Glaucus_or The Wonders of the Shore(格劳高斯)

VIP免费

2024-12-26 0 0 473.83KB 113 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Glaucus/or The Wonders of the Shore

Glaucus/or The Wonders

of the Shore

By Chas Kingsley

Glaucus/or The Wonders of the Shore

You are going down, perhaps, by railway, to pass your usual six

weeks at some watering-place along the coast, and as you roll along

think more than once, and that not over-cheerfully, of what you shall do

when you get there. You are half-tired, half-ashamed, of making one

more in the ignoble army of idlers, who saunter about the cliffs, and

sands, and quays; to whom every wharf is but a "wharf of Lethe," by

which they rot "dull as the oozy weed." You foreknow your doom by

sad experience. A great deal of dressing, a lounge in the club-room, a

stare out of the window with the telescope, an attempt to take a bad

sketch, a walk up one parade and down another, interminable reading of

the silliest of novels, over which you fall asleep on a bench in the sun,

and probably have your umbrella stolen; a purposeless fine-weather sail

in a yacht, accompanied by many ineffectual attempts to catch a

mackerel, and the consumption of many cigars; while your boys deafen

your ears, and endanger your personal safety, by blazing away at

innocent gulls and willocks, who go off to die slowly; a sport which you

feel to be wanton, and cowardly, and cruel, and yet cannot find in your

heart to stop, because "the lads have nothing else to do, and at all events

it keeps them out of the billiard-room;" and after all, and worst of all, at

night a soulless RECHAUFFE of third-rate London frivolity: this is

the life-in-death in which thousands spend the golden weeks of summer,

and in which you confess with a sigh that you are going to spend them.

Now I will not be so rude as to apply to you the old hymn-distich

about one who

" - finds some mischief still For idle hands to do:"

but does it not seem to you, that there must surely be many a thing

worth looking at earnestly, and thinking over earnestly, in a world like

this, about the making of the least part whereof God has employed ages

and ages, further back than wisdom can guess or imagination picture,

and upholds that least part every moment by laws and forces so complex

and so wonderful, that science, when it tries to fathom them, can only

learn how little it can learn? And does it not seem to you that six

weeks' rest, free from the cares of town business and the whirlwind of

Glaucus/or The Wonders of the Shore

town pleasure, could not be better spent than in examining those

wonders a little, instead of wandering up and down like the many, still

wrapt up each in his little world of vanity and self-interest, unconscious

of what and where they really are, as they gaze lazily around at earth and

sea and sky, and have

"No speculation in those eyes Which they do glare withal"?

Why not, then, try to discover a few of the Wonders of the Shore?

For wonders there are there around you at every step, stranger than ever

opium-eater dreamed, and yet to be seen at no greater expense than a

very little time and trouble.

Perhaps you smile, in answer, at the notion of becoming a

"Naturalist:" and yet you cannot deny that there must be a fascination in

the study of Natural History, though what it is is as yet unknown to you.

Your daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing

"Pteridomania," and are collecting and buying ferns, with Ward's cases

wherein to keep them (for which you have to pay), and wrangling over

unpronounceable names of species (which seem to he different in each

new Fern-book that they buy), till the Pteridomania seems to you

somewhat of a bore: and yet you cannot deny that they find an

enjoyment in it, and are more active, more cheerful, more self-forgetful

over it, than they would have been over novels and gossip, crochet and

Berlin-wool. At least you will confess that the abomination of "Fancy-

work" - that standing cloak for dreamy idleness (not to mention the

injury which it does to poor starving needlewomen) - has all but

vanished from your drawing-room since the "Lady-ferns" and "Venus's

hair" appeared; and that you could not help yourself looking now and

then at the said "Venus's hair," and agreeing that Nature's real beauties

were somewhat superior to the ghastly woollen caricatures which they

had superseded.

You cannot deny, I say, that there is a fascination in this same

Natural History. For do not you, the London merchant, recollect how

but last summer your douce and portly head-clerk was seized by two

keepers in the act of wandering in Epping Forest at dead of night, with a

dark lantern, a jar of strange sweet compound, and innumerable

Glaucus/or The Wonders of the Shore

pocketfuls of pill-boxes; and found it very difficult to make either his

captors or you believe that he was neither going to burn wheat-ricks, nor

poison pheasants, but was simply "sugaring the trees for moths," as a

blameless entomologist? And when, in self-justification, he took you

to his house in Islington, and showed you the glazed and corked drawers

full of delicate insects, which had evidently cost him in the collecting the

spare hours of many busy years, and many a pound, too, out of his small

salary, were you not a little puzzled to make out what spell there could

be in those "useless" moths, to draw out of his warm bed, twenty miles

down the Eastern Counties Railway, and into the damp forest like a deer-

stealer, a sober white-headed Tim Linkinwater like him, your very best

man of business, given to the reading of Scotch political economy, and

gifted with peculiarly clear notions on the currency question?

It is puzzling, truly. I shall be very glad if these pages help you

somewhat toward solving the puzzle.

We shall agree at least that the study of Natural History has become

now-a-days an honourable one. A Cromarty stonemason was till lately

- God rest his noble soul! - the most important man in the City of

Edinburgh, by dint of a work on fossil fishes; and the successful

investigator of the minutest animals takes place unquestioned among

men of genius, and, like the philosopher of old Greece, is considered, by

virtue of his science, fit company for dukes and princes. Nay, the study

is now more than honourable; it is (what to many readers will be a far

higher recommendation) even fashionable. Every well-educated

person is eager to know something at least of the wonderful organic

forms which surround him in every sunbeam and every pebble; and

books of Natural History are finding their way more and more into

drawing-rooms and school-rooms, and exciting greater thirst for a

knowledge which, even twenty years ago, was considered superfluous

for all but the professional student.

What a change from the temper of two generations since, when the

naturalist was looked on as a harmless enthusiast, who went "bug-

hunting," simply because he had not spirit to follow a fox! There are

those alive who can recollect an amiable man being literally bullied out

Glaucus/or The Wonders of the Shore

of the New Forest, because he dared to make a collection (at this

moment, we believe, in some unknown abyss of that great Avernus, the

British Museum) of fossil shells from those very Hordwell Cliffs, for

exploring which there is now established a society of subscribers and

correspondents. They can remember, too, when, on the first

appearance of Bewick's "British Birds," the excellent sportsman who

brought it down to the Forest was asked, Why on earth he had bought a

book about "cock sparrows"? and had to justify himself again and again,

simply by lending the book to his brother sportsmen, to convince them

that there were rather more than a dozen sorts of birds (as they then held)

indigenous to Hampshire. But the book, perhaps, which turned the tide

in favour of Natural History, among the higher classes at least, in the

south of England, was White's "History of Selborne." A Hampshire

gentleman and sportsman, whom everybody knew, had taken the trouble

to write a book about the birds and the weeds in his own parish, and the

every-day things which went on under his eyes, and everyone else's.

And all gentlemen, from the Weald of Kent to the Vale of Blackmore,

shrugged their shoulders mysteriously, and said, "Poor fellow!" till they

opened the book itself, and discovered to their surprise that it read like

any novel. And then came a burst of confused, but honest admiration;

from the young squire's "Bless me! who would have thought that there

were so many wonderful things to be seen in one's own park!" to the old

squire's more morally valuable "Bless me! why, I have seen that and that

a hundred times, and never thought till now how wonderful they were!"

There were great excuses, though, of old, for the contempt in which

the naturalist was held; great excuses for the pitying tone of banter with

which the Spectator talks of "the ingenious" Don Saltero (as no doubt

the Neapolitan gentleman talked of Ferrante Imperato the apothecary,

and his museum); great excuses for Voltaire, when he classes the

collection of butterflies among the other "bizarreries de l'esprit humain."

For, in the last generation, the needs of the world were different. It had

no time for butterflies and fossils. While Buonaparte was hovering on

the Boulogne coast, the pursuits and the education which were needed

were such as would raise up men to fight him; so the coarse, fierce,

Glaucus/or The Wonders of the Shore

hard-handed training of our grandfathers came when it was wanted, and

did the work which was required of it, else we had not been here now.

Let us be thankful that we have had leisure for science; and show now in

war that our science has at least not unmanned us.

Moreover, Natural History, if not fifty years ago, certainly a hundred

years ago, was hardly worthy of men of practical common sense. After,

indeed, Linne, by his invention of generic and specific names, had made

classification possible, and by his own enormous labours had shown

how much could be done when once a method was established, the

science has grown rapidly enough. But before him little or nothing had

been put into form definite enough to allure those who (as the many

always will) prefer to profit by others' discoveries, than to discover for

themselves; and Natural History was attractive only to a few earnest

seekers, who found too much trouble in disencumbering their own minds

of the dreams of bygone generations (whether facts, like cockatrices,

basilisks, and krakens, the breeding of bees out of a dead ox, and of

geese from barnacles; or theories, like those of elements, the VIS

PLASTRIX in Nature, animal spirits, and the other musty heirlooms of

Aristotleism and Neo-platonism), to try to make a science popular,

which as yet was not even a science at all. Honour to them,

nevertheless. Honour to Ray and his illustrious contemporaries in

Holland and France. Honour to Seba and Aldrovandus; to Pomet, with

his "Historie of Drugges;" even to the ingenious Don Saltero, and his

tavern-museum in Cheyne Walk. Where all was chaos, every man was

useful who could contribute a single spot of organized standing ground

in the shape of a fact or a specimen. But it is a question whether

Natural History would have ever attained its present honours, had not

Geology arisen, to connect every other branch of Natural History with

problems as vast and awful as they are captivating to the imagination.

Nay, the very opposition with which Geology met was of as great benefit

to the sister sciences as to itself. For, when questions belonging to the

most sacred hereditary beliefs of Christendom were supposed to be

affected by the verification of a fossil shell, or the proving that the

Maestricht "homo diluvii testis" was, after all, a monstrous eft, it became

Glaucus/or The Wonders of the Shore

necessary to work upon Conchology, Botany, and Comparative Anatomy,

with a care and a reverence, a caution and a severe induction, which had

been never before applied to them; and thus gradually, in the last half-

century, the whole choir of cosmical sciences have acquired a soundness,

severity, and fulness, which render them, as mere intellectual exercises,

as valuable to a manly mind as Mathematics and Metaphysics.

But how very lately have they attained that firm and honourable

standing ground! It is a question whether, even twenty years ago,

Geology, as it then stood, was worth troubling one's head about, so little

had been really proved. And heavy and uphill was the work, even

within the last fifteen years, of those who stedfastly set themselves to the

task of proving and of asserting at all risks, that the Maker of the coal

seam and the diluvial cave could not be a "Deus quidam deceptor," and

that the facts which the rock and the silt revealed were sacred, not to be

warped or trifled with for the sake of any cowardly and hasty notion that

they contradicted His other messages. When a few more years are past,

Buckland and Sedgwick, Murchison and Lyell, Delab 坈he and Phillips,

Forbes and Jamieson, and the group of brave men who accompanied and

followed them, will be looked back to as moral benefactors of their race;

and almost as martyrs, also, when it is remembered how much

misunderstanding, obloquy, and plausible folly they had to endure from

well-meaning fanatics like Fairholme or Granville Penn, and the

respectable mob at their heels who tried (as is the fashion in such cases)

to make a hollow compromise between fact and the Bible, by twisting

facts just enough to make them fit the fancied meaning of the Bible, and

the Bible just enough to make it fit the fancied meaning of the facts.

But there were a few who would have no compromise; who laboured on

with a noble recklessness, determined to speak the thing which they had

seen, and neither more nor less, sure that God could take better care than

they of His own everlasting truth. And now they have conquered: the

facts which were twenty years ago denounced as contrary to Revelation,

are at last accepted not merely as consonant with, but as corroborative

thereof; and sound practical geologists - like Hugh Miller, in his

"Footprints of the Creator," and Professor Sedgwick, in the invaluable

Glaucus/or The Wonders of the Shore

notes to his "Discourse on the Studies of Cambridge" - have wielded in

defence of Christianity the very science which was faithlessly and

cowardly expected to subvert it.

But if you seek, reader, rather for pleasure than for wisdom, you can

find it in such studies, pure and undefiled.

Happy, truly, is the naturalist. He has no time for melancholy

dreams. The earth becomes to him transparent; everywhere he sees

significancies, harmonies, laws, chains of cause and effect endlessly

interlinked, which draw him out of the narrow sphere of self-interest and

self-pleasing, into a pure and wholesome region of solemn joy and

wonder. He goes up some Snowdon valley; to him it is a solemn spot

(though unnoticed by his companions), where the stag's-horn clubmoss

ceases to straggle across the turf, and the tufted alpine clubmoss takes its

place: for he is now in a new world; a region whose climate is

eternally influenced by some fresh law (after which he vainly guesses

with a sigh at his own ignorance), which renders life impossible to one

species, possible to another. And it is a still more solemn thought to

him, that it was not always so; that aeons and ages back, that rock which

he passed a thousand feet below was fringed, not as now with fern and

blue bugle, and white bramble-flowers, but perhaps with the alp- rose and

the "gemsen-kraut" of Mont Blanc, at least with Alpine Saxifrages which

have now retreated a thousand feet up the mountain side, and with the

blue Snow-Gentian, and the Canadian Sedum, which have all but

vanished out of the British Isles. And what is it which tells him that

strange story? Yon smooth and rounded surface of rock, polished,

remark, across the strata and against the grain; and furrowed here and

there, as if by iron talons, with long parallel scratches. It was the

crawling of a glacier which polished that rock-face; the stones fallen

from Snowdon peak into the half-liquid lake of ice above, which

ploughed those furrows. AEons and aeons ago, before the time when

Adam first

"Embraced his Eve in happy hour, And every bird in Eden burst In

carol, every bud in flower,"

those marks were there; the records of the "Age of ice;" slight, truly;

Glaucus/or The Wonders of the Shore

to be effaced by the next farmer who needs to build a wall; but

unmistakeable, boundless in significance, like Crusoe's one savage

footprint on the sea-shore; and the naturalist acknowledges the finger-

mark of God, and wonders, and worships.

Happy, especially, is the sportsman who is also a naturalist: for as

he roves in pursuit of his game, over hills or up the beds of streams

where no one but a sportsman ever thinks of going, he will be certain to

see things noteworthy, which the mere naturalist would never find,

simply because he could never guess that they were there to be found.

I do not speak merely of the rare birds which may be shot, the curious

facts as to the habits of fish which may be observed, great as these

pleasures are. I speak of the scenery, the weather, the geological

formation of the country, its vegetation, and the living habits of its

denizens. A sportsman, out in all weathers, and often dependent for

success on his knowledge of "what the sky is going to do," has

opportunities for becoming a meteorologist which no one beside but a

sailor possesses; and one has often longed for a scientific gamekeeper or

huntsman, who, by discovering a law for the mysterious and seemingly

capricious phenomena of "scent," might perhaps throw light on a

hundred dark passages of hygrometry. The fisherman, too, - what an

inexhaustible treasury of wonder lies at his feet, in the subaqueous world

of the commonest mountain burn! All the laws which mould a world

are there busy, if he but knew it, fattening his trout for him, and making

them rise to the fly, by strange electric influences, at one hour rather than

at another. Many a good geognostic lesson, too, both as to the nature of

a country's rocks, and as to the laws by which strata are deposited, may

an observing man learn as he wades up the bed of a trout- stream; not to

mention the strange forms and habits of the tribes of water-insects.

Moreover, no good fisherman but knows, to his sorrow, that there are

plenty of minutes, ay, hours, in each day's fishing in which he would be

right glad of any employment better than trying to

"Call spirits from the vasty deep,"

who will not

"Come when you do call for them."

Glaucus/or The Wonders of the Shore

What to do, then? You are sitting, perhaps, in your coracle, upon

some mountain tarn, waiting for a wind, and waiting in vain.

"Keine luft an keine seite, Todes-stille f 乺chterlich;"

as G 攖he has it -

"Und der schiffer sieht bek 乵mert Glatte fl 刢he rings umher."

You paddle to the shore on the side whence the wind ought to come,

if it had any spirit in it; tie the coracle to a stone, light your cigar, lie

down on your back upon the grass, grumble, and finally fall asleep. In

the meanwhile, probably, the breeze has come on, and there has been

half-an-hour's lively fishing curl; and you wake just in time to see the

last ripple of it sneaking off at the other side of the lake, leaving all as

dead-calm as before.

Now how much better, instead of falling asleep, to have walked

quietly round the lake side, and asked of your own brains and of Nature

the question, "How did this lake come here? What does it mean?"

It is a hole in the earth. True, but how was the hole made? There

must have been huge forces at work to form such a chasm. Probably

the mountain was actually opened from within by an earthquake; and

when the strata fell together again, the portion at either end of the chasm,

being perhaps crushed together with greater force, remained higher than

the centre, and so the water lodged between them. Perhaps it was

formed thus. You will at least agree that its formation must have been a

grand sight enough, and one during which a spectator would have had

some difficulty in keeping his footing.

And when you learn that this convulsion probably took plus at the

bottom of an ocean hundreds of thousands of years ago, you have at

least a few thoughts over which to ruminate, which will make you at

once too busy to grumble, and ashamed to grumble.

Yet, after all, I hardly think the lake was formed in this way, and

suspect that it may have been dry for ages after it emerged from the

primeval waves, and Snowdonia was a palm-fringed island in a tropic

sea. Let us look the place over more fully.

You see the lake is nearly circular; on the side where we stand the

pebbly beach is not six feet above the water, and slopes away steeply

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

Glaucus/orTheWondersoftheShore1Glaucus/orTheWondersoftheShoreByChasKingsleyGlaucus/orTheWondersoftheShore2Youaregoingdown,perhaps,byrailway,topassyourusualsixweeksatsomewatering-placealongthecoast,andasyourollalongthinkmorethanonce,andthatnotover-cheerfully,ofwhatyoushalldowhenyougetthere.Youarehalf...

展开>> 收起<<

Glaucus_or The Wonders of the Shore(格劳高斯).pdf

共113页,预览23页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Glaucus_or The Wonders of the Shore(格劳高斯)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: