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The Session of 1856.

anything a bishop might do, and
the partisans of the High Church
objected to any arrangement which
should place the disposal of the
great sees of London and Durham
in the hands of a latitudinarian
This, as everybody
Minister.
knows, is the explanation of the
opposition which the Bill encoun-
tered. The Bill merely extended
to the Church the same rational
principle which has been long ap-
plied to the great offices of law and
state, to the army and navy, and to
every branch of the public service.
The case for the Bill was complete;
it was what lawyers call an unde-
The shallow, unten-
fended cause.
able, and ridiculous ground of
simony was set up; and Sir James
Graham and Mr. Gladstone did not
hesitate to discredit their talents
and authority by such a frivolous
argument. Simony, indeed! Why,
what perverted ingenuity must that
be which could regard as simoniacal
a proposal to relinquish spiritual
power and large revenues for a
moderate pension. Parliament, how-
ever, with its usual good sense,
saw through and overruled this point
The anti-
without any difficulty.
episcopalians took a more prudent
course, for they opposed the Bill
without any argument whatever. All
they urged was that the retiring
bishops had behaved very shabbily
in fixing the amount of their pen-
sions, and making it the condition
of their resignation. We must say
we think the prelates were open to
this remark, and that they would
have exercised a wiser and more
becoming discretion if they had un-
conditionally resigned their sees, and
trusted to the liberality of Parlia-
ment to make a proper provision
But this
for their retirement.
matter of taste
was merely a
and discretion, and constituted,
we need hardly say, no argu-
ment against a measure the prin-
cipal object of which was to pro-
vide for the efficient administration
of two of the highest offices in the
Church. The Bill was founded on
the admitted physical incapacity of
the existing incumbents, and if
it had failed to pass, its rejection
would have been tantamount to a

declaration of the sense of Parlia-
ment that bishops were of no use.
Many persons, no doubt, are of this
opinion; but as it is hardly compe-
tent to us to argue on that assump-
tion, we must think that Parliament
had no other alternative but to pass
the Bill.

A languid and unsatisfactory ses-
sion has been closed by a speech
from the leader of the Opposition,
as vague, rambling, and pointless as
the futile labours which it professed
The fine talents of

to censure.

Mr. Disraeli have indeed been less
conspicuous during the last session
than at any period since he became
eminent as a parliamentary chief.
A man of his acute observation and
sensibility cannot fail to perceive
and feel the coldness and alienation
of his followers. They have fallen
off like water which runneth apace;
and that organization which used to
distinguish the Conservative party,
and render them so formidable, has
almost disappeared. Those invigo-
rating cheers which used to sustain
their brilliant leader when he ex-
posed the blunders of Lord Aber-
to stimulate him in holding up to
deen's Administration, have ceased
of Lord Palmerston. The Conserva-
ridicule the still more glaring errors
tive chief failed therefore, on the
recent occasion, to profit by the fine
field for his peculiar vein of caustic
raillery which a review of the session
of 1856 laid open. Some vapid gene-
ralities, some vague definitions of
party, accompanied by a wearisome
iteration of abandoned' measures,
filled up a dreary space of two
hours, and made up a discourse
more like a second-rate lecture at a
mechanics institute, than the mas-
terly summing-up of the legislative
labours of a session of the British
Parliament which we might have
expected from the lips of an accom-
plished orator. The country, so far
from being angry with Lord Pal-
merston for the bills which he has
abandoned, are, we believe, quite
indifferent about the matter, and
are just as willing as they were in
of confidence which he may think
January last to give him any amount
proper to require for the mainte-
nance of his Administration.

FRASER'S MAGAZINE.

SEPTEMBER, 1856.

SCIENCE BY THE SEA-SIDE.

'GIVE
IVE a dog a bad name,' says

the proverb, and hang him.' On similar principles, call your animal by some high-sounding appellation, and though he be the veriest cur that ever yelped, you shall find an admirer and a purchaser for him. We are the more impressed with the truth of this latter proposition from the fact that, within the last few years, every other friend or acquaintance of ours has taken to his hearth some atrocious cur in the shape of a pet science (Heaven save the mark!), whose abstract value is in inverse ratio to the length of its name. There is, for instance, the eur geological, whose presence is indicated by ungainly chisels, hammers, earth-bespattered baskets, and specimens of every conceivable kind of antediluvian monster and formation, scattered profusely where no such things should be; the cur botanical, known by the token of desiccated flowering plants, whose withered skeletons and barbaric appellations recal no memory of shady valley and sunlit moorland; the cur chemical, which is simply offensive to our olfactories, and leaves its traces on our garments as we take the proffered seat by the fire-side; the cur zoological, which rejoices in brainless skulls and awful skeletons, gaping grimly at us from unexpected lairs; or in (its latest development, whose manifold phases we now intend to illustrate) marine aquaria, savoury puddles of chemist-made occan-water, tenanted by starving actinia and misanthropic crustaceans. These, and many another cur metaphorical, snarl at us from every fire-side, yelp in our drawingrooms, growl at our heels by the rippling waters of our favourite trout-stream, and the sunny shores of our sea-side pleasaunce. O for a Chancellor of the Exchequer who shall be far-sighted enough to lay a

VOL. LIV. NO. CCCXXI.

un

price on the useless curs of science

who shall tax know-nothingism when it flaunts in the garb of knowledge, and make the dilettanti pay for the luxury of disporting themselves, whilst the sun shines, in the tub of the philosopher!

Having, however, let off this burst of splenetic steam, we are anxious not to be misunderstood. We are not, of course, inveighing against the pursuit of science, or against her pursuers, whether professional or amateur; we simply wage war against those piratical craft who hoist her colours that they may smuggle their own goods for their own profit into the country where science is loved and piracy hated.

An action-pardon our metaphysical turn of mind-is good or evil, with regard, that is, to the actor, as it is done from a good or an evil motive; take as a well-known example the case of two men who throw a half-crown at a beggar, with the intention respectively of reliev ing his wants and breaking his head. Now similarly a man may pursue, and in these days does pursue, science from one of four motives, two good and two bad.

He may be, in the first place, an affecter of knowledge from a mere love of novelty. He has possibly exhausted the usual routine stock of pleasurable emotions; has run through a half-dozen of London seasons; done his Switzerland and his Italy, his seat of war or his grand tour; has blazed away (rather ineffectually) on the moors, or fished, with more toil than sport, the great salmon lochs of Scotland and the fiords of Norway; he has exhibited himself to more or less advantage, in the neatest of pinks, on the bestconditioned of horses in the crack hunting-field of the day. What next, and next? There is nothing new under the sun for him.

Or take the female side of the

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question. Sated with the opera, weary of balls and wearier picnics, utterly blasé with regard to the latest novel, or the last ingenious method of losing time, whether yclept potichomanie, pteridomanie, or any of the numerous manias which are not as yet recognised at Hanwell, or the more aristocratic 'retreat,'-what in such a case can the sufferer do to gain the great object of life, a new sensation ?

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She-for we shall be ungallant enough to present a feminine example of the disease which is now in our mind's eye-she being located at a fashionable watering place (name of no consequence, for are they not legion, and as like each other as Cæsar and Pompey ?) happens to be shipwrecked one stormy afternoon on the coasts of a marine curiosity shop. She wanders idly in its be-cornered recesses, now disinterring an ill-used Omer or nautilus, tortured with files and acids into prismatic colours and unwonted sinuations; now wondering whether the rain will cease; now admiring a basket of sea-weeds, besmirched with varnish and adorned with a motto, which poetically requests the reader not to call them weeds,' because they are neither more nor less than flowers of the sea,' a title which we fancy the anemones and polypes would be very well inclined to dispute with them.

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And pray, Mrs. So-and-so, what have you got in that rather dirtylooking pudding-basin ?'

Them's zuphites, ma'am, if you please,' responds the sibyl, from the depths of her grotto.

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Zu-what?'

Phites, ma'am. Sea nemones, ma'am; what Mr. Gosse writes books about. Comes from the

beach, ma'am. Tuppence eachleastways the common ones; crassycornys, fourpence; dianthys, one shilling and sixpence.'

And what's the use of them, Mrs. So-and-so ?'

'Lor, ma'am, I can't tell ye-I never could find no use in them my. self, but the quality thinks them butifull-Iss, fy! keeps 'em in their draring-rooms, and never minds their turning their little insides out, nor smelling nasty-like, nor nothing!'

The result of which dialogue is that

our lady friend carries home a jar of marine pickles, invests in a Gosse and a Kingsley, and before morning is on the high-road to a state of confirmed thalassian' (v. Gosse) monomania.

So far of the cause of the disease, now for the symptoms. Next day, Phillis, the sheeny-ringletted lady'smaid, is discovered in hystericssix nasty pudding-basins, two confectioner's jars, and a foot-tub, on the drawing-room table, her mistress's bonnet on the floor, garnished with a layer of damp sea-weed, and her mistress's dress all over irreparable puddles of salt-water. Her mistress is raving. Her vocabulary is a mixture of young-lady expletives, and a quasi-scientific jargon, which becomes more and more complicated as she penetrates the depths of zoological nomenclature.

'O, Mr. Penaninke, I am 80 charmed to see you this morning,' was her salutation, as we unwarily did ourselves the honour of a midday call; this, I think, is quite in your way. I know you delight in the exquisite forms of the natural world' (pointing to the pie-dishes).

Yes,' we observed, mildly, we were very fond of anything which was natural.'

'Now, do look at this lovely specimen of Actinia troglodytes, so named, as dear Mr. Gosse tells us, from its inhabiting the caves of the African Shepherds,-how very curious, isn't it?'

We endeavoured to insinuate that the penultimate syllable of the unhappy animal's specific name was not usually lengthened by the professors of the Greek language; and further, that the creature being found on the English coast, couldn't live in an African cave; but the torrent had burst its banks, and we were overwhelmed. And then, my dear Mr. Penaninke, it's so much better, of course, as Mr. Kingsley says, to be improving one's mind ('spoilt her best bonnet, I declarewell, I never!' moaned Phillis, who was rescuing the débris of her mistress's outward woman in a retired corner of the room), by studying the works of nature, than to ruin one's constitution, and throw away one's time in crochet-ing purses and embroidering braces for your

1856.]

Different Classes of Natural-History Students.

ungrateful sex' (we bowed deprecatorily); and besides, it's so delight ful, as Mr. Gosse says, to be always perceiving the wonderful adaptation of ends to means, and the beautiful lessons of resignation and decorum-no, I don't mean that, quite -but you know what I mean-it's just like, I mean, going to hear that charming Mr. Thumpitwell, when he gives us such beautiful sermons in the season of the Rotunda Chapel -I never knew before what instruction and amusement these lovely little polypuses were able to give us !'

Here the lady paused, apparently for lack of breath, and we seized the opportunity and our hat, and escaped as decorously as our inward convulsions would allow ; nor did we recover our philosophic calm till we had ensconced ourselves for the whole afternoon in a favourite nook on the rocky shore, and seen the great sun sink, a ball of rushing fire, through vast belts of purple and golden cloud into the far-off Atlantic waste. The finale of our lady-friend's mania was brief and tragical. Having been invited to a half-dozen of picnics given in honour of the officers of the 144th, who had been lately quartered in the town, she entirely forgot her scientific pur. suits; and when she relapsed into her former state, and re-sought her ill-fated captives, she found them lying at the bottom of their dry receptacle in a shapeless and undistinguishable mass-stinking, as Phillis tersely remarked; or, as her mistress more elegantly paraphrased it, evolving sulphuretted hydrogen in the most charmingly scientific manner.

There is another class of so-called natural-history students, who affect the dress of the physiologist from a worse motive than that of the novelty hunter which we have just dissected. The mainspring of their proceedings is a perverted love of approbation-the desire of being thought scientific. Miserable wretches-swarming on our coasts like blow-flies in summer time-infesting our soirées and conversaziones in the London season, known by their inaccurate jargon of uncouth barbarisms, their fierce denunciation of humbler-minded nature lovers and seekers, their vain prattle

255

of depths which they have neither the love nor the capacity to penetrate. Let us leave them; they are not worth treading upon; they will die in a few years of intellectual atrophy, and lapse of their own accord into that state of annihilation whither they consign the true naturalist and philosopher.

We will turn to pleasanter subjects, and speak of those kindly spirits, ever flourishing and ever increasing, who pursue nature from a simple, honest, manly love of nature. They are convinced that everything which is, is very good ;' they are always observing, comparing, discriminating, enjoying; they know, that deepest knowledge, that after all they know but little. We never quarrel with any pets scientific' which hearts like these may care to cherish. Let us join, for the sake of the relief which the contrast will afford, a party of such nature lovers, who, in the happy summer time, are taking their recreation after their own wise fashion. We are the number is of little consequence-let us say that we are seven,' and that we all agree in a general love of everything created; and have in addition our respective specializations, which add considerably to the happiness of the body corporate. One, for instance, is a botanist, and since our party has been established on the sea-coast, he has devoted himself to the various forms of Fern which luxuriate in the cliff recesses, and wave on the windy inland downs; nor has he neglected the Algae, delicate of contour, and gorgeous of colour, which the sea has washed up for his inspection from its pathless depths. Another is great in birds; and tells us endless stories of the ways and means of life on the ocean wave' which characterize the dippers and the divers, and the rest of the multitudinous Natatores. Another is a physiologist, and enunciates general laws for our general edification. Another is learned in the habits and habitats of the endless lower life which lurks in those seeming deserts of dry rock and shining water. But in the case of each and all science is subservient to the love of Nature. The latter is our great end, the former a means

to it, and thereby it happens that we are all more or less superficial quá savans, but yet none the less enthusiastic and enjoying quá men. Well, we start in the early morning from the wave-worn pier steps of the little harbour of Ilfracombe most prolific and picturesque of 'watering-places,' which in spite of its increasing popularity, must always be a favourite haunt of the naturalist and nature-lover. The summer sun shines over the broken crags of Hillsborough, and kindles with a natural fire the beacon on the Lantern Hill-where, as Mr. Gosse remarks, with more Protestantism than piety, the ancient chapel of Saint Nicolas expiates its former days of Popish darkness by yielding a nightly light to the wandering

mariner.

How the sea glistens and glimmers in the increasing glare-how lovingly it laps and curls in creamy wavelets round the grey rocks, tossing and tangling the seaweed in the wantonness of its delight how it seethes and dimples in the deep eddies and the jagged rockpools; and how freshly and freely the waters of the mid-channel rush, in the might of their full career, to mingle with the Atlantic swell when the next flood' shall hurl in the crested squadrons of its advanced guard! Three or four towing-nets are trailing from the stern of our fishing-boat-bottles, jars, chisels, hammers, and baskets lie in vast confusion under her thwarts-the fresh aroma of the much-abused 'weed' floats around her flapping sails, as with many a pitch and a tumble she rolls over the tide-eddy at the harbour mouth-and then,

With a wet sheet and a flowing sea,
And a wind that follows fast,

away we run to the westward, and leave the white terraces and dotted hill-houses, and all our cares and troubles, if we have any, far behind

us.

As we shut out rock after rock of the rounded base of Capstone, from whose summit we have so often watched the long glory' of the harvest moon's rippling track on the quiet sea, our botanist suddenly loses that calm control which previously distinguished him; and

rising, pipe in mouth, from his lair in the stern of the boat, descants long and eloquently on the nature treasures of that isolated peak. He tells us how in its remotest recesses, just above the line of the high spring-tides, he has found the long, sturdy, glossy fronds of the seafern, Asplenium marinum, side by side with the crisp lilac sheaves of the cliff-loving Statice spathulata; how the white clusters and the succulent leaves of the scurvy-grass cling around the loose stones, and beautify, as nature ever does, the waste places of man's devising. Then, among the short, sweet herbage he has discovered a whole colony of sturdy plantains, Plantago lanceolata, the fighting cocks' of our childhood; P. coronopus, the pretty 'buck's-horn,' with its coronet of deeply-cut leaflets; P. major, old Gerard's Way brede-the GerWegebreit' the Danish 'Verbred,'-ingenious compounds, denoting at once the habitat of the plant and the characteristic of its leaf. Then, waxing warm with his subject, he pours out a torrent of botanico-barbaric nomenclature, and piles Pelion upon Ossa with remorseless facility; for he knows how its rounded summit and its

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slippery sides are blazing with Anthyllis vulneraria, and Lotus corniculatus, and Jasione montana, and Armeria and Silene maritima, and Spergularia rubra and marina, and Ethusa cynopium,-till he is stopped by the inextinguishable laughter of the whole party, who are mutually bound in an offensive and defensive league, and incontinently capsize any one of their number who shows the smallest symptoms of riding his hobby to death.

Further on we pass the grassy slopes of Torr Point, above which the seven sister Torrs heave their undulating crests, covered with purple heather and soft green moss, and endless mazes of golden furze. Then there are the beetling, gloomy crags of Brandy Cove, which can recount many a daring deed of bygone days, when smuggling was the heroic mode of getting one's livelihood, and preventive men were legitimate targets for country practice. How clamorously the great

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