It may be, as Carl Sauer (1962) has suggested, that man was originally a creature of the seashores, where abundant food, tolerable climate and a ready supply of conveniently shaped rocks enabled him to develop the beginnings of culture. This may well also have something to do with our present interest in the seashore, reflecting as Sauer says a deep instinctive need to see and experience the sea. Yet it has taken man a strangely long time to become interested in the seashore as a scene for scientific activity, and perhaps an even longer time to become interested in the wider reaches of the ocean. Long after man became interested in strange beasts of countries beyond the rim fiery peaks and strange plants from the antipodes he began to look at the shores of his own country beneath his feet. Indeed this interest came after he had developed practices of cultivating oysters and mussels in tidal impoundments. It has often been suggested that the popularisation of the seashore, both as a place to seek health and recreation and as a source of intellectual improvement, was associated with the easy access provide by the dvelopoment of railways in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, as Heren (1967) points out in an amusing account of the British habit of seashore holidays, this began well before the railways. Scarborough was the first such resort or “spa,” started before the middle of the eighteenth century, a hundred years before rail transportation. But these early resorts were on sandy beaches; apparently only poets and wreckers frequented rocky coasts.
Neveretheless it seems probable that the ready access provided by developing rail lines in Britain and in Europe and especially the ease with which rail transportation enabled the return of living material to parlours and laboratories had a strong influence on the development of marine biology and the public awareness of the creatures of the sea and shore. This obvious from the charming account by P.H. Gosse in Tenby, his second book on seashore life, published in 1856, of the railway trip from London to the Welsh coast: 'To our steady-going forefathers, it was an awful transaction in human life to travel some three hundred miles from home', yet it could be accomplished in half a day at 'the rushing flight of the express-train, fifty miles an hour'. Certainly rail transportation (which began in England in 1829 and a few years later on the Continent) made possible the vogue of marine aquaria, for which Gosse was in the main responsible, and so eloquently described by George Henry Lewes (1858), who was contributing essays on seashore life to Blackwood's Magazine during Gosse's palmiest years:
Since the British mind was all alive and trembling . . .
Of course the availability of useful and reasonably priced microscopes by the 1830s also stimulated observation of the smaller creatures and finer details of seashore life. As W.H. Harvey (1849) remarked: 'The improvements effected of late years in the microscope, may well be said to have opened to us a material world of whose existence we should otherwise be ignorant' (p.170).
One cannot, however, build up a theory of the origin of seashore studies as a byproduct of rail transportation and achromatic lens systems. One of the most original of marine biologists thrived before the days of rail (to be sure, he lived on the coast and had made many voyages in the line of duty as an army surgeon with regiments abroad) and used a 'common magnifying glass'. This was of course John Vaughan Thompson (1779-1847), who in 1816 improvised the first plankton net and in 1823 discovered the metamorphosis of barnacles. He was obviously the first planktonologist, although the term plankton was not to be introduced until 1887 by Viktor Hensen. His papers, so long neglected (although the algologist, W. H. Harvey (1849), acknowledged the significance of his work in one of the first popular books about British seashore life) were written in a charming, straightforward style, and his account of the discovery of the metamorphosis of the cypris deserved posting on the bulletin boards of marine laboratories everywhere:
The facts about to be laid open in regard to the Cirripedes are of so extraordinary and novel a naturee, that they would hardly gain credence did they not proceed from some respectable source, or were they not placed within the power of every Naturalist to satisfy himself of their correctness . . .
Indeed the world of the sea is rich in marvels and aprt of the ancient fascination for the sea that Carl Sauer (1962) suggests is part of our very beginning makes us unable to resist looking into these books and asking for more of them. Few of them, I suspect, have been publishers' failures; most of them go through several editions or reprintings and copies turn up in unexpected spots like the unfrequented front rooms of isolated ranches or on lonely shelves of dull suburban villas.
There seems to be only one book-length treatment of a marine biologist of any kind as a fictional character. This is of course John Steinbeck's Cannery Row (1945). What seems to me remarkable about this book and the biographical sketch of its subject, Edward F. Ricketts, that Steinbeck (1951) wrote later as a prologue to Sea of Cortez (1941) (Which he and Ricketts originally did together), is the lack of mention of the book on which Ricketts' reputation so securely rests among both scientific and amateur naturalists. The Doc of Cannery Row is curiously like and unlike Ed Ricketts, as might be expected, and a folk hero has developed along the local waterfront who bears only a casual resemblance to reality. But Cannery Row has been translated into many languages and Ed Ricketts may well be, at least as Doc, one of the best known marine biologists of the long history of seaside literature (Pl.2b). His personal papers and letters, however, suggest a personality much more in sympathy with Hermann Hesse than with his best friend John Steinbeck. He was much more than an amiable faun seducing willing young ladies to the accompaniment of recording of Gregorian chants, he was as serious and devoted a student of seashore life as Philip Henry Gosse, Edward Forbes, or Josef Lorenz. Perhaps, had he lived longer, he would have caught up with Lorenz; certainly in preparing himself for the writing of Between Pacific Tides he paid much more attention to details of the physical environment than most of his predecessors; he spent weeks, for example, posting and averaging tidal exposures before the days of computers.* It was no longre fashionable, by the time Ricketts first published Between Pacific Tides (1939), to comment on the manner in which the pursuit of seaside studies illuminated the Acts of the Creator, but Ed was in one sense a frustrated philosopher, seeking, as is obvious from such parts of the Sea of Cortez as the Easter Sunday chapter (which was one of his contributions to that book), some synthesis of his world outlook. Philosophy was to him as to Novalis, a drive to return home, ein Trieb, uberall zu Hause zu sein. Some of this comes through in Steinbeck's treatment, but note scribbled on the title page of one of Ricketts' notebooks seems a suitable epigram for all those who before and since have gone down to the sea to write books about its life:
*Between Pacific Tides, by Edward F. Ricketts and Jack Calvin, is one of the oldest and financially most successful (at any rate to the publishers) books in the genre. The publishing history will be found in Hedgpeth (1971) and a summary of seaside literature on the Pacific Coast of North America is set forth in the 4th edition of Between Pacific Tides (1968).
Hedpgeth, Joel W. 1971. Philosophy on Cannery Row, pp.89-129. In Steinbeck: The Man and his Work (Ed. Richard Astro and Tetsumaro Hayashi). Oregon Statee University Press.
Ricketts, Edward F. and Calvin, Jack. 1968. Between Pacific Tides. 4th Edn, revised by Joel W. Hedgpeth.) Stanford University Press.
Sauer, Carl O. 1962. Seashore Primitive Home of Man? Proc. Am. Phil. Soc., 106, 41-47. (Reprinted in Land and Life, A Selection of the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer, Ed.John B. Leighly, Berkeley, 1967, pp.300-312.
Steinbeck, John. 1945. Cannery Row. New York: Viking Press.
