第32章

But to return to the water-world, and to dredging; which of all sea- side pursuits is perhaps the most pleasant, combining as it does fine weather sailing with the discovery of new objects, to which, after all, the waifs and strays of the beach, whether "flotsom jetsom, or lagand," as the old Admiralty laws define them, are few and poor. I say particularly fine weather sailing; for a swell, which makes the dredge leap along the bottom, instead of scraping steadily, is as fatal to sport as it is to some people's comfort. But dredging, if you use a pleasure boat and the small naturalist's dredge, is an amusement in which ladies, if they will, may share, and which will increase, and not interfere with, the amusements of a water-party.

The naturalist's dredge, of which Mr. Gosse's "Aquarium" gives a detailed account, should differ from the common oyster dredge in being smaller; certainly not more than four feet across the mouth; and insteadof having but one iron scraping-lip like the oyster dredge, it should have two, one above and one below, so that it will work equally well on whichsoever side it falls, or how often soever it may be turned over by rough ground. The bag-net should be of strong spunyarn, or (still better) of hide "such as those hides of the wild cattle of the Pampas, which the tobacconists receive from South America," cut into thongs, and netted close. It should be loosely laced together with a thong at the tail edge in order to be opened easily, when brought on board, without canting the net over, and pouring the contents roughly out through the mouth. The dragging-rope should be strong, and at least three times as long as the perpendicular depth of the water in which you are working; if, indeed, there is much breeze, or any swell at all, still more line should be veered out. The inboard end should be made fast somewhere in the stern sheets, the dredge hove to windward, the boat put before the wind; and you may then amuse yourself as you will for the next quarter of an hour, provided that you have got ready various wide-mouthed bottles for the more delicate monsters, and a couple of buckets, to receive the large lumps of oysters and serpulae which you will probably bring to the surface.

As for a dredging ground, one may be found, I suppose, off every watering-place. The most fertile spots are in rough ground, in not less than five fathoms water. The deeper the water, the rarer and more interesting will the animals generally be: but a greater depth than fifteen fathoms is not easily reached on this side of Plymouth; and, on the whole, the beginner will find enough in seven or eight fathoms to stock an aquarium rivalling any of those in the "Tank-house" at the Zoological Gardens.

In general, the south coast of England, to the eastward of Portland, affords bad dredging ground. The friable cliffs, of comparatively recent formations, keep the sea shallow, and the bottom smooth and bare, by the vast deposits of sand and gravel. Yet round the Isle of Wight, especially at the back of the Needles, there ought to be fertile spots; and Weymouth, according to Mr. Gosse and other well-known naturalists, is a very garden of Nereus. Torbay, as may well be supposed, is anadmirable dredging spot; perhaps its two best points are round the isolated Thatcher and Oare-rock, and from the mouth of Brixham harbour to Berry Head; along which last line, for perhaps three hundred years, the decks of all Brixham trawlers have been washed down ere running into harbour, and the sea-bottom thus stored with treasures scraped up from deeper water in every direction for miles and miles.

Hastings is, I fear, but a poor spot for dredging. Its friable cliffs and strong tides produce a changeable and barren sea-floor. Yet the immense quantities of Flustra thrown up after a storm indicate dredging ground at no great distance outside; its rocks, uninteresting as they are compared with our Devonians, have yielded to the industry and science of M. Tumanowicz a vast number of sea- weeds and sponges. Those three curious polypes, Valkeria cuscuta (Plate I. fig. 3), Notamia Bursaria, and Serialaria Lendigera, abound within tide-marks; and as the place is so much visited by Londoners, it may be worth while to give a few hints as to what might be done, by anyone whose curiosity has been excited by the salt-water tanks of the Zoological Gardens and the Crystal Palace.

An hour or two's dredging round the rocks to the eastward, would probably yield many delicate and brilliant little fishes; Gobies, brilliant Labri, blue, yellow, and orange, with tiny rabbit mouths, and powerful protruding teeth; pipe fishes (Syngnathi) (25) with strange snipe-bills (which they cannot open) and snake-like bodies; small cuttlefish (Sepiolae) of a white jelly mottled with brilliant metallic hues, with a ring of suckered arms round their tiny parrots' beaks, who, put into a jar, will hover and dart in the water, as the skylark does in air, by rapid winnowings of their glassy side-fins, while they watch you with bright lizard-eyes; the whole animal being a combination of the vertebrate and the mollusc, so utterly fantastic and abnormal, that (had not the family been amongst the commonest, from the earliest geological epochs) it would have seemed, to man's deductive intellect, a form almost as impossible as the mermaid, far more impossible than the sea- serpent. These, and perhaps a few handsome sea-slugs and bivalve shells, you will be pretty sure to find: perhaps a great dealmore.