Glaucus | Page 7

a meteorologist which no one beside but a sailor possesses;
and one has often longed for a scientific gamekeeper or huntsman, who,
by discovering a law for the mysterious and seemingly capricious
phenomena of "scent," might perhaps throw light on a hundred dark
passages of hygrometry. The fisherman, too, - what an inexhaustible
treasury of wonder lies at his feet, in the subaqueous world of the
commonest mountain burn! All the laws which mould a world are there

busy, if he but knew it, fattening his trout for him, and making them
rise to the fly, by strange electric influences, at one hour rather than at
another. Many a good geognostic lesson, too, both as to the nature of a
country's rocks, and as to the laws by which strata are deposited, may
an observing man learn as he wades up the bed of a trout- stream; not to
mention the strange forms and habits of the tribes of water-insects.
Moreover, no good fisherman but knows, to his sorrow, that there are
plenty of minutes, ay, hours, in each day's fishing in which he would be
right glad of any employment better than trying to
"Call spirits from the vasty deep,"
who will not
"Come when you do call for them."
What to do, then? You are sitting, perhaps, in your coracle, upon some
mountain tarn, waiting for a wind, and waiting in vain.
"Keine luft an keine seite, Todes-stille frchterlich;"
as G”the has it -
"Und der schiffer sieht bekmmert Glatte fl„che rings umher."
You paddle to the shore on the side whence the wind ought to come, if
it had any spirit in it; tie the coracle to a stone, light your cigar, lie
down on your back upon the grass, grumble, and finally fall asleep. In
the meanwhile, probably, the breeze has come on, and there has been
half-an-hour's lively fishing curl; and you wake just in time to see the
last ripple of it sneaking off at the other side of the lake, leaving all as
dead-calm as before.
Now how much better, instead of falling asleep, to have walked quietly
round the lake side, and asked of your own brains and of Nature the
question, "How did this lake come here? What does it mean?"
It is a hole in the earth. True, but how was the hole made? There must
have been huge forces at work to form such a chasm. Probably the
mountain was actually opened from within by an earthquake; and when
the strata fell together again, the portion at either end of the chasm,
being perhaps crushed together with greater force, remained higher
than the centre, and so the water lodged between them. Perhaps it was
formed thus. You will at least agree that its formation must have been a
grand sight enough, and one during which a spectator would have had
some difficulty in keeping his footing.
And when you learn that this convulsion probably took plus at the

bottom of an ocean hundreds of thousands of years ago, you have at
least a few thoughts over which to ruminate, which will make you at
once too busy to grumble, and ashamed to grumble.
Yet, after all, I hardly think the lake was formed in this way, and
suspect that it may have been dry for ages after it emerged from the
primeval waves, and Snowdonia was a palm-fringed island in a tropic
sea. Let us look the place over more fully.
You see the lake is nearly circular; on the side where we stand the
pebbly beach is not six feet above the water, and slopes away steeply
into the valley behind us, while before us it shelves gradually into the
lake; forty yards out, as you know, there is not ten feet water; and then
a steep bank, the edge whereof we and the big trout know well, sinks
suddenly to unknown depths. On the opposite side, that flat-topped wall
of rock towers up shoreless into the sky, seven hundred feet
perpendicular; the deepest water of all we know is at its very foot.
Right and left, two shoulders of down slope into the lake. Now turn
round and look down the gorge. Remark that this pebble bank on which
we stand reaches some fifty yards downward: you see the loose stones
peeping out everywhere. We may fairly suppose that we stand on a dam
of loose stones, a hundred feet deep.
But why loose stones? - and if so, what matter? and what wonder?
There are rocks cropping out everywhere down the hill-side.
Because if you will take up one of these stones and crack it across, you
will see that it is not of the same stuff as those said rocks. Step into the
next field and see.