Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the ShoreKingsley, Charles
History
Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore
Kingsley, Charles
Natural history -- Juvenile literature; Seashore biology -- Juvenile literature
Look, again, at those sea-slugs. One, some three inches long, of a
bright lemon-yellow, clouded with purple; another of a dingy grey; {130a}
another exquisite little creature of a pearly French White, {130b} furred
all over the back with what seem arms, but are really gills, of ringed
white and grey and black. Put that yellow one into water, and from his
head, above the eyes, arise two serrated horns, while from the after-part
of his back springs a circular Prince-of-Wales’s-feather of gills,—they
are almost exactly like those which we saw just now in the white
Cucumaria. Yes; here is another instance of the same custom of
repetition. The Cucumaria is a low radiate animal—the sea-slug a far
higher mollusc; and every organ within him is formed on a different type;
as indeed are those seemingly identical gills, if you come to examine
them under the microscope, having to oxygenate fluids of a very different
and more complicated kind; and, moreover, the Cucumaria’s gills were put
round his mouth, the Doris’s feathers round the other extremity; that
grey Eolis’s, again, are simple clubs, scattered over his whole back, and
in each of his nudibranch congeners these same gills take some new and
fantastic form; in Melibæa those clubs are covered with warts; in
Scyllæa, with tufted bouquets; in the beautiful Antiopa they are
transparent bags; and in many other English species they take every
conceivable form of leaf, tree, flower, and branch, bedecked with every
colour of the rainbow, as you may see them depicted in Messrs. Alder and
Hancock’s unrivalled Monograph on the Nudibranch Mollusca.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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