246 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



as before, bad weather and exhaustion drove them back 

 to London. These were eight months of intense and con- 

 centrated activity out of doors, during which comparatively 

 Httle purely literary work was done. The mode in which 

 these months were spent is fully described in that chatty 

 and delightful record, The Aquarium. It was much less 

 desultory and amateurish than the way in which the pre- 

 vious year, in Devonshire, had been occupied. Philip 

 Gosse now clearly understood what objects he wished to 

 secure, and the way to secure them. Almost every evening 

 he sent off to the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park a 

 package of living creatures, the " bag " of the day, and 

 sometimes this would mean seventy or eighty specimens. 

 His first care was to secure seaweeds, carefully selecting 

 those which were in full health, and, by preference, the 

 finer and cleaner varieties, firmly affixed to rocks. He 

 became an adept in chipping off just as much of the rocky 

 support as the roots required, and no more. To these he 

 would add such specimens of the littoral fauna, annelids, 

 sea-anemones, shells, nudibranchs, and crustaceans, as he 

 found, by experience, had the best chance of surviving 

 the journey, and these he packed, as a rule, not in water, 

 but swathed in wrappings of wet seaweed. 



His principal exercise, however, at Weymouth, was 

 dredging in the bay. He declared that Ovid knew more 

 about the arts of dredging than any later naturalist, and 

 used to point, by way of proof, to a passage in the 

 Halieuticon^ which he took the liberty of paraphrasing 

 thus : — 



" When you the dredge would use, go not away 

 Far out to sea. Mind that your haul be made 

 According to your bottom. Where the ground 

 Is foul and ledgy, be content to fish 

 With hook and line. But when upon the sea 



