through the British islands and the continent, was returning full
of valuable information and sound reflection, enhanced by the
most amiable modesty, to relate all he had seen, heard, and
thought, to a venerable father, who had cheerfully toiled himsplf,
to afford a family of five sons, successively as they had finished
their studies, the same liberal indulgence, with equally liberal
means, by which my companion had so amply profited. When a
prudent man, more or less uneducated himself, not only devotes
a part of the savings of a life of labour, but labours still, even in
the decline of life, to afford a large family of sons the pleasure and
advantage of extensive travel, of which he has been entirely
deprived, it marks a greatness of mind, more enviable and more
honourable than the highest degree of cultivation. I never felt so
reluctant to part with an individual with whom I had so short an
acquaintance, as I did to part with this young man, who soon
found a vessel in which he might proceed to Teneriffe.
The only fish we caught, were the coryphena hippwris, (which
the sailors dried and dressed, but found very oily at the extremities,
and very dry in the middle) and a bream, which proved excellent
eating, and answered to Pennant’s description of the spams
brama of Linnaeus, excepting, that it had only one row of very
small, fine teeth, and that it was one foot eight inches in length.
Both these fish were caught during a fight breeze in latitude 34°,
longitude 10° W. The next day, we fell in with two immense
logs of American pine, which the captain hove to for, and took
aboard. They were completely water-logged, and covered with a
continued mass of the lepas anatifera; of the several hundreds,
which I had thus unexpectedly an opportunity of examining, there
was not one with more or less than five valves1. These logs were
also full of the teredo navalis, and a species not described by Cuvier,
1 Vide Cuvier, Regnè Animal, vol. II., p i506,
but which I found, on referring to my extracts, to be the teredo
gigantea, so accurately figured in Home’s Comparative Anatomy: I
was surprised to find; however, that the longest did not measure
more than four inches“, which was also the ordinary length of the
t. navalis; they had all bored in the direction of the grain of the
wood. A small crab, fig. 3, a and b, which I conceive to be a new
species of planes{ was found in great numbers amongst the anatifera,".
I kept a small net constantly floating for molluscas, but neither
caught nor saw any * and, although we shot several water-birds
long before we made Porto Santo, they all floated past out of
reach. The phosphorescence of the sea was evidently produced
by a pink rotifera, which we fished up in buckets, and which renewed
its expiring fight whenever the water was agitated, but did
not induce any difference of temperature in it, as far as I could
judge by an ordinary thermometer. I could not help remarking
that our approach to the island, both before and after we saw it,
was not accompanied by alga of any description; indeed, there
are very few to be met with in Madeira, probably, from the extreme
depth of the sea close in to the shore : a small frond of green
ulva was brought to me, (adhering to a piece of coralline) which
I also saw on the rocks, just raising their heads out of the sea,
between Funchal and Brazen-head, or Garajao. A species of
sertularia proper was dragged up, close to these rocks, which seems
to form an exception to the general character of the horny stem,
it being calcareous; the colour was a dead white, and it was
attached to a mass of earth and coralline, by a root like that of a
fucus; on peeling off the calcareous matter, a stem, also like that
m It was a cream coloured, transparent white, with a light brown streak down the
middle; the valves calcareous, of an uneven surface, and white.
n It was of a delicate, but bright, rose colour: from the symmetrical form of its
test (notched so regularly as to increase the projection and distinctness of its chaperon,)
it may be called p. clypeatus.