Until a hundred years ago the seashore, with all its myriads of nameless creatures, had been left to itself. It had remained, almost since the beginning of time, as Sir Edmund Gosse described it:
The rocks between tide and tide were submarine gardens of beauty that seemed often to be fabulous, and was positively delusive, since, if we delicately lifted the weed curtains of a windless pool, though we might for a moment see its sides and floor paven with living blossoms, ivory white, rosy-red, oragne and amethyst, yet all thath panoply would melt away, furled into hollow rock, if we so much as dropped a pebble in to disturb the magic dream.
To be sure, naturalists had known of this vast and lovely province of nature since the days of Aristotle, that first great seashroe observer, and there had always been collectors of such conspicuous things as sea shells and starfishes as well as fishers of crabs and cockles for the market place, but in all those hundreds of years between Aristotle and the early years of Victoria's reign there had been general pillage of the seashore.
Today, however, there is no longer peace at the seashore, except, paradoxically, in areas which have been restricted in wartime. The "unravished bride of quietness" has been ravished by thsoe very ones who profess to love her most, the nature lovers and the zoology students. Armed with handsomely illustrated books, buckets, bottles, and enamel pans, they descend upon the shore left undefended by the recessed tide, and scrape its creatues from their rocky homes and dig them out of their crevice refuges. reefs which have been particularly favored by the complicated circumstances of time, tide, and temperature, have suffered most, especially if they are near cities, and it is teh perenial lament of the teacher who guides another ravaging horde to a choice "collecting ground" that the beach is no longer as it used to be ten, fifteen, or twenty years agol. Perhaps tehre has been, he suggests, a shift in the ocean currents, and the rarer creatures have been obliged to seek some more favorable spot. . . .
Only on the Pacific coast has a book appeared which might be considered to stand in the high tradition of English popularization. This is Between Pacific Tides, by Edward F. Ricketts and Jack Calvin (1939). Though intended as a handbook for seashore animals of the Pacific coast, its readable style and approach to the problem by zones instead of zoological classificatiion raise it far above the usual status of a handbook. This book has a sort of sequel, Sea of Cortez, by John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts, which is something else again. Many have found its narrative half to philosophical for their tastes or have objected to the philosophy on its own merits.
But it is not these books alone which send students and dilettantes to the seashore to continue that pillage which Gosse did so much to inspire less than a hundred years ago. Indeed, such books are probably not consulted until interest has already been aroused in some other manner. This has been more true, perhaps, in America than in England, where, despite the paucity of good seashore books, the coasts of Massachusetts and California have been effectively raided as that of Devon, and the primary beauty of the seashore is no more. It is no less a personage than Lous Agassiz who must be blamed for a large share of the impetus which sent well-meaning despoilers to the shores of the North American continent. Like that of Forbes in England, the influence of Agassiz has made itself felt through teaching and the inspiration of teachrs ratehr through the writing of books, and the precept "Study nature, not book," which he posted on the walls of America's first seaside station at Penikese in 1873, is still fresh in the minds of American naturalists (now called biologists, or worse still, ecologists), professional and amateur alike.
They have indeed studies nature instead of books, although some of them seem to have conducted their studies solely for the purposes of contributing ratehr dull and detailed monographs, if not the writing of books. Looking over the first hundred years of the books - seaside companion and vade maecums, as few as they are, one is tempted to deny that there is any need for newere and better books about the fascinations of the seashore and its creatures. The writer, himself an ardent student of one type of littoral creature, whose numbers he has persistently reduced on every occasiion he has visited the beach, and furthermore the author of some popular articles which may have done their own small part to promote that same enthusiasm he now deplores, fully realizes that he is not without sin. Yet up-to-date manuals of seashore life are badly needed, even at the peril of further ransacking of the tidepools. Of course, it might be argued that an obsolescent manual or quaintly outdated book - for example, perhaps, one of Gosse's - stimulates more intensive collecting, and that a complete manual might eliminate the necessity of excessive collecting in the hope of finding uncatalogued rarities.
There seems to be no way out of this dilemma; certainly G.K. Chesterton wrote no truer paradox than "The man who is likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly the man who loves it with a reason." Such a thought could not have occurred to Aristotle on a visit to the shore in those remote golden days before Everyman became his owon biologist, carrying a bucket to the beach, for Aristotle, while not much of a poet himself, had a taste for Homer and loved the sea with emotions as well as reason. The unkindest slur against that great man's name is the fable that he ended his life by throwing himself into the sea because he could not understand the currents in the Strait of Euripus.
We cannot expect a generation of Aristotles, but it does not seem too much to hope for that our biologist, readers and writers of books alike, will go down to the shore, not in the spirit of treasure hunters, but as poets in spirit and as students of living things instead of specimens in bottles, even if the Homeric phrase does not ring in their ears as it surely did in those of Aristotle:
In Triton's shell the echoing sea
is but the mirrored surge of sound
within the distant hallways of the ear,
and time the shadow of a thing unfound.
