La Harpe asks if the two hemistichs—

La mer tombe et bondit—Elle remonte, gronde—

do not make us hear the noise of the flood
which knocks against the shore, or which
is repelled back again towards the high
sea?

Whatever vague conceptions of the ocean
people who have never seen it may have
obtained of it, they owe to the poets. But
both science and poetry, truthful observation
and harmonious expression, have much work
before them ere they will suffice to give an
idea of the sea prior to observation of it.
Were I not doubtful of successfully hitting
the nice distinction between an epigram and
an impertinence, I would say of all their
books and all their songs upon the sea—A
plague upon them, for they are not worth the
price of an excursion-ticket to see it!

I shall suppose the large circle of country
cousins I have now the honour of addressing
have, after knowing much of what prosers
and poets have said about the seaside, the
good sense to go and see it. Their first
exclamation is, how different the ideas they
had derived from books were from the
impressions they now derive directly from
observation!

Months of observation will not exhaust the
admiration and wonder inspired by watching
the vast glassy field whose waves leap up in
spray against the rocks, or run up edged with
a froth, and playing with the pebbles upon
the smooth sandbeach. During intervals of
wonder at the seaside, they feel a necessity
for some one to tell them what the things are
which they see there. In trying to gratify
this laudable curiosity, I shall follow what I
remember was the order of the questions
addressed to me by new-comers to the
seaside. Should any bookish naturalist sneer at
this method, and look big while discoursing
about the mineral, vegetable, animal, and
nominal kingdoms, I may tell him his
classifications are chiefly expressive of a time
when students were pitifully afraid of kings, and
called groups of things kingdoms less with a
view to describe nature than to flatter the
masters of their fortunes, liberties, and lives.
All things are classified by death and life.
The stars are all dead. Plants and animals
are both alive. These are the two vast
groups of things in the universe. There is no
such difference as this difference between the
dead and the living, and I hope I may be
permitted to make it the basis of my classification
of nature. All the forms of life encountered
at the seaside have characteristics
of their own; and I have always found
them the first objects of the curiosity of
intelligent observers. Man is always to man
the most interesting of living or animated
creatures.

The classifications of men according to
nations and races, in which men of science
have studied mankind, might be advantageously
increased by dividing and observing
them under the divisions of country folk of
the plains and hills, and town folk and coast
folk. All classifications are just turns and
shakes of the kaleidoscope, and this one may
yield insight and instruction as well as the
others. Men of plains, men of mountains,
and men of towns, and men of shores, are
profoundly different from each other in their
ethnological characteristics. There are great
moral differences between them; and, while
identical in structure, they differ greatly in
their anatomical and physiological developments.

No doubt all the ingenuity of men gifted
with geniuses for finding differences, has
never been able to impugn the doctrine of the
unity of man. The European, Ethiopian,
Mongolian, and American, are but different
varieties of one species. As Buffon has said
it beautifully: "Man, white in Europe, black
in Africa, yellow in Asia, and red in America,
is nothing but the same man differently dyed
by climate."

Most certainly this sentence might be
imitated, and it might be said: Man, broad
on the coasts, tall on the plains, ruddy upon
the mountains, and pale in towns, is always
the same man modified by locality.

Observation, conversation, and reading,
have told me something respecting English,
Irish, and French coast populations; but the
coast folk I had the best opportunities of
studying in my youth were the fishers of
Footdee, and of the Bridge of Don at
Aberdeen, who still appear to me the most
interesting and remarkable of coast folk. The
older I grow, and the more I have travelled,
the better worthy of record appears the
information I have collected respecting them.
Perhaps I do not deceive myself when I
fancy the study of coast folk in general a
somewhat new point of view of a natural
group of mankind, which will be found to
emit picturesque and useful lights upon
several practical questions at present
tumbling and tossing about in tenebrous
agitation. Fortunately I am able to compare and
combine with my own observations on the
Aberdeen fishing communities, those of an
observer of nearly a hundred years ago,—a
venerable and intelligent lady, now no more,
having confided to me her Recollections of
Footdee in the Last Century.

Besides describing the curious manners of
a very remarkable race of coast folk, these
combined recollections and observations in
two different centuries may suggest useful
thoughts to minds which consider the poor.
Next week, then, I shall beg to present
them.