Of all his daughters, Maggie seems to have been the most helpful. She went down to Gardenston to obtain the refuse from the fishermen’s lines, to collect fish, crustacea, and such like, and send them home to her father by the carrier. She sometimes accompanied him along the coast as far as Fraserburgh and Peterhead. One evening, while Edward was partaking of his evening meal, Maggie entered and accosted him joyfully—“Father, I’ve got a new Star-fish t’ ye, wi’ sax legs!” “I hope so, Maggie,” he answered, “but I doubt it.” After he had finished his supper, he said, “Now, Maggie, let’s see this prodigy of yours.” After looking at it, “Just as I thought, Maggie,” said he, “it’s _not_ a new species—it’s only an _Ophiocoma Ballii_, but rather a peculiar one in its way, having, as you said, ‘sax legs’ instead of five.”
Of the Rosy-Feather Star (_Comatula roseacea_)—which Edward had long been searching for, and at last found—he says: “What a pretty creature! but how brittle! and oh, how beautiful! Does any one wonder, as I used to do, when he hears of a stone-lily or of a lily-star, as applied to this genus? Then let him get a sight of a Crenard-star, and sure I am that his surprise will give place to admiration. And how curious! It was once supposed to have been the ’most numerous of the ocean’s inhabitants,’ whereas now there are only about a dozen kinds to be found alive,—one only in the British seas, and that but rarely met with. Well, I am proud to be able to record its occurrence on the Banffshire coast. The specimen I allude to, was taken from the stomach of a cod.”
But still more wonderful is that rare species, the Great Sea-Cucumber (_Cucumaria frondosa_), the king of the Holothuridæ family, found on the Banffshire coast. Edward’s specimen was brought up on the fishermen’s lines. “When at rest,” he says, “it is fully sixteen inches long. It is of a very deep purple on all except the under side, which is greyish. It is a most wonderful, and at the same time a most interesting animal. What strange forms and curious shapes it assumes at will! Now it seems like a pear, and again like a large purse or long pudding. Sometimes it has the appearance of two monster potatoes joined endways,—from which it diverges into a single bulb, with no suckers visible; and again it looks as long as my arm, rough and warty-looking. Its tentacula too, how curious they are! Simple to appearance, yet how complete and how beautiful withal. What strange forms and what beauteous creatures and inconceivable things there are in the ocean’s depths! What a pity it is that we cannot traverse its hidden fields and explore its untrodden caverns!”