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1
164
Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore
·
Charles Kingsley
111
[Picture:
Plate
11:
Syngnathus
Lumbriciformis
etc.]
An
hour
or
two’s
dredging
round
the
rocks
to
the
eastward,
would
probably
yield
many
delicate
and
brilliant
little
fishes;
Gobies,
brilliant
Labri,
blue,
yellow,
and
orange,
with
tiny
rabbit
mouths,
and
powerful
protruding
teeth;
pipe
fishes
(Syngnathi)
{163}
with
strange
snipe-bills
(which
they
cannot
open)
and
snake-like
bodies;
small
cuttlefish
(Sepiolæ)
of
a
white
jelly
mottled
with
brilliant
metallic
hues,
with
a
ring
of
suckered
arms
round
their
tiny
parrots’
beaks,
who,
put
into
a
jar,
will
hover
and
dart
in
the
water,
as
the
skylark
does
in
air,
by
rapid
winnowings
of
their
glassy
side-fins,
while
they
watch
you
with
bright
lizard-eyes;
the
whole
animal
being
a
combination
of
the
vertebrate
and
the
mollusc,
so
utterly
fantastic
and
abnormal,
that
(had
not
the
family
been
amongst
the
commonest,
from
the
earliest
geological
epochs)
it
would
have
seemed,
to
man’s
deductive
intellect,
a
form
almost
as
impossible
as
the
mermaid,
far
more
impossible
than
the
sea-serpent.
These,
and
perhaps
a
few
handsome
sea-slugs
and
bivalve
shells,
you
will
be
pretty
sure
to
find:
perhaps
a
great
deal
more.
Meanwhile,
without
dredging,
you
may
find
a
good
deal
on
the
shore.
In
the
spring
Doris
bilineata
comes
to
the
rocks
in
thousands,
to
lay
its
strange
white
furbelows
of
spawn
upon
their
overhanging
edges.
Eolides
of
extraordinary
beauty
haunt
the
same
spots.
The
great
Eolis
papillosa,
of
a
delicate
French
grey;
Eolis
pellucida
(?)
(Plate
X.
fig.
4),
in
which
each
papilla
on
the
back
is
beautifully
coloured
with
a
streak
of
pink,
and
tipped
with
iron
blue;
and
a
most
fantastical
yellow
little
creature,
so
covered
with
plumes
and
tentacles
that
the
body
is
invisible,
which
I
believe
to
be
the
Idalia
aspersa
of
Alder
and
Hancock.
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