
 just simply Death to those delicate and fading crea- 
 tures. Or, even worse than Death, it is the commence- 
 ment of a long career of suffering and helplessness far 
 worse than Death itself. In this latter case you leave 
 a poor creature who, now sick, now well, drags on a 
 wretched existence, a misery to himself and a burthen 
 upon public charity. 
 
 All this must be cut short. We must have foresight 
 combined with humanity. We must snatch the child 
 from these murderous surroundings ; we must take him 
 from man and give him to the grand nursing of the fe- 
 cund Nature — of the Sea. And, then, the child will 
 live and become Man. Your very foundlings, if you 
 thus treat them may some day become your Nelsons 
 and your Napiers, and your community, instead of hav- 
 ing to support an habitual patient of your hospitals, 
 will have the bold seaman or the strong laborer. 
 
 And, for the matter of that, why need we depend up- 
 on the State to do this great thing ? Florence hath 
 taught us that the royal heart is fully equal to any oth- 
 er royalty ; woman in her mercy, is a royalty ; she 
 commands, entreats, and man obeys. Woman ! Have 
 mercy upon the children ! 
 
 If I were a young and lovely woman, I well know 
 what /should say, and what 1 should do.. I should 
 
THE NEW LIFE OP THE NATIONS. 395 
 
 have all around me my magnificence and my luxury, 
 and when on some fine day, my lover in his love should 
 be eager, passionate, ready to give great gifts, I would 
 say to him : — 
 
 " Please ofi"er me none of your Cachemires, designed 
 in England and woven in India ; for Diamonds I 
 really care nothing ; Berthollet who knows so well how 
 to imitate Nature can make Diamonds, if he so please. 
 But if you really wish to make me a present which I 
 shall love, and for which I shall love you, be so good as 
 to get me a nice well sheltered, yet beautifully sunny 
 home, in which I can lodge some three score, or so, of 
 poor children. They will want no fine furniture ; not 
 much of any kind. Once established in that sunny, 
 quiet, and kindly home, they will be well fed, and well 
 cared for ; and, my word for it, not a woman will go to 
 the sea-side for her own health who will not give her 
 mite towards the support of those poor children. If 
 Beatrice of Florence could influence her father to found 
 such a home, such a saving refuge, cannot we women of 
 France do as much ? Is it that we are less beautiful, 
 or are you less truly in Love ? " 
 
 " If the Sea, as you every morning tell me, has beau- 
 tified and improved me so much ; surely, your best gift 
 would be my keepsake for the beach. And if you 
 really love me, you will share with me in this work, 
 this great work of bringing to the bosom of the great 
 
396 THE NEW LIFE OP THE NATIONS. 
 
 Ocean-mother a whole family of these perishing chil- 
 dren. Let her take our pledges of a durable tender- 
 ness and purest love ! Let her bear witness that, in the 
 presence of the Infinite, we were, in very truth, united 
 in one holy thought I " 
 
 One woman has thus commenced and another will 
 continue, the common mother, France. No Institution 
 more useful, no money better expended. And, in fact, 
 not much needs to be expended. The chief thing ne- 
 cessary will be to transfer some of our charitable 
 institutions from the interior. For many of those 
 institutions expend their funds in mere waste ; in fact, 
 some of them might be quite truly termed Pauper 
 Manufactories. 
 
 The Romans had the good sense never to grudge ex- 
 pense for anything that concerned the public health. 
 Just look at their splendid aqueducts, just consider 
 their public baths where quite gratuitously, or, at the 
 utmost, at the charge of a half cent, the meanest could 
 bathe, and you will at once understand their public 
 spirit, their really large and grand patriotism. Fresh 
 water baths, salt water baths, everything was provided 
 for that lazy and non-producing plebeianism ! Perhaps, 
 in fact, in the politico-economical sense, the Patricians 
 of Rome did too much for that, at once indolent and 
 seditious Plebs. And shall we, we, WE hesitate to do 
 far less to save our o^fn r£^ce, th^t Que creative and 
 
THE NEW LIFE OP THE NATIONS. 897 
 
 laborious race that creates all that is really progressive 
 on our globe ? 
 
 I speak not here merely, or even principally, of the 
 children ;• but of all. Every town, at this very instant, 
 has a town within a town, a town of horrible sufferers ; 
 of the poor, and the afflicted ; they are going to be 
 Paupers not only now, but for the whole remainder of 
 their lives. Again, and again, and again they will 
 come ; cured to-day, and returning to-morrow worse 
 and more helpless than ever. They must be enormously 
 expensive ; and who pays the cost ? Why their hardier 
 fellow workmen who, in the ultimate result, pay all our 
 expenses ! And the laborer dies young, and leaves his 
 young ones a burthen on the public purse. 
 
 Prevention is better than cure. You can do far more 
 for the man who is in danger of being sick than for him 
 who is already worn out. Ten days or a fortnight of 
 rest and good^living at the sea-side, will restore him to 
 you, a good, sound, solid laborer. His carriage, and 
 the cheap shelter, for so few days ! by that recuperat- 
 ing sea-side, I tell you again, will restore him to you, a 
 good sound, honest, and independent laborer. And 
 the man will be saved, and his young family ; and such 
 a man as, if you once lose him, you cannot easily re- 
 place. No ! You cannot replace him, for, as I have 
 already said, every really working man is the slow 
 product, of a long tradition of thought and of labor, and 
 
398 THE NEW LIFE OF THE NATIONS. 
 
 he himself is a work of art ; of that so much misunder- 
 stood human art in which Humanity itself becomes a 
 creative Power. 
 
 "Who shall give me to see that crowd of inventive 
 people, that creating and manufacturing people, who in 
 the world's service are hourly wearing themselves out ; 
 who, I ask, will give me to see that People, that true 
 People, enabled to repair their shattered frames at the 
 magnificent sea-side ? Let this ability be provided for 
 them, and all classes and conditions will equally share 
 the benefit. And let it not be forgotten that all classes 
 and conditions owe thus much to the worn toilers, for 
 by their toil, their excessive toil, all classes are benefit- 
 ed. It is by their very blood, by their very marrow, that 
 all classes receive their enjoyments, their elegance, and 
 their enlightenment. Let society, then, give to them 
 the repose, the saline air, the restoring waters of the 
 great restoring Sea. In doing thus much, society will 
 benefit itself; while doing the simplest justice to its 
 worn toilers. 
 
 Have pity upon yourselves, all ye poor men of the 
 West. Consult upon, and act for, the common weal. 
 Earth entreats you to live and offers you that which is 
 her best, the SEA, to repair your own strength and thus 
 secure your children against your weakness. Earth 
 would be ruined if you persist in ruining yourselves, 
 for you are her Genius, her inventive and working Soul. 
 
THE NEW-LIFE OF THE NATIONS. 399 
 
 She lives by your life, and if you die she also will die. 
 In the name, then, of Humanity and of Nature, too, 
 Nations ! Attention ! Mercy for yourselves ; Earth 
 supplies you with the means of laboring and living ; 
 THE SEA offers you the still better means of living 
 WELL. 
 
NOTES. 
 
 " Thai vast animal the Earth, which for heart has a magnet, has at 
 its snrfece a doubtful being, electric and phosphorescent, more sensitive, 
 and infinitely more prolific, than the Earth itself. 
 
 " That being which we call the Sea, — is it a parasite of the vast ani- 
 mal which we call the Earth ? No. It has not a distinct and hostile 
 personality. It vivifies and fecundates the Earth with its vapors; it 
 even appears to be the Earth itself in that which it has of the most pro- 
 ductive; in other words, its principal organ of fecundity." 
 
 Crerman Dreams ! But are they, in feet, entirely Dreams 7 More 
 than one great mind, without going quite so far, seem to admit for both 
 Earth and Sea a kind of obscure personality. Ritter and Lyell say: 
 " The Earth labors herself; can she be impotent to organise herself 7 How 
 are we to imagine that the creative power which we observe in every 
 being on the globe can be denied to the globe itself 7 " But how does 
 the globe act 7 How at the present time does it obtain accretion 7 From 
 the Sea and its living denizens. 
 
 The full solution of thes9»great questions would require a more pro- 
 found study of Physiology than we as yet have made. Nevertheless, 
 during the last twenty years every thing tends this way : 1. We have 
 studied the irregular and exterior phase of the movements of the Sea, we 
 have inquired into the Law of Storms. 2. We have studied the move- 
 ments proper to the Sea, its currents, the play of its arteries and veins, 
 of which the first propel the salt water from the Equator to the Poles, 
 while the second return it, freshened, to the Equator : 3. The third and 
 more difficult question on which inodern chemistry will throw light, is 
 that as to the real nature of the marine mucus, of that unctuous gela- 
 tine which ia every where found in Sea water, and which appears to be a 
 living liquid. 
 
 It is quite recently that the sounding of Brooke, and more especially 
 the soundings for the submarine telegraph from Europe to America, 
 have begun to reveal the secrets of the bottom of the Sea. Are its lowest 
 
402 NOTES. 
 
 depths peopled? Formerly, that was denied, but Forbes and James 
 Koss found life throughout them. 
 
 Previous to those splendid discoveries, which were made less than 
 twenty years ago, the booli of the Sea could not be written. The- first 
 attempt at writing it was made by M. Hartwig. For my own part, I 
 was still far from the Idea of writing it when, in 1845, in preparing my 
 book of " The People," I commenced, in Normandy, my study of the 
 population of the Coasts. In the fifteen subsequent years, this vast and 
 difficult subject has been continually growing upon me, and has followed 
 me from shore to shore. 
 
 The first book of this Volume — i glanoe at the Seas, is, as the title 
 indicates, merely a preliminary promenade. All the important matters 
 therein are discussed in the following three books. I except two, 
 however. Tides and Beacons. Here my principal guide has been M. 
 Chazallon's important Annual, already numbering twenty volumes, the 
 first having appearing in 1839. If the Civic Crown was bestowed upon 
 the man who saved one human life, how many such crowns has not M. 
 Ohazallon deserved ! Anterior to his labors, the errors, as to the tides, 
 were enormous. By immense labor he has corrected the observations 
 fijr nearly five hundred ports from the Adour to the Elbe. His Annual 
 gives the most exact information upon the Beacons. Similarly valuable 
 is the clear and agreeably written exposition in the Souvenirs of M. de 
 Quatrefages on the Lighthouse system of Fresnel and Arago. The ad- 
 mirable system of revolving lighthouses, in which the lights flash and 
 disappear, at short and regular intervals, is due to Lemoine, Mayor of 
 Calais. 
 
 For the various names of the Sea refer to Ad. Pictet — Oriffines Indo- 
 Europeennes. On the water, consult the Introduction to Beville's 
 Annual of the Waters of France ; Aime's Annale's de Chimie II., V., 
 XII, XIII, and XV. Morren, the same, I, and Acad de Bruxelles, 
 XIV., &c. On the saltness of the Sea Chapman quoted byTricaut Ann. 
 de Hydrographie XIII, 1857, and Thomassy's Bulletin de la Societe 
 Geographique, 4 June, 1860. 
 
 I did not thoroughly comprehend the Shore of Saint Michel en Greve 
 and the questions concerning it, untU I read in the Revue des Deux- 
 mondes the two very fine articles of M. Baude, full alike of facts and 
 ideas. I speak elsewhere of his excellent views on the Fisheries. 
 
 In speaking (Chap. Ill) of Brittany, I must acknowledge my obliga- 
 tion to the book of Cambry which formerly gave me my first ideas upon 
 that subject. It should be read in the edition which Emile Souvestre 
 
NOTES. 403 
 
 enriched, and we may say doubled, with his excellent notes and notices 
 which thenceforth made us thoroughly acquainted with the Darniers 
 Bretons In several admirable little tales of graphic and striking truth- 
 fulness, Souvestre has given the best existing pictures of our western 
 coasts, especially of Finisterre and the neighboring shores of the Loire. 
 I should be glad to quote something from a writer so agreeable, and a 
 friend so sincerely lamented, but the limits of this little book prevent me 
 from quoting any literary matter. 
 
 The remarkable observation made by Elie de Beaumont, quoted by 
 me in Chapter 4 of Book I. , stands at the head of his article — which, in 
 itself, is a great book — Terrains in the Dictionary of M. d'Orbigny. 
 
 What I have said about St. George's, in Chapter 7, is much better 
 said in Pelletan's books on Royan and in his Pasteur du Desert. That 
 Pastor, as is generally known , was the grand-father of Pelletan, the 
 reverend minister Jarousseau, so admirably heroic in saving his enemies. 
 His small house, still standing, is a veritable Temple of Humanity. 
 
 Notes to Book 2. Chapter I, Fecundity. On the Herring, see Vol. 
 I of De Reste's translation of an anonymous Dutch work ; Noel de la 
 Moriniere in his excellent works printed and unpublished ; Valenciences* 
 Paissons, SfC. 
 
 Chapter 11. Milky Sea. Bory de Saint Vincent, Diet. Classique, 
 Articles Mer et Matieres ; Zimmerman, the World before Man, a 
 beautiful and popular work which is in every one's hands. I am in- 
 debted also to the work of M. Bronn, crowned by the Academy of the 
 Sciences. On the universal innocuousness of the vegetation of the Sea, 
 consult Pouchet's Botanique a work of the highest order. For the 
 plants which become animals ; see Vaueher's Conferves, 1 803 ; Decaisne 
 and Thuret Annates de Sc. JVat, 1845; Volumes HI., XIV. and XVI., 
 and Comptes de I'Acad., 1853, Vol. XXXVI; also, articles of Monta- 
 gue Dictd' Orb. On the Volcanoes, see part 4, of Humboldt's Cosmos, 
 and Bitter, translated by Elisee Keclus, Revue Germ., 30th November, 
 1859. 
 
 Chapter III. The Atom. In the text I have quoted the great mas- 
 ters, Ehrenberg, Dujardin, Pouchet, Heterogenie. In the end sponta- 
 neous generation will conquer. 
 
 Chapters IV, V, VI, &c. Throughout this book, in ascending from 
 inferior to superior life, I have taken for my guiding thread in the great 
 labyrinth, the hypothesis of Metamorphosis but without serious intention 
 of constructing a chain of beings. The idea of ascending Metamorpho- 
 sis is natural to the mind, and is, in some sort, irresistibly imposed 
 
404 NOTES. 
 
 upon us. Cuvier himself, at the close of his Introduction to hia Pois- 
 sons, confesses that if that theory has no Historical value it lias a logical 
 value. On the Sponge, see Paul Gervais Diet. d'Orb. V. 375; Grant 
 in Chenn, 307, &c. On Polypes, Corals, and Madrepores (Chapters 4 
 and 5) besides Forster, Peron and Dawin consult Quoy and Gaimard ; 
 Lamouroux, Polypes Flexibles ; Milne Edwards, Polypes and Ascidies 
 of the Channel, &c. On the Calcaire, see the two Geologies of Lyell. 
 
 Chapter VI. Medusa, Polypes, &c. See Ehrenberg, Lession, Du- 
 jardin, &c. Forbes shows by vegetable analogies that these animal 
 metamorphoses are very simple phenomena. Annals of Nat. History, 
 December, 1844. See also his excellent dissertations, Medusa, in 
 quarto, 1849. 
 
 Chapter VII. The Oursin or Sea Hedgehog. See the curious dis- 
 sertations in which M. Caillaud has described his discoveries. 
 
 Chapter VIH. Shells, Pearl, and Mother of Pearl. The capital work 
 on these is Blaiuville's Malacology. See, also, on the Pearl Mabius of 
 Hamburgh, Revue Germ., July 31, 1858. I have profitably cousulted 
 on this subject our celebrated Jeweller, M. Froment Meurice. 
 
 Chapter IX, The Poulpe. Cuvier, Blainville, Dujardin Ann. des 
 Sciences Nat., first series. Vol. V. p. 214, and second series Vols. 8, 16, 
 and 17; Robin and Seoord, Locomotion of Cephalapodes, Revue de 
 Zoology, 1849, p. 333. 
 
 Chapter X. Crustaoess. Besides the classical and important work 
 of Milne Edwards, I have consulted d'Orbigny and various travelers. 
 See, also, the fine Atlas of Dumont d'Urville. 
 
 Chapter IX. Fish. The Introduction of Cuvier, Valenciennes' article 
 Fish, in d'Orbigny's Dictionary. This last article is a complete book, 
 learned and excellent. On the anatomy of Fish see the celebrated dis- 
 sertation of Geofifroy. For what I have said on the nests made by 
 spawning Fish I am indebted to Messrs. Caste and Gerbe. 
 
 Chapters XII and XIII. Whales, Amphibii and Syrens. Here, 
 Lacepede is at once instructive and eloquent. Nothing can be better 
 than Boitard's articles in d'Orbigny's Dictionary. 
 
 Notes to Book 3. Conquest of the Sea. This book sprang natur- 
 ally out of my perusal of travels and voyages from the first History of 
 Dieppe, by Vitel Estancelin, down to the recent discoveries. Especially 
 consult Kerquelon, John Ross, Parry, Weddell, Dumont, d'Urvilie 
 James Ross, and Kane; Biot in the Journal des Savants and the lu- 
 minous and precious abridgement of those works, by M. Langele in the 
 Revue des deux Mondes. On the Fishery, besides the great works of 
 
NOTES. 405 
 
 Duhamel, see Tiphaine, " Economic History of tlio Western Seas de 
 ' France, 1760." 
 
 Notes to Booe 4. Restoration by the Sea. As long ago as 1725, 
 Maraigli seems to have suspected the presence of iodine. In 1730, an 
 anonymous work, Comes Domesticus, recommended Sea Bathing. 
 
 Hie Bibliography of the Sea would be endless. There are many ex- 
 cellent books. Among them I may mention "the Mediterranean Sea," 
 by W. H. Smith, 1854, the Manuals and Guide books of Guadet, Roo- 
 cas, Cochet, Ernst, &o. 
 
 On the degeneracy of Races, see Morel, 1807: Magnus Huss, " Mco- 
 holismus," 1852, &c. 
 
 I owe my acquaintance with the pamphlet of Doctor Barellay ( Ospizi 
 JUarini) to my illustrious friend Montanelli, and to the delightftil 
 articles of M. DaU' Ongaro. 
 
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