Submarine Architecture. 339 



SUBMARINE ARCHITECTURE. 



BY SHIRLEY HIBBEBD. 



When Endymion saw " the giant sea above his head/' he was 

 in no better position for moral reflections on the perishability 

 of man's work than we who sit in a small boat off Weymouth, 

 perplexed for the moment by the abundant variety of objects 

 just brought from the sea-bottom by the dredge. Endymion 

 trod his way timidly among things 



" More dead than Morpheus' imaginings : 

 [Old rusted anchors, helmets, breastplates large, 



Of gone sea-warriors ; brazen beaks and targe : 



Bucklers that for a hundred years had lost 

 [The sway of human hand." 



So we, probing amongst the sand and shells, and wriggling 

 annelids, and heshy lumps of Actinia, that have shrunk up in 

 fear of the strange company and altered scene, have our 

 thoughts turned aside from zoology proper by observing 

 amongst the rubbish pieces of tile, chips of crockery, half- 

 decayed nuts, a nail or two, and some other odd reminders of 

 the earth and man which the sea has swallowed, to keep with 

 other things until it shall have receded from these shores and 

 left them buried with its own deposits of shelled and crusted 

 forms, once living tenants of the deep. There is nothing, how- 

 ever contemptible to minds unschooled in observation, but may 

 furnish a subject for thought and a theme for discourse not 

 altogether aimless. As an antiquarian will deduce materials to 

 fill iip some old gap in history by the examination of an in- 

 scribed tile, so the odd findings of the dredge will be found 

 equally fruitful in furnishing a stimulus to both inductive and 

 deductive reasoning. Here is a piece of tile ; ergo, it is the 

 work of man. It is encrusted with colonies of serpulse, and had 

 it remained a few years longer in the watery depths, its shape, 

 colour, and character would have been obliterated by the addi- 

 tion of successive deposits of the same kind, and Nature would 

 have effected that object which she has always in view, the oblite- 

 ration of the traces of man's art, and the appropriation to her 

 own uses of whatever may fall from his hands. Precisely the 

 same lesson is taught — so says Emilius, sitting at the stern of 

 the boat, and looking with some sort of contempt upon the 

 strictly zoological part of the gathering — by the findings of the 

 dredge as by the exploration of a ruined city. The moment man 

 lets go any product of his industry, Nature begins the work of 

 disintegration. She dissolves, triturates, corrodes ; or, if she 

 cannot do either, she hides under a living garment the records 

 of the dead past. But we tell Emilius that Nature does not 



