Some diversions of a naturalist / by Ray Lankester.

  • Ray Lankester
Date:
[1925]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Some diversions of a naturalist / by Ray Lankester. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    surface of the ocean-floor far below for some ten or twenty minutes, and then to haul it up again and see what living wonders the unseen world has sent you, is, in my opinion, the most exciting and delightful sport in which a naturalist can indulge. There are difficulties and drawbacks connected with it. You cannot, in a small boat and without expenditure of large sums on a steam yacht and crew, reach from our coast—with rare excep- tions in the north-west—with a fair prospect of returning in safety, those waters which are ioo fathoms deep. And it is precisely in such depths that the most interesting “ hauls ” are to be expected. I had had in former days to be content with io fathoms in the North Sea and 30 to 40 off the Channel Islands. Then there is the question of sea-sickness. Nothing is so favourable to that diversion as slowly towing a dredge. I used to take the chance of being ill, and often suffered that for which no other joy than the hauling in of a rich dredgeful of rare sea creatures could possibly com- pensate, or induce me to take the risk (as I did again and again). I remember lying very ill on the deck of a slowly lurching “ lugger ” in a heaving sea off Guernsey, when the dredge came up, and as its contents were turned out near me, a semi-transparent, oblong, flattened thing like a small paper-knife began to hop about on the boards. It was the first specimen I ever saw alive of the “ lancelet ” (Amphioxus), that strange, fish-like little creature, the lowest of vertebrates. I recognized him and immediately felt restored to well-being, seized the young stranger, and placed him in a special glass jar of clear sea-water. A few years later the fishermen at Naples would bring me, without any trouble to myself, twenty or more any day of the week (“ cimbarella ” they called them), and I not only have helped to make out the cimbarella’s anatomy
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