6 



A NATURALIST ON DESERT ISLANDS. 



There were, as a matter of fact, a thousand things upon 

 the surface, whose existence is undreamt of hy the average 

 mortal, who passes on his all-sufficient way quite happy 

 in his ignorance — a swarming world of the most unexpected 

 and surprising forms of life; but to have seen them, or 

 at any rate the greater part of them, we should have 

 required a tow-net and a microscope, to say nothing of 

 some degree of tact in getting the captain to slow down 

 and so lose time. 



And now it was the fourth day : it had just struck two 

 bells (1 o'clock), and some of us were on the point of 

 leaving the bridge to go down to lunch, when one of the 

 officers put down his glasses and quietly gave utterance 

 to the remark that he could see Swan Island. And there 

 sure enough it was, right ahead of us, miles away upon 

 the horizon, a hazy, phantom-like streak of blue, with an 

 apparent size of about two feet long by three inches 

 high. Our jibboom was making a dead set, straight 

 for it ; now towering high up in the sky yards above it ; 

 now curtseying deep dowa beneath it, or swinging off 

 a point or two to either side ; but always coming back 

 gradually or quickly, surely or with a little quivering 

 hesitation, to dwell for a moment point blank 

 upon it. 



Surely the little human animals who populate this planet, 

 have done many wonderful things since they first began 

 to exercise the thinking cells of their brains by chipping 

 flints to enable them to live by hunting ; and they have 

 mastered many great things which it was essential for 

 them to know ; but this trick of navigation, this juggling 

 with the compass and magnetism, with the height of the 

 sun at twelve o'clock and with imaginary hnes of latitude 

 and longitude, this wonderful power, in a word, of finding 

 their way with almost unerring certainty over the trackless 

 seas, from one small point to another, thousands of miles 

 apart, seems, with the necessary knowledge which underHes 

 it all, to have been one of the most wonderful tricks 

 which they have made their own. To the man who 



