Page:The aquarium - an unveiling of the wonders of the deep sea.djvu/97

62 are very numerous on the downs above, when he fell over. Thirteen hours he lay helpless at the bottom, in the hardest frost of the winter of 1849-50, and was then found with a broken arm and thigh, but with no other important injuries.

But up with the dredge; let us see our success. It feels pretty heavy as it mounts, and here as it breaks the surface we can already see some bright-hued and active creatures in its capacious bag. A wide board resting on two thwarts serves for a table, and on this,—a few of the more delicate things that appear at a glance, having been first taken out,—the whole contents are poured. The empty dredge is returned to the deep for another haul, while we set eagerly to work with fingers and eyes on the heap before us.

What a pleasure it is to examine a tolerably prolific dredge-haul! I am not going to enumerate all the things that we found; it would make a pretty long list. Numbers of rough stones, and of old worm-eaten shells, half of a broken bottle, and other strange matters were there; every one, however rude, worthy of close examination, because studded with elegant zoophytes, the tubes of Serpulœ and other Annelida, bright-coloured pellucid Ascidians, graceful nudibranch Mollusca, the spawn of fishes, and endless other things. Brittle-stars, by scores, were twining their long spiny arms like lizards' tails among the tangled mass; arrayed in the most varied and most gorgeous hues, of all varieties of kaleidoscopic patterns (See Plate IV); and Sand-stars not a few. The latter are much more delicate in constitution