A Naturalist's Rambles on the Devonshire Coast.
By P. H. Gosse,
A.L.S. &c. London : John Van Voorst, 1853.

    WE shall do our readers a service at this season of the year, when so many are seeking health and relaxation by the sea-shore, by directing their attention to this very pleasing and useful work. Armed with this and Dr. Harvey's excellent 'Sea-side Book*,' every pool will be found to offer ample sources of amusement and instruction, and they may bid defiance to that dire ennui which would appear to be the source of the ordinary melancholy amusements of a `watering place.' We do not mean to say that people who go for relaxation to the sea­side should bore themselves by taking microscopes and scalpels and making scientific observations ; but without going at all deeply into the subject, the search for zoophytes and mollusks will give their walks something of the excitement of a hunt, and bringing them home - watching their odd ways, and finding out all about them in the books - will originate a vast deal of interest, and a great deal of fun and humour into the bargain. At least so we have found it, and we dare not venture to imagine that the `gentle reader' is a more dry and adjust personage than our self.
    Most persons have a gustatory interest in Prawns, and indeed one considers it to be part of one's mission at the sea-side to devour them at breakfast and tea; but how few of us there are who are aware that the thing we pluck off with our fingers, not without inward murmur­ings at the absurd complexity of Palamonic structure, has such a dignified name as `Cephalo-thorax.' Still less that the well-flavoured red thing when alive can deserve so much eloquence as Mr. Gosse has expended upon him in the following passage:­
    "Large Prawns swim at freedom through this large pool; and a very pleasing sight it is to watch them as they glide gracefully and equally along; the tail-fans are widely dilated, rendering conspicuous the contrasted colours with which they are painted; the jaws are expanded, the feet hanging loosely beneath. Now one rises to the surface almost perpendicularly; then glides down towards the bot­tom, sweeping up again in a graceful curve. Now he examines the weeds, then shoots under the dark angles of the rock. As he comes up towards me I stretch out my hand over the water; in an instant he shoots backwards a foot or so; then catching hold of a weed with his feet and straddling its vertical edge, he remains motionless, gazing up at me with his large prominent eyes as if in the utmost astonish­ment.
This Prawn, that comes to our tables decked out and penetrated, as it were, with a delicate pellucid rose colour, beautiful as he is then, is far more beautiful when just netted from the bottom, or from the overhanging weed-grown side of some dark pool. If you happen never to have seen him in this state let me introduce him to you; form and dimensions of course you are acquainted with; these do not change, but I will just observe that it is a 'sizeable' fellow that is now before me, whose portrait I am going to take. Stand still, you beauty! and don't shoot round and round the jar in that retrograde fashion, when I want to jot down your elegant lineaments! there now he is quiet! quiet but watchful! maintaining a sort of armed neutrality, with extended eyes, antennae stretching perpendicularly upwards, claws held out divergently with open pincers ready to seize, as if these slender things could do me any harm, and feet and expanded tail prepared in a twinkling to dart backward on the least alarm."
    The book is full of such genial and graphic descriptions of marine animals, interspersed with an abundance of carefully made and detailed scientific observations; particularly as regards the Polypes and Medusæ. Mr. Gosse gives some of the best descriptions of the peculiar `thread-cells' of these animals we have met with, and his observations respecting the effect of light on the colour of Fuci and of Crustacea, upon the development of Lepralia, and on the mode in which the Pecten performs its leaps, are well worthy of attention. With respect to the latter point we may remark, that whatever may be the case with Pecten, we have unquestionably seen the allied genus Lima flapping with its valves like a butterfly through the water.
    The only faults we have to notice in Mr. Gosse's book arise from that want of acquaintance with foreign literature which is unhappily the rule in English works. Thus he does not seem to know that the structure of the eyes of the Lamellibranchiata has been elaborately described by Krohn and Will, and that a memoir has been devoted to Pedicellina by Van Beneden. Again, much as we regret to deprive a lady of her well-earned honours, we are necessitated to point out that the animal of which he gives an excellent figure and description, and on which, supposing it to be new, he confers the name of Johnstonella Catharina, was first described by Eschscholtz in 1825, under the name of Tomopteris, afterwards by Quoy and Gaimard as Briarea; then by Busch in 1847 and by Grube in 1848, as Tomopteris. It is in fact the Tomopteris onisciformis, and has a very extensive distribution, having been taken by the present writer in the tropical regions of the South Pacific. It is assuredly an Annelid, but a most remarkable form; and a very excellent description of its structure, by Grube, will be found in Müller's `Archiv' for 1848.
Lapses of this kind will doubtless be corrected by our author in his second edition, and we take leave of him with our best wishes that he may soon have the opportunity of so doing.

 * Published by Van Voorst,- a book popular enough to cause a 'Religious' Society to put forth a work with a title so similar, that those who look no further might be readily deceived. We trust our readers will take care to discourage this pious aberration.