admiration. The sea-flowers and the worms are rather low in the scale of
living things. Far be it from you to decide that there are any living
creatures with whom a loving and intelligent patience will not at last
enable us to hold communion. But though, when you put the point of your
little finger towards a Crassy, he gives it a very affectionate squeeze,
and seems rather anxious to detain it permanently, the balance of
evidence favours the idea that his appetite rather than his affections
are concerned, and that he has only mistaken you for his dinner.

At present our intercourse is certainly limited, and though the
_Serpulae_ and _Sabellae_ have their heads out of their chimneys all
along, there is no reason to suppose that they take the slightest
interest in the human beings who peer at them through the glass.

But with the fishes it is quite another thing. When you can fairly look
into eyes as bright and expressive as your own, a long stride has been
taken towards friendly relations. You flatten your nose on one side of
the glass, and Mr. Fish flattens his on the other. If you have the
stoniest of British stares he will outstare you. You long to scratch his
back, or show him some similar attention, and (if he be a cod) to ask
him, as between friends, why on earth (I mean in sea) he wears that
queer horn under his chin.

Now with the _Crustaceans_(hard-shelled sea-gentlemen) it is different
again. So far as one feels friendly towards a fish it is a fellow
feeling. You know people like this or that cod, as one knows people like
certain sheep, dogs, and horses. And a very short acquaintance with fish
convinces you that not only is there a type of face belonging to each
species, but that individual countenances vary, as with us. It is said
that shepherds know the faces of their sheep as well as of their other
friends, and I have no doubt that the keeper of the Great Aquarium knows
his cod apart quite well.

And if one's feeling for the _Crustaceans_--the crabs, lobsters, prawns,
&c.--is different, it is not because one feels them to be less
intelligent than fishes, but because their intelligence is altogether a
mysterious, unfathomable, unmeasurable quantity. There's no saying what
they don't know. There is no telling how much they can see. And the
great puzzle is what they can be thinking of. For that the spiny
lobsters are thinking, and "thinking very seriously about something,"
you can no more doubt than Jack did