John George Francis

“ That scent, and sight, and sound, are altogether irresistible. We throw aside Dr. Buckland and Hugh Miller, clap on a “wide-awake,” rush down at once by the zig-zag path, and madly catch up a bunch of dripping tangle, and kick a hole in the moist sand, and presently find that our “Balmorals” are ancle-deep in the brine of a nimble wave.
And now I descry a faint purplish hue upon the red beach which lies at the foot of Culver. To-morrow, we will breakfast early, and hunt up a score of pebbles before the day grows hot. ”

“ It is well that, to console us under such apparent poverty as to the gems, we possess the treasure an hundred-fold in other shapes, though derived from the same sources. Clay gives us no sapphires; but it floors our ponds and canals, furnishes our earthenware, and yields the bricks which have built the ribs of London. Carbon refuses to flash upon us in the rays of an indigenous “brilliant,” but it feeds our furnaces, propels our steamers and locomotives, and cheers a million of household hearths under the well-known form of Coal. ”

“ In England, we find the agates greenish white, lemon colour, or dark grey; and on the island of Iona, hard by the ruined monastery, they are picked up of a soft green hue, and as clear as a chrysolite. The best lump of agate I ever saw came from an unfrequented bay in the Isle of Wight; the colours were dullish, but in texture it approached an oriental onyx, and it weighed above a pound. I know of no equal specimen in the collection of the British Museum.
CARNELIAN, which is our purest form of chalcedony, is undoubtedly a more beautiful stone than the agate. ”

“ Let any one fill a drawer with such specimens gathered by himself: and, omitting the question of mere marketable value, what jeweller’s counter can compare with it for real interest? The oriental gems, though they gleam as if “all air and fire,” are but dead crystals, and have never stood higher than they stand now: whereas these pretty fossils from our wave-beaten coast tell each a wondrous tale, and form a kind of tangible link between the zoophyte of to-day and his far-removed ancestry in the earliest seas which washed the surface of our globe. ”

“ Thus, between tide-waves and currents, changes are going on continually both in the volume and the physical constitution of the sea-water. And this, which might at first on a hasty glance look like casual and unimportant variation, when we come to consider it attentively, is found to be an arrangement fraught with wisdom and beneficence; for it insures continual variations of temperature, it attracts the purifying storms, restores the elastic spring of the atmosphere, and provides for weary man a healthy tonic breeze when he rambles along the beach or scales the face of the cliff. ”

“ Professor Faraday has said that the ruby-tinted glass called “Bohemian” derives its colour from gold in a pure form, finely attenuated, and not from any chemical combination of that substance.
A white diamond has far more lustre than one which is yellow or violet-tinted. But in all the sapphires, the deeper the hue, the more brilliant and valuable the stone. Hence the technical term for the colour of a diamond is its water. In all these gems the hues (whatever their origin) are homogeneously united with the crystal; and the modus operandi of Nature is a profound secret. ”

“ To such, even a brief [3] sojourn on the simple-featured coast may, undoubtedly, prove wearisome; but the fault rests with themselves. For, all the while, others, who are better informed and more awake to what lies around them, will be cheerfully occupied in kindred pursuits at the foot of the cliff, or away on the beach, or far out, at low tide, among the weedy rocks and sand. Here they hunt the cockle and the razor-shell, collect bright algæ and marvellous zoophytes, or search for agates and fossils among the endless heaps of shingle. ”

“ I have already, in my opening chapter, remarked how the sea brings down, in the course of ages, many a pebbly beach from cliff and causeway. But I am far from assuming, therefore, that all the pebbles of a beach come from the land. The usual bottom of the sea is, indeed, no pebbly shore; but there are many submerged rocks of sandstone and oolite, out of whose ribs and crevices, from time to time, fossils may be washed, just as our own chalk-cliffs, the main resort of the siliceous pebbles, were themselves laid down in deep seas. ”

“ The lapidary has from the first felt himself at home with Nature, and has found room for many of her devices and eccentricities, which he could not now bear to turn out of doors. Neither are we inclined to quarrel with him about his arrangements, though his shop exhibits nothing which will remind us of a frontage in Pall Mall or Bond Street. Moreover, when we look a little closer, he is not such a mere dreamer after all. Commerce has not been forgotten, nor is a certain kind of elegance lacking. ”

“ For here the wind not only has free scope, but it also finds another element, fluid but incompressible, to obey its impulse and follow in the course which it takes. If the WIND be like a wild spirit, the WATER is a mighty, irresistible body, endowed with motion by the other, and capable of any work, from the drowning of a sea-gull to the wrecking of a stately ship. ”

“ Thus light is separated from darkness; waters from waters; water from earth. And by a like analogy we may suppose that the “firmament” or atmosphere, the lower part of which we breathe, was also eliminated in its component gases from the primitive shapeless bulk of matter.
If we take forty-five miles as the average height of this atmosphere above the surface of our globe, it is proportionately, like the thin rind upon an apple, or the bloom [152] upon a peach; and may very well have come forth without any violence done to nature, or any waste of her resources, from the womb of the earth. ”

“ Dizzy precipices of chalk stand like sugar-loaves against the blue sky, here and there cleft in a tortuous, yawning chasm. Beneath, the beach seems to slumber, so gentle is that lisping murmur, where the long billowy swell washes the face of the skerries, and lifts up and down their heavy fringe of tangle like a giant’s beard. ”

“ But in speaking of the labours of the ocean, I shall confine myself to the seashore, as the scope of this little volume does not go beyond that region. The point where sea and land meet is the critical point for all observers of Nature. Here the disciple of geology should serve his apprenticeship, and if he cannot accumulate facts, and glean a kind of inspiration here, he cannot do so anywhere. Moreover here, better, we think, than in any inland scenery, Man can muse and meditate. ”

“ As our practical ideas of locomotion are immensely surpassed by the speed of the Earth’s rotation on her axis, which is at the equator rather more than 1000 miles an hour, and yet far more surpassed by the rate at which she moves in her orbit round the Sun, which exceeds 20,000 miles an hour, so also our experience of a puff of wind on the hillside, or a dash of water in our face, [135] when a slanting shower or the spray from a cataract salutes us, gives us no conception of the stupendous powers which are exerted when the sea, convulsed by a storm, rages along some unprotected coast. ”

“ So, nothing connected with the mysterious choanite was “lucky.”
Perhaps every feature in “Vectis,” from the matted festoons on its honey-combed rocks to the “witchery of its soft blue sky,” predisposes a frequent visitor to approve also of its pebbles. But it is an unprejudiced fact, that in texture and colour they excel those which are found on the Sussex beaches. And while I think highly of our Devonshire jaspers, I remember a jasper-agate, gathered some years ago at Sandown, which might challenge all such stones of native growth in our London museums, and bear away the palm. ”

“ But it is a metal which makes the bark of certain trees and shrubs to glisten; aided, in the case of the birch and wheat-stubble, by particles of silex. It is a metal, absorbed from juices of the soil, which gives their tints to flowers, and their deep tinge to fruits. It is a metal which dyes the plumes of the king-fisher; and the gleaming scales of the dragon-fly and diamond-beetle owe their brilliancy to metallic lustre. Why should this all-pervading law vary in the crystals? ”

“ Observe, then the peculiar way in which the outer crust of an old pebble is worn, as compared with that of one which has newly descended upon the beach. This crust or cuticle is highly suggestive, if you can once come to understand it; and as a hopeful indication of progress, you may safely assume that you do understand it, when you find that you can obtain pebbles such as nine persons out of ten somehow never “have the luck” to meet with. Sometimes a stone has parted with its original coating, and has donned another: and this operation may either be complete, or still in fieri. ”

“ Nor is this surprising, when we remember that all creatures naturally desire something which they have not got. For the bottom of the sea itself is no beach at all, but chalk or sand, and sometimes hardened sandstone, with, I dare say, many precipitous pits and hollows, and many pointed crags. Here, gigantic fronds of the oar-weed wave to and fro among thousands of acres of dulse and bladderwrack ”

“ The breeze which bends the standing corn does not impart so much pleasure as that which dimples the bay at the foot of our rustic garden; the thunder-cloud resting on a mountain is not so impressive as that huge wall of inky blackness, which seems as if it would choke the very light and air while it gathers on the horizon, but will presently rend asunder and purify the overcharged atmosphere by launching a tempest upon the face of the deep. ”

“ Above all, those who desire to note epochs in the flight of Time, and to set up way-marks in the Earth’s chronology, must study the line of the sea-coast, the ancient and the modern, for here, if anywhere, the dial-plate is uncovered, and the shadow of the gnomon may be traced through some seconds of the enormous day which has witnessed the existence of the heavens and the earth. ”

“ I am in a district of the New Red Sandstone, and as far as my eye can reach I see towering cliffs of a kindred formation, wheeling round or jutting out in foxy-coloured masses, while the innumerable points of shingle glow like an autumn stubble at their feet. ”

“ Solid as the ground appears, all is subject to elemental change and motion; and whenever the waves of the sea or the strong current of a river can plough some crumbling chine, or wear away the face of a cliff, down come the imbedded pebbles and crystals, and gradually form a beach upon the margin of the ocean. ”

“ The variety exhibited by Nature seems to be almost infinite, take what ground we will for observation and comparison. This has been frequently noted in both the animal and vegetable departments of Creation. I believe it to be no less true of the mineral, especially when we embrace under that head fossil remains.
If there be any feature in British scenery which to a cursory observer appears uniform and identical everywhere, it is the yellow-looking beach along the coast line. Yet it will be found on trial that our beaches differ widely from each other. No two are quite alike. ”

“ Nay more: on the range of the Sussex coast—a very monotonous range—I am acquainted, at this present time of writing, with four beaches, which I do not scruple to pronounce totally different one from another. If I were shown the pebbles, I could generally tell from which quarter they came. But to become aware of variety, you must observe certain admitted facts. The frequenters of our coast-scenery, not one-tenth part of whom can plead the sad excuse of being invalids, usually know but little of the character of a beautiful beach lying in their intermediate neighbourhood. ”

“ For pleasing the eye, perhaps the choicest stone in Britain is a moss-agate, of which the pretty name yields an accurate description. The “moss” is some oxidized metal, whose ramifications form a striking contrast with the limpid chalcedony in which it seems to float like seaweed or sponge.
When a fine specimen of one of these stones has been cleverly cut, it is not unusual to obtain in its section the principal features of a mimic landscape—the clear sky, and the fuscous earth. Some, in addition, display a setting sun, &c. Such stones get the name of “landscape-pebbles.” ”

“ It were vain to deny that the lapidary’s acquaintance might in time prove an expensive amusement; for pebble-hunting is a hobby, and like all hobbies is liable to be over-ridden. But experience begets caution. For a score of stones which a tyro will leave on the board to be cut, a connoisseur will not venture above two or three. ”

“ Certainly, the chief mystery of every animated creature seems to reside in its life, and Life is like a burning lamp. Once the life extinct, we can anatomize and analyze, and arrive at many partial conclusions; but, meanwhile, the life has departed, and we do not know what that was. The nearest thing to its likeness is expression; and animals rank high in the scale of being, according as they command and impart expression. A dog or horse have a great deal; a bird some; a reptile or insect, absolutely none to our eyes. ”

“ It yields an amusing diversion in the water, to play the pebbles about under one’s feet. The effect of it, however, is not so quaint as that which I remember experiencing many years ago in Loch Long, where are no pebbles, but plenty of mud. Here, wading out in the shallows to arrive at swimming depth, I put one foot after the other on the backs of some unsuspecting flounders lying on the sand, and laughed aloud at the tickling sensation as they glided away from under me.
But all motion is a source of interest and charm, especially while we are on the sunny side of forty. ”

“ The first charm lay in that silent mystery which broods over every part of creation, a veil as yet unpenetrated by Science: it lay in our instinctive consciousness that Nature, in what are, perhaps, her simplest movements, still transcends all the master-pieces of Art. ”