It is not possible to be certain about the exact nature of what appears to be a "piece of amber" thrown up on the seashore, without chemical examination. A year or two ago a friend brought to me a dark brownish-yellow-coloured piece of what looked like amber, which (so my friend stated) had been picked up on the shore at Aldeburgh. It was as big as three fingers of one's hand, very transparent and fibrous-looking, owing to the presence of fine bubbles in its substance arranged in lines. I found an exactly similar piece from the same locality in the collection of the Natural History Museum. It was labelled "copal," and, I suppose, had been chemically ascertained to be that resin and not "amber," or, to use the correct name, "succinite." How either of these pieces got into the North Sea it is difficult to say. Though the "copal" of commerce is obtained from the West Coast of Africa, it may occur (though I have not heard that it does) associated with true amber in Prussia. A fossilized resin very similar to copal is found in the London clay at Highgate and elsewhere near London, and is called "copalite." It is possible, though not probable, that the bits of amber found on our East Coast beaches are derived from Tertiary beds, now broken up and submerged in the North Sea, and do not travel to us all the way from the Baltic.
LET us now leave the beach-pebbles and go down on to the rocks at low tide in order to see some of the living curiosities of the seashore. There are some seaside resorts where, when the tide goes down, nothing is exposed but a vast acreage of smooth sand, and here the naturalist must content himself with such spoils as may be procured by the aid of a shrimping-net and a spade. Wading in the shallow water and using his net, he will catch, not only the true "brown shrimp," but other shrimp-like creatures, known as "crustacea"--a group which includes also the lobsters, hermit-crabs, true crabs, and sand-hoppers, as well as an immense variety of almost microscopic water-fleas.
He will also probably catch some of the stiff, queer little "pipe-fish," which are closely related to the little creatures known as "sea-horses." Pipe-fish are very sluggish in movement, almost immobile, whilst the "sea-horse" or hippocampus--only to be taken by the dredge amongst corallines in deep water on rocky bottoms (as, for instance, in the Channel Islands)--goes so far as to curl his tail, like a South American monkey, round a stem of weed and sit thus upright amidst the vegetation. Even when disturbed he merely swims very slowly and with much dignity in the same upright position, gently propelled by the undulating vibratory movement of his small dorsal fin. The male in both pipe-fish and sea-horses is provided with a sac-like structure on the ventral surface in which he carries the eggs laid by the female until they are hatched.