92 THE VICTORIAN NATURALIST. 



Dwir authors, suit your topics to your strength, 

 And ponder well your subject and its length, 

 Nor lift your load before you're quite aware 

 What weight your shoulders will or will not bear. 



Feeling the force of this advice, I feared to undertake a 

 burden which might prove too heavy for me, or to appear to 

 trespass on a domain where I might be found an ignorant 

 intruder, but I got over this objection by the reflection that 

 what I propose is not to give a learned disquisition, but simply 

 a record of my own experience, and a description of some 

 wonderful forms of life caught and preserved by myself some 

 twenty years ago, which, I trust, if not unknown to the members 

 of this Club, may not be found uninteresting, and may, perhaps, 

 be the means of enabling others, if opportunity occur, to obtain 

 valuable and instructive information, and to gain from that 

 knowledge fresh proofs of the wisdom and goodness of the 

 Supreme Being, whose presence and creative power are evidenced 

 by the skill displayed in the structure and maintenance of the- 

 lowest and feeblest of His creatures as much as in the highest in 

 the scale of animated beings. 



It was while on a trip to England, in the days when there were 

 no ocean steamers by which to make the voyage in thirty-two 

 days, that I was enabled to secure the objects which I shall have 

 to bring under your notice to-night ; and here I may mention 

 incidentally that two great advantages were enjoyed by me on 

 this occasion — first, that I went home in a ship commanded by 

 a gentleman who had other tastes and talents besides those 

 usually possessed by the genus skipper, and who entered heartily 

 into the work with the instinct and ardour of a naturalist ; and 

 next, that on this particular voyage we were favoured by mild 

 and genial weather, which, though it extended the period of our 

 passage to 136 days, and proved tedious to those who were 

 anxious to get away from the discomforts of board-ship life, was- 

 singularly favourable to us who were engaged, whenever oppor- 

 tunity occurred, in searching for specimens of creatures found 

 only in the "vast and fathomless deep," for it must be reniem- 

 bered that when engaged in dredging, or more properly towing a 

 net, for surface shells and curiosities, it is essential that the speed 

 of the ship should not exceed three or four knots, as the delicate 

 and fragile objects which are drawn into the net are smashed 

 up and ruined by the rush of water, and by contact with each 

 other. 



I would, before proceeding further, offer an explanation as to 

 the title of my paper, which I describe as " Surface Shells," a 

 title which I chose because, although other forms of life are 

 treated of besides those which may be properly called shells, 

 the general idea of a shell is that it applies to creatures with a 

 hard, heavy shell-covering, usually found on the sea bottom 



