as
been violated, the exquisite product of centuries of natural
selection has been crushed under the rough paw of well-meaning,
idle-minded curiosity. That my Father, himself so reverent, so
conservative, had by the popularity of his books acquired the
direct responsibility for a calamity that he had never
anticipated became clear enough to himself before many years had
passed, and cost him great chagrin. No one will see again on the
shore of England what I saw in my early childhood, the submarine
vision of dark rocks, speckled and starred with an infinite
variety of colour, and streamed over by silken flags of royal
crimson and purple.

In reviving these impressions, I am unable to give any exact
chronological sequence to them. These particular adventures began
early in 1858, they reached their greatest intensity in the
summer of 1859, and they did not altogether cease, so far as my
Father was concerned, until nearly twenty years later. But it was
while he was composing what, as I am told by scientific men of
today, continues to be his most valuable contribution to
knowledge, his _History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals_,
that we worked together on the shore for a definite purpose, and
the last instalment of that still-classic volume was ready for
press by the close of 1859.

The way in which my Father worked, in his most desperate
escapades, was to wade breast-high into one of the huge pools,
and examine the worm-eaten surface of the rock above and below
the brim. In such remote places--spots where I could never
venture being left, a slightly timorous Andromeda, chained to a
safer level of the cliff--in these extreme basins, there used
often to lurk a marvellous profusion of animal and vegetable
forms. My Father would search for the roughest and most corroded
points of rock, those offering the best refuge for a variety of
creatures, and would then chisel off fragments as low down in the
water as he could. These pieces of rock were instantly plunged in
the saltwater of jars which we had brought with us for the
purpose. When as much had been collected as we could carry away--
my Father always dragged about an immense square basket, the
creak of whose handles I can still fancy that I hear--we turned
to trudge up the long climb home. Then all our prizes were spread
out, face upward, in shallow pans of clean sea-water.

In a few hours, when all dirt had subsided, and what living
creatures we had brought seeme