I'HE VICTORIAN NATURALIST. 129 



and narrow crevices which intervene between every stone or log 

 and the ground on which it rests. 



My scientific equipment was very simple, consisting of a num- 

 ber of small bottles of methylated spirits, and perhaps one large 

 one, a pair of steel forceps for the benefit of any beast which 

 looked as if it might bite, and last, but not least, paper and pencil, 

 for it is of the utmost importance to accurately note and, if 

 possible, sketch the size, form, and colour of the living animals. 

 When placed in spirit many animals, and especially the delicate 

 Planarian Worms, in which I was particularly interested, contract 

 greatly and lose their natural colouring, when it becomes almost 

 if not quite impossible to make specific determinations. 



The fauna of the dark and narrow crevices to which I have 

 alluded is a very distinct thing, much more so than is, I think, 

 generally realized. Just as we have a special fauna characteristic 

 of freshwater, and another special fauna characteristic of the 

 seashore between tide marks, so we have also a special fauna 

 characteristic of the dark, moist crevices beneath stones and dead 

 logs and under the rotten bark of trees. Probably many of those 

 present are acquainted with the following passage from " The 

 Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," by Oliver Wendell Holmes, 

 which was recalled to my memory last night by Mr. Lucas : — 

 " Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat 

 stone which had lain, nobody knows how long, just where you 

 found it, with the grass forming a little hedge, as it were, all round 

 it close to its edges ; and have you not, in obedience to a kind 

 of feeling that told you it had been lying there long enough, 

 insinuated your stick or your foot or your fingers under its edge 

 and turned it over, as a housewife turns a cake when she says 

 to herself — 'It's done brown enough by this time.' What an odd 

 revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a 

 small community, the very existence of which you had not 

 suspected until the sudden dismay and scattering among its mem- 

 bers produced by your turning the old stone over ! Blades of 

 grass flattened down, colourless, matted together as if they had 

 been bleached and ironed ; hideous crawling creatures, some of 

 them coleopterous or horny-shelled — turtle-bugs one wants to call 

 them ; some of them softer but cunningly spread out and com- 

 pressed like Lepine watches (Nature never loses a crack or a 

 crevice, mind you, or a joint in a tavern bedstead but she always 

 has one of her flat-pattern live timekeepers to slide into it) ; 

 black, glossy crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the 

 whips of four-horse stage coaches ; motionless, slug-like creatures, 

 larvae perhaps, more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even 

 in the infernal wriggle of maturity ! But no sooner is the stone 

 turned and the wholesome light of day let upon this compressed 

 and blinded community of creeping things than all of them that 



