第25章

There are a few other true cellepore corals round the coast. The largest of all, Cervicornis, may be dredged a few miles outside on the Exmouth bank, with a few more Tubulipores: but all tiny things, the lingering and, as it were, expiring remnants of that great coral-world which, through the abysmal depths of past ages, formed here in Britain our limestone hills, storing up for generations yet unborn the materials of agriculture and architecture. Inexpressibly interesting, even solemn, to those who will think, is the sight of those puny parasites which, as it were, connect the ages and the aeons: yet not so solemn and full of meaning as that tiny relic of an older world, the little pear- shaped Turbinolia (cousin of the Madrepores and Sea-anemones), found fossil in the Suffolk Crag, and yet still lingering here and there alive in the deep water of Scilly and the west coast of Ireland, possessor of a pedigree which dates, perhaps, from ages before the day in which it was said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." To think that the whole human race, its joys and its sorrows, its virtues and its sins, its aspirations and its failures, has been rushing out of eternity and into eternity again, as Arjoon in the Bhagavad Gita beheld the race of men issuing from Kreeshna's flaming mouth, and swallowed up in it again, "as the crowds of insects swarm into the flame, as the homeless streams leap down into the ocean bed," in an everlasting heart-pulse whose blood is living souls - and all that while, and ages before that mystery began, that humble coral, unnoticed on the dark sea-floor, has been "continuingas it was at the beginning," and fulfilling"the law which cannot be broken," while races and dynasties andgenerations have been"Playing such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As make the angels weep."Yes; it is this vision of the awful permanence and perfection of the natural world, beside the wild flux and confusion, the mad struggles, the despairing cries of the world of spirits which man has defiled by sin, which would at moments crush the naturalist's heart, and make his brain swim with terror, were it not that he can see by faith, through all the abysses and the ages, not merely" Hands, From out the darkness, shaping man;"but above them a living loving countenance, human and yet Divine; and can hear a voice which said at first, "Let us make man in our image;" and hath said since then, and says for ever and for ever, "Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world."But now, friend, who listenest, perhaps instructed, and at least amused - if, as Professor Harvey well says, the simpler animals represent, as in a glass, the scattered organs of the higher races, which of your organs is represented by that "sca'd man's head," which the Devon children more gracefully, yet with less adherence to plain likeness, call "mermaid's head," (12) which we picked up just now on Paignton Sands? Or which, again, by its more beautiful little congener, (13) five or six of which are adhering tightly to the slab before us, a ball covered with delicate spines of lilac and green, and stuck over (cunning fellows!) with stripes of dead sea-weed to serve as improvised parasols? One cannot say that in him we have the first type of the human skull: for the resemblance, quaint as it is, is only sensuous and accidental, (in the logical use of that term,) and not homological, I.E. a lower manifestation of the same idea. Yet how is one tempted to say, that this was Nature's first and lowest attempt at that use of hollow globes of mineral for protecting soft fleshy parts, which she afterwards developed to such perfection in the skulls of vertebrate animals! But even that conceit, pretty as it sounds, will not hold good; for though Radiates similar to these were amongthe earliest tenants of the abyss, yet as early as theirtime, perhaps even before them, had been conceived and actualized, in the sharks, and in Mr. Hugh Miller's pets the old red sandstone fishes, that very true vertebrate skull and brain, of which this is a mere mockery.

(14) Here the whole animal, with his extraordinary feeding mill, (for neither teeth nor jaws is a fit word for it,) is enclosed within an ever- growing limestone castle, to the architecture of which the Eddystone and the Crystal Palace are bungling heaps; without arms or legs, eyes or ears, and yet capable, in spite of his perpetual imprisonment, of walking, feeding, and breeding, doubt it not, merrily enough. But this result has been attained at the expense of a complication of structure, which has baffled all human analysis and research into final causes. As much concerning this most miraculous of families as is needful to be known, and ten times more than you are likely to understand, may be read in Harvey's "Sea-Side Book," pp. 142- 148, - pages from which you will probably arise with a sense of the infinity and complexity of Nature, even in what we are pleased to call her "lower" forms, and the simplest and, as it were, easiest forms of life. Conceive a Crystal Palace, (for mere difference in size, as both the naturalist and the metaphysician know, has nothing to do with the wonder,) whereof each separate joist, girder, and pane grows continually without altering the shape of the whole; and you have conceived only one of the miracles embodied in that little sea-egg, which the Creator has, as it were, to justify to man His own immutability, furnished with a shell capable of enduring fossil for countless ages, that we may confess Him to have been as great when first His Spirit brooded on the deep, as He is now and will be through all worlds to come.

But we must make haste; for the tide is rising fast, and our stone will be restored to its eleven hours' bath, long before we have talked over half the wonders which it holds. Look though, ere you retreat, at one or two more.