Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore

No branch of science, moreover, has been more humbling to the boasted rapidity and omnipotence of the human reason, or has more taught those who have eyes to see, and hearts to understand, how weak and wayward, staggering and slow, are the steps of our fallen race (rapid and triumphant enough in that broad road of theories which leads to intellectual destruction) whensoever they tread the narrow path of true science, which leads (if I may be allowed to transfer our Lord’s great parable from moral to intellectual matters) to Life; to the living and permanent knowledge of living things and of the laws of their existence. Humbling, truly, to one who looks back to the summer of 1754, when good Mr. Ellis, the wise and benevolent West Indian merchant, read before the Royal Society his paper proving the animal nature of corals, and followed it up the year after by that “Essay toward a Natural History of the Corallines, and other like Marine Productions of the British Coasts,” which forms the groundwork of all our knowledge on the subject to this day. The chapter in Dr. G. Johnston’s “British Zoophytes,” p. 407, or the excellent little résumé thereof in Dr. Landsborough’s book on the same subject, is really a saddening one, as one sees how loth were, not merely dreamers like, Marsigli or Bonnet, but sound-headed men like Pallas and Linné, to give up the old sense-bound fancy, that these corals were vegetables, and their polypes some sort of living flowers. Yet, after all, there are excuses for them. Without our improved microscopes, and while the sciences of comparative anatomy and chemistry were yet infantile, it was difficult to believe what was the truth; and for this simple reason: that, as usual, the truth, when discovered, turned out far more startling and prodigious than the dreams which men had hastily substituted for it; more strange than Ovid’s old story that the coral was soft under the sea, and hardened by exposure to air; than Marsigli’s notion, that the coral-polypes were its flowers; than Dr.