Sept. 1, 1S69.] 



HARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



193 



UN DEE THE SEAWEED. 



By MAJOR HOLLAND, R.M.L.I. 



H E spring tide 

 which accompanied 

 the last new moon 

 has left a tide-mark 

 of its own some four 

 feet higher up the 

 shelving, shingly 

 beach in Stokes Bay 

 than the stout ridge 

 showing the high-water line 

 of ordinary tides. Aided by a 

 stiff sou'-wester, it has thrown 

 up a most miscellaneous crop 

 of flotsam and jetsam. Broken 

 oars, cork floats from the 

 fishermen's trawl nets, frag- 

 ments of spars, and logs of 

 shattered ship timber tell 

 silent tales of rough work out 

 at sea, and furnish a rare and 

 abundant harvest to the 

 wretched, ragged, weather- 

 stained beach-combers, who 

 are busily plying their pre- 

 carious trade, furtively eyeing the coastguard man, 

 who regards them with ill-favour as " a dubersome 

 lot, not at all particular as to who things belongs 

 to." Here are star-fishes (So/aster papposa and 

 TJraster rubens), with sea grapes and cuttlefishes 

 galore, aphrodites, crabs, whelks, hermits, a pipe- 

 fish {Syvgnathis), sea blubbers (Acalepha), a dead 

 gull, and even a huge angler (Lophius piscatorius) 

 nearly five feet long, and in a very unsavoury con- 

 dition, all driven on shore by stress of weather, and 

 left wrecked and stranded high and dry, stewing 

 and baking in the hot summer sun. 



Here are cinders and vitrified metallic-looking 

 clinkers from passing steamboats, with cocoa-nut 

 husks and shells, and the green crests of golden 

 pine-apples, contributions, no doubt, from the 

 stewards of the West-Indian or Hamburg- American 

 No. 57. 



mail-packets that run through the Solent. This 

 bleached and battered cabbage-stump, reduced by 

 the rudest possible process of maceration to a snowy 

 network of fibre, would be in itself a fortune to a 

 lecturer on structural botany. How those merry 

 little pusses with streaming golden tresses, who 

 " kilt their skirts aboon the knee," and paddle in 

 the pools on the margin of the ripple-marked sand, 

 and run away screaming from "the white horses" 

 that are beginning to roll in with the rising flood, 

 and to break in a mimic surf on the beach, laugh 

 when the said stump goes into our pocket, while 

 out of the same pocket comes a common pickle- 

 bottle, labelled onions, in large characters, which, 

 after a loud pop with the bung, is gravely set down 

 by a great matted and tangled coil of seaweed, 

 nearly as thick as one of their waists, and looking, 

 as it lies in a wavy line many yards long, with 

 many similar lengths on either hand, like some great 

 ocean cable " laid up " by old Eather Neptune and 

 his mates at the bottom of the deep, deep sea. A 

 dozen white-winged yachts, schooners, yawls, and 

 cutters are cruising between the Nab and the 

 Needles ; a mighty ironclad is running the measured 

 mile ; the towers of Osborne stand out in bold 

 relief against the blue sky; and even the ivied walls 

 of Norris Castle can be distinguished from the 

 background of rich woodland behind them ; — all is 

 bright and beautiful and full of life ; and so is this 

 old cable-mat of sun-baked seaweed with which we 

 have to do. 



Project a vilior a Iff a— more worthless than the 

 seaweed thrown out upon the shore. Perhaps if the 

 desponding Thyrsis had possessed a seaside book 

 and a microscope, or even a pocket lens, and could 

 have shown his Nerine Galatea the wonders and 

 beauties contained in the very commonest heap of 

 alga, he would have selected some other standard 

 of comparison. We lift up the mass, and out drops 

 a four-horned spider-crab {Pisa tetraoclon), with 

 four strong horns on the front of his carapace, the 



K 



