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observe its complicated anatomy, the nerves which animate it, the intestines which receive its food, the vessels which nourish it, and the muscles which give it motion. We can not convey to the reader without drawings (which the author does not employ) any idea of these various organizations. It may suffice to state that, as the annelid has three hundred rings, it must have one brain or chief nervous center, three hundred secondary centers, and three thousand nervous trunks. The process of alimentation is effected by not less than two hundred and eighty stomachs! For the purposes of nutrition, it has five hundred and fifty branchiæ, six hundred hearts, and six hundred arteries and veins. The muscular apparatus is surprising. Each ring is supplied with about one hundred and twenty muscles; and reckoning those of the proboscis and head, the annelid moves by means of more than thirty thousand muscles!

opening which receives its food serves also for its rejection. Its ovaries are of some size, and the number of its ova can not be less than four or five hundred thousand!

Hitherto M. Quatrefages had no companion in his travels or in his researches, and at Chaussey he had to endure hardships of no common kind. During three months he saw the sun only about half a dozen times. Rain or mist attended him in all his rambles; and he often returned so completely drenched, that he was obliged to lie in bed till his clothes were dried. In his one apartment he was inundated by the slightest storm. He one morning awoke with six inches of water under his bed. His steel instruments rusted, the salt dissolved in his salt-cellar, and a pound of sugar, which had been forgotten for a fortnight at the bottom of his cupboard, was converted into syrup.

In his journey to the coasts of Sicily he was more fortunate. In 1843, the Minister of Public Instruction apppointed a scientific commission, consisting of our author, M. Milne Edwards, and M. Blanchard, to visit the coasts of Sicily. Leaving Paris on the 20th March, 1844, they reached Naples on the 28th, and soon after arrived at Palermo. In this city and its neighborhood they found many objects of the deepest interest. After admiring, in the palaces, churches, and cloisters of the city, the valuable carvings, and the precious marbles, malachites, and lapis lazulis with which they are adorned, and enjoying the beauties of the lovely valley of the Conca d'Oro, where the vegetation is entirely southern and African in its character, and where the citron and orange trees form forests from three to four miles

In contrast with this highly favored worm, our author describes the Doyerina, a few lines long, in which the muscles of the trunk are blended into two or three layers, the digestive and nervous centers united, the circulatory organs reduced to a single dorsal trunk, and the respiratory organs wanting. In the Aphlebina the degradation is more manifest; the body is a mere sac inclosing a straight intestine, there is no circulatory organ, and the blood is moved only by cilia. As an example of extreme degradation, our author takes the Nemertes Borlasii, a worm thirty to forty feet long, (sometimes more than one hundred feet,) and only five or six lines wide, flat like a ribbon, of a brown or violet color, and like varnished leather. It is found under stones, rolled into a ball, and coiled into a thousand ap-in extent, they visited the famous grotto parently inextricable knots. It glides through the water by means of fine vibratile cilia on every part of its body. Its tissues are so contractile that a nemestes thirty feet long, placed in alcohol, is reduced to two and a half or three feet! Although all the great apparatus of life is represented in this animal, it is reduced to its simplest expression. The same

interlaced arrangement of the very delicate fibers of the epidermis. This we can not admit. To produce the polarized tints, we must have one laminated structure to polarize, and a transverse one to analyze the light. We have seen such colors thus produced

in crystals of nitrate of potash, but there can be no such structure in the annelids.

of San Ciro, a fine example of an osseous breccia, which contained fossil bones intermingled with sea-shells. The grotto is an irregular excavation, about forty or fifty feet deep and from twenty to thirty feet high, and its walls are still marked with the tools by which it was excavated. Caverns with masses of fossil bones have been long ago discovered in the Hartz Mountains and elsewhere. Dr. Buckland found that the bones of bears, hyenas, and sometimes even of dogs, wolves, and jaguars, of a larger size than existing species, were interspersed in the mud which formed the bottom of the caverns; and he was led to consider these excavations

as the resort of carnivorous animals, and | submarine grottoes. Those narrow and of the victims on which they fed. It was deep fissures, in which the waves had only afterwards discovered, however, that in just rippled over the arches at the water's limestone rocks without fossils, there were edge, were engulfed and swallowed up veins entirely filled with bones impacted amid the strangest and wildest sounds. in a matrix wholly different from the rock. The slight ripple raised by our small boat The veins were, therefore, supposed to be sufficed to awake these singular voices of ancient fissures, into which currents of the shore, which fall upon the ear like water had washed from the soil the skele- the prolonged cry of some colossal montons which they bore. This explanation ster whose rest had been abruptly diswas confirmed in 1842 by MM. Constant turbed." Prevost and Desnoyers, who discovered at Montmorency and Fontainebleau a great number of ancient fissures like those on the shores of the Mediterranean, where they are now forming. The former were osseous breccias, containing the remains of paleontological faunas; and the latter, osseous caverns, containing only the remains of existing animals. Before the grotto of San Ciro was dismantled, it was covered with the bones of elephants, hippopotami, deer, stags, and dogs, agglutinated by calcareous infiltrations, or cemented by quartzose sand and indurated clay. Our author tells us that the bones were so numerous, that certain English travelers shipped them to London, where they were converted into animal black!

In order to carry out their plans of research, our naturalists resolved to circumnavigate Sicily in a boat of their own; and they succeeded in obtaining the Santa Rosalia, and her crew of seven men, for sixteen francs a day. In advancing to the West after passing the Castello di Molo, their attention was arrested by the singular nature of the beach, which was formed of limestone so unequally dense and highly porous, that the force of the waves had undermined the entire mass, and broken it up on all sides. "These semi-arches," says our author, "crowned and garlanded by the cactus and other shrubs, gave rise to a perfect labyrinth of grottoes, which defies all description. It would require the skill of the most accomplished artist to give an idea of the marvelous admixture of forms, colors, and effects produced by the vast halls in which a far larger pinnace than ours might have found shelter; where irregular porticoes, with strangely contorted pillars, seemed cut out of colossal agates; and where all the most widely differing colors, from milkywhite to blood-red, or raven-black, were blended together, varied and contrasted in the most striking manner. But no artist's touch could convey an idea of these

Our travelers spent their first night near the dismantled tower of Sferacavallo, distracted with sea-sickness, with the garlic and onion perfumes of seven unwashed Sicilian sailors, and, what was worse still, with the stench of the kitchen cockroach, (Blatta orientalis,) which swarmed in every crevice of the ship's timbers, and which at night emerged in thousands. These creatures, sometimes two or three inches long, often destroy the entire cargo of trading vessels, and render the ship unfit for service.

At the small fishing village of Torre dell' Isola our naturalists found a restingplace in the manor-house occupied by the Padre Antonino, a poor Dominican, who performed the services of the sanctuary for ten pounds a year. The three apartments which he gave them, with planks to sleep upon, softened by an inch and a half of wool and cotton, were speedily prepared to hold their microscopes and bottles, and they lost no time in beginning their researches.

In his first excursion, M. Quatrefages saw the ocean under an aspect entirely new to him. Owing to the marvelous transparency of the water, annelids and medusas, which appeared only a few inches from the surface, were actually at the depth of many feet. He could see beneath the boat, plains, valleys, and hills, here bare and rugged in their sides, and there clothed with verdant herbage, or spotted with tufts of shrubs. Amid these submarine precipices and sands, there lay bright red sea-weeds and glossy fucus fronds, as distinctly revealed as if he had been suspended in space, or soaring like a bird to contemplate the varied features of hill and dale. These submarine recesses were the abode of strangely formed beings. Fishes, single and in shoals, were seen rushing among the tufts of sea-weed, while Gorgonidae, Caryophyllidæ, and a hundred different kinds of Polyzoaries were "blooming in tufts of living flow

ers." Here were Holothurias climbing the temple, though thirty feet high and six rocks, star-fishes of the hue of pomegran- feet wide, has tottered on its base; not ate, Molluscs crawling along, and now and a stone has been displaced from its simple then seized by the pincers of enormous cornice. Time and the elements have spider-like crabs. There were strings of spared its sharp cut blocks, and given Salpæ, clear as crystal-animals alternately them only the color of age. The stage oviparous and viviparous, the single in- of the theater is in perfect preservation, dividuals being viviparous, and those ag- and the lower tier of seats in tolerable gregated in strings oviparous. There also condition. Of the city and its palaces not were swarms of large spherical Beröes, a fragment remains. The temple and the whose strange organization was discover- theater are the only vestiges of that proud ed by M. Edwards; the Firola and the and opulent Segesta, which was once the Diphyes, and the graceful Stephanomia rival of Agrigentum and Syracuse. whose delicate living garlands of crystals Around these edifices, so miraculously and blossoms disappear when dried, leav-preserved, the same scene meets the eye ing not a trace on the goblet which the night before they had adorned.

In order to study these derivatives of rare or imperfectly known types, recourse was had to every means of capturing them. Drags, pocket-nets, skimming vessels, and dredges, were their implements at sea; and when these failed, one of the crew would strip, and, diving below, would bring up the desired prize. On shore, huge stones had to be turned and broken, and hammers and ponderous levers replaced their nets and silk-bags. A very curious formation, previously unnoticed, facilitated their researches among the rocks. Whenever calcareous rocks ran into the sea, they were encircled with a kind of causeway on a level with the surface of the water, and following all the sinuosities of the shore. This compact cement, encircling a considerable part of the rocky coasts of Sicily, is the work of two species of small molluscs, of the genus Vermetus, which live united together in almost incredible numbers, and form the solid causeway by the combination of their interlaced tubes.

Laden with living treasures from the irregular cavities of the causeway, our naturalists steered their course to Castellamare, a town with six thousand people, and situated on the largest bay in Sicily. From the want of the humblest inn, they were lodged in a room, emptied for their use of a pile of half-rotten onions. For tunately, however, they could not find on the shore any materials for their study, and contented themselves with visiting the temple and theater of Segesta. In the midst of a desert, and on a high hill, there rose before them one of the most magnificent monuments of ancient art, in a state of perfect preservation. Not even one of the thirty-six columns of this noble

which entranced the gaze of Æneas and his companions.

Quitting Castellamare for San Tito, our travelers passed the 200 towers, once garrisoned with 10,000 men, which were built to protect the island from African pirates. In this miserable village they could hardly obtain food, and their lodging was of the most meager character. Here, however, M. Blanchard acquired for the museum one of the subterranean cities in which the ants administer their republican institutions. In these insects, more than in the bee, a strange mixture of instinct and reason is evinced in actions of extreme complexity. Some live in trees, and others in excavations of the soil. Some gather food for the day's, and some even for the next day's consumption. Other communities rear herds and flocks of plant-lice, watch over them from their infancy, construct places to shelter them, or pasture them within the ant's nest, and then feed upon the saccharine fluid which the plant-lice secrete. Under a different instinct, some of the ant communities attack their neighbors, and, when successful, carry off eggs or young larvæ, which, after development, are brought up as slaves to do the work of their masters.

At San Vito, M. Edwards was successful in his researches. The Medusa had been regarded as lumps of living jelly, till M. Dumeril injected milk into their digestive circulatory and reproductive organs. Ehrenberg observed their organs of sight, and M. Edward discovered the distinction of the sexes, and the existence of the same organization in the entire family of the Medusidæ. In the allied family of the Beroïdæ, he found a remarkable uniformity of organization along with a diversity of external forms so singular, that they have scarcely any charac

ter in common, excepting the form and action of their vibratile cilia. Our countryman, Professor Grant, had discovered their nervous system long before either Ehrenberg or M. Edwards*

Next to the Medusa and Beroïda are the Stephanomiæ, the most extraordinary animals in the marine world. Round an axis of flexible crystal, sometimes a yard long, are attached by long transparent peduncles hundreds of small bodies like flower-buds, and in this garland are interspersed beads of the most vivid red, amid an infinity of filaments. Each of these parts is a special organ: one for seizing food, a second for digesting it, a third for respiration, a fourth for vision, and a fifth for propagating the species. The animal moves by means of water driven out by the contraction of little bells, the bells having their mouths directed backwards --a structure unique in the animal kingdon.t

M. Quatrefages made here some important observations on the Syllis, an annelid about two or three inches long. It reproduces itself by developing a number of rings at its extremity, the first ring producing a head with eyes and antennæ. The parent and offspring are still united by the skin and intestine, so that the new animal lives on the remains of the food swallowed by the old one. After the new animal is swollen with eggs, it separates from the other; the eggs swell, the body bursts, the animal dies, and the germs within are diffused around. These animals are made to be only reproductive machines. Their offspring never exhibit the characteristics of their father or mother.

Among the marvels of the marine world not the least is the generation of the Medusa. The egg produces a ciliated larva, which, after certain changes, is converted into the stem of a hydroid polypary, from which sprout numerous polypes. The same stem subsequently produces new buds, not like polypes, but

In examining one of these animals long ago, we found a small spot within the animal which had a polarising structure.

M. Quatrefagos mentions it as the opinion of some naturalists, that each of the Siphonophora is a colony of distinct but incomplete individuals, some of which are charged with the functions of locomotion, and others with those of nutrition, etc.

According to Steenstrup, some animals resemble their grandparents and not their parents! VOL. XLIV.-NO. I.

"Who,"

which become true Medusa! says our author, "would not exclaim that a miracle was performed, if he saw a hen drop an egg, and a reptile emerge from it, giving birth at once to an indefinite number of fishes and birds!"

On the backs of Sicilian mules our travelers arrived at Trapani, the ancient Drepanum,, a town of 30,000 inhabitants, situated at the extreme western point of Italy; interesting chiefly from the beautiful women of San Juliano* (supposed to be the descendants of the priestesses of the Erycinean Venus,) and from the rock called La Columbara, which faces the harbor, and is the same rock which Virgil mentions as the goal at the boat-race in the funeral games in honor of Anchises.

Having found this locality destitute of the objects they desired, they set off in the Rosalia for the Archipelago of the Egades, nine miles distant, consisting of three principal islands-Favignana, Levanzo, and Maritimo. The first of these, twenty miles in circuit, afforded ample materials for research. The Palermo limestone, which here underlies the calcareous rock, consists of countless zoophytes, sponges, and polyparies. A cubic foot of it would fill an entire collection. The capital of Favignana has 3000 inhabitants, a number which is nearly doubled by the garrison of three forts, and by 2000 convicts immured in the terrible dungeons of Fort St. John. The most curious object in the town is its public clock, with two hands and no wheels. A citizen, in the keep of one of the forts, and having an hour-glass in his hand, strikes the hours with a hammer on a bell, and thus indicates to the community the march of time.

In the arm of the sea between Levanzo and Favignana, there is established a tonnaro, or tunny fishery, rented at 60,000 francs. The fish are caught by the Madrague, which is an actual park of a hundred feet square, with its walks and alleys all terminating in a vast labyrinth of chambers opening into one another, and ending in the corpou, or chamber of death. Our naturalists saw the process of capture, already immortalized by Joseph Vernet's picture of it. Five or six hundred tunnies, chased from chamber to chamber by the valves, which close behind them, reach at last the chamber of death. Its

* A village situated on Mount Eryx.

4

movable floor of netting has been grad ually lifted to near the surface of the water; and the proprietor of the fishery with his staff, and a group of ladies from Palermo, and a band of two hundred fishermen, stand prepared, the one to perform a bloody massacre, and the other to enjoy the sport. When the net floor is near the surface the tunnies become visible, darting through their watery prison. After various preliminary skirmishes between their bronze-limbed assailants and the helpless fishes, in which hooks and spears of all kinds are driven remorselessly into their flesh, the whistle of the master fisherman is heard, the men break into a song, the net floor, covered with struggling life, is near the surface, and the skirmish becomes a massacre. Hooks and harpoons cross one another in the unequal strife; cries of triumph encourage the butchers; and the dumb and uncomplaining life-the dead with their torn and quivering flesh, and the dying in their convulsive agonies-sinks under the relentless strokes of its foes. In three hours, 554 fish were caught, each weighing 176 pounds, which with 400 still in the Madrague, would produce 70 tons, of the value of £1720.

After denouncing this wholesale butchery as a wanton infliction of pain upon unresisting life, M. Quatrefages proceeds to give an account of the important researches and discoveries of M. Edwards, which at first met with much opposition, both in France and other countries. In a popular article like the present, it would be out of place to attempt to give the general reader any intelligible account of these discoveries. It may be sufficient to state, that in the superior animals, the various functions on which life depends are performed by special organs; while in the lower grades there are no distinct organs, and yet the animals digest, absorb, and respire, and fluids circulate through all their tissues. That is, the function is independent of the organ; each part of body being equally adapted to perform simultaneously all the requisite physiological acts. But as these acts are accomplished at the same point, they can not be as perfectly executed as if there had been a special organ for each. Hence the value of the principle developed twenty years ago by M. Edwards: "That the successive degrees of perfection attained by the different organisms in the

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animal kingdom, depend upon the extent to which functional labor is divided."

Owing to the zoological poverty of the western coasts of Sicily, our naturalists retraced their steps, and, returning to Palermo, proceeded to Cephalu and Milazzo (the residence of Louis Philippe during his exile,) where they found suitable accommodation for themselves, and ample materials for study among the tufts of algae and Fuci in the basins of the calcareous rocks. While M. Blanchard was bagging insects in thousands, black snakes, geckos, and lizards, his companions were arranging a new apparatus for pursuing the marine animals into their native rocks, deeply buried beneath the ocean. Furnished with a diving apparatus, fitted to his person, M. Edwards went to the bottom of the sea in the harbor of Milazzo, and the bay of Taormine, where, at the depth of twenty-five feet, he examined the algae and the zoophytes, and strove for nearly an hour to detach with a pickaxe some of the large panopas. Molluscs and zoophytes without number, and immense quantities of the eggs of the molluscs and annelids, were among his submarine acquisitions; and by these he was enabled to study every phase of their curious evolution. M. Quatrefages was rewarded, from the grottoes of the cape, with a new Gasteropodous mollusc, "one of the most marvelously beautiful gems he had ever seen." The smooth tentacles of our snails were replaced by two large crystal horns, each of which bore a tuft of rosy branches with violet blossoms, while its forehead was covered with a spangled vail of the finest gauze.

In order to compare the population of calcareous rocks with that of volcanic districts, our zoologists made a trip to Stromboli, a distance of nearly forty miles. The island, with about thirty houses built of lava, is merely a volcanic cone, nine miles in circuit, and almost 2000 feet high. Having found no animal life among its barren calcined rocks, they resolved to visit the volcano. With safe guides and stout staffs, they ascended a path of moving sand, through vines and thistles, till every trace of vegetation disappeared. In about three hours they reached the top of the old cone, 600 feet above the present crater, and on their arrival, they were greeted with an eruption. They saw the abyss kindling at their feet, while a jet of fire rose towards them with the

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