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“He’s turned giddy!” shouted a man beside us, who, like every one else, was watching the sea-gentlemen with rapt interest.

Why the little sole tried rock climbing I don’t know, and I doubt if he knew himself.

Tank 7 is full of Basse–glittering fish who keep their silver armour clean by scrubbing it among the stones. Like other prettily-dressed people, they look out of the window all along.

At Tanks 1, 2, and 3, your chief feelings will be curiosity and admiration. The sea-flowers and the worms are rather low in the scale of living things. Far be it from you to decide that there are any living creatures with whom a loving and intelligent patience will not at last enable us to hold communion. But though, when you put the point of your little finger towards a Crassy, he gives it a very affectionate squeeze, and seems rather anxious to detain it permanently, the balance of evidence favours the idea that his appetite rather than his affections are concerned, and that he has only mistaken you for his dinner.

At present our intercourse is certainly limited, and though the Serpulae and Sabellae have their heads out of their chimneys all along, there is no reason to suppose that they take the slightest interest in the human beings who peer at them through the glass.

But with the fishes it is quite another thing. When you can fairly look into eyes as bright and expressive as your own, a long stride has been taken towards friendly relations. You flatten your nose on one side of the glass, and Mr. Fish flattens his on the other. If you have the stoniest of British stares he will outstare you. You long to scratch his back, or show him some similar attention, and (if he be a cod) to ask him, as between friends, why on earth (I mean in sea) he wears that queer horn under his chin.

Now with the Crustaceans(hard-shelled sea-gentlemen) it is different again. So far as one feels friendly towards a fish it is a fellow feeling. You know people like this or that cod, as one knows people like certain sheep, dogs, and horses. And a very short acquaintance with fish convinces you that not only is there a type of face belonging to each species, but that individual countenances vary, as with us. It is said that shepherds know the faces of their sheep as well as of their other friends, and I have no doubt that the keeper of the Great Aquarium knows his cod apart quite well.

And if one’s feeling for the Crustaceans–the crabs, lobsters, prawns, &c.–is; different, it is not because one feels them to be less intelligent than fishes, but because their intelligence is altogether a mysterious, unfathomable, unmeasurable quantity. There’s no saying what they don’t know. There is no telling how much they can see. And the great puzzle is what they can be thinking of. For that the spiny lobsters are thinking, and “thinking very seriously about something,” you can no more doubt than Jack did about the Merrow.

The spiny lobsters (commonly, but erroneously called craw-fish or cray-fish) and the common lobsters are in Tank No. 9.

Ah! that is a wonderful pool. The first glimpse of the spiny lobsters is enough for any one who has read of Coomara. We are among the Merrows at last.

I don’t know that Coomara was a lobster, but I think he must have been a crustacean. Even his green hair reminds one of the spider-crabs; though matter-of-fact naturalists tell us that their green hair is only seaweed which grows luxuriantly on their shells from their quiet habits, and because they are not given to burrowing, or cleaning themselves among the stones like the silver-coated basse. At one time, by the bye, it was supposed that they dressed themselves in weeds, whence they were called “vanity-crabs.”

But the spiny lobsters–please to look at them, and see if you can so much as guess their age, their capabilities, or their intentions. I fancy that the difference between the feelings with which they and the fishes inspire us is much the same as that between our mental attitude towards hill-men or house-elves, and towards men and women.