Glaucus | Page 9

sun, to form a huge dam across the ravine;
till, the "Ice age" past, a more genial climate succeeded, and neve and
glacier melted away: but the "moraine" of stones did not, and remains
to this day, as the dam which keeps up the waters of the lake.
There is my explanation. If you can find a better, do: but remember
always that it must include an answer to - "How did the stones get
across the lake?"
Now, reader, we have had no abstruse science here, no long words, not
even a microscope or a book: and yet we, as two plain sportsmen, have
gone back, or been led back by fact and common sense, into the most
awful and sublime depths, into an epos of the destruction and
re-creation of a former world.
This is but a single instance; I might give hundreds. This one,
nevertheless, may have some effect in awakening you to the boundless
world of wonders which is all around you, and make you ask yourself
seriously, "What branch of Natural History shall I begin to investigate,
if it be but for a few weeks, this summer?"
To which I answer, Try "the Wonders of the Shore." There are along
every sea-beach more strange things to be seen, and those to be seen
easily, than in any other field of observation which you will find in
these islands. And on the shore only will you have the enjoyment of
finding new species, of adding your mite to the treasures of science.
For not only the English ferns, but the natural history of all our land
species, are now well-nigh exhausted. Our home botanists and

ornithologists are spending their time now, perforce, in verifying a few
obscure species, and bemoaning themselves, like Alexander, that there
are no more worlds left to conquer. For the geologist, indeed, and the
entomologist, especially in the remoter districts, much remains to be
done, but only at a heavy outlay of time, labour, and study; and the
dilettante (and it is for dilettanti, like myself, that I principally write)
must be content to tread in the tracks of greater men who have preceded
him, and accept at second or third hand their foregone conclusions.
But this is most unsatisfactory; for in giving up discovery, one gives up
one of the highest enjoyments of Natural History. There is a mysterious
delight in the discovery of a new species, akin to that of seeing for the
first time, in their native haunts, plants or animals of which one has till
then only read. Some, surely, who read these pages have experienced
that latter delight; and, though they might find it hard to define whence
the pleasure arose, know well that it was a solid pleasure, the memory
of which they would not give up for hard cash. Some, surely, can
recollect, at their first sight of the Alpine Soldanella, the Rhododendron,
or the black Orchis, growing upon the edge of the eternal snow, a thrill
of emotion not unmixed with awe; a sense that they were, as it were,
brought face to face with the creatures of another world; that Nature
was independent of them, not merely they of her; that trees were not
merely made to build their houses, or herbs to feed their cattle, as they
looked on those wild gardens amid the wreaths of the untrodden snow,
which had lifted their gay flowers to the sun year after year since the
foundation of the world, taking no heed of man, and all the coil which
he keeps in the valleys far below.
And even, to take a simpler instance, there are those who will excuse,
or even approve of, a writer for saying that, among the memories of a
month's eventful tour, those which stand out as beacon-points, those
round which all the others group themselves, are the first wolf-track by
the road-side in the Kyllwald; the first sight of the blue and green
Roller-birds, walking behind the plough like rooks in the tobacco-fields
of Wittlich; the first ball of Olivine scraped out of the volcanic
slag-heaps of the Dreisser- Weiher; the first pair of the Lesser Bustard
flushed upon the downs of the Mosel-kopf; the first sight of the cloud
of white Ephemerae, fluttering in the dusk like a summer snowstorm
between us and the black cliffs of the Rheinstein, while the broad

Rhine beneath flashed blood-red in the blaze of the lightning and the
fires of the Mausenthurm - a lurid Acheron above which seemed to
hover ten thousand unburied ghosts; and last, but not least, on the lip of
the vast Mosel-kopf crater - just above the point where the weight of
the fiery lake has burst the side of the great slag-cup, and rushed forth
between two cliffs