The Time Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Had A Pet Sea Snail
I've been reading the diary Doyle kept of his time as a ship's surgeon aboard an Arctic whaling vessel in 1880, and you all deserve to hear the tale of John Thomas, Doyle's pet Clione limacina, which he drew in the above picture.
Doyle, then 21, found John Thomas on June 3rd, 1880:
Brought up a most beautiful Clio or Sea Snail, a couple of inches long, looking like some weird little fairy. I have stuck him in a pickle bottle and christened him "John Thomas." I hope he will live, we have put some butter and pork into his house.
The following day, Doyle attempted to feed John Thomas and wrote a short poem about the snail:
John Thomas is in an awful passion. We left the pickle bottle far from the fire, and as there are 11 degrees of frost it froze up and John has caught cold. He is sitting in a corner with his tail in his mouth, just as a sulky baby sticks its thumb into its potato box. I have drawn John's attention to the butter & pork and he took a hurried breakfast, but seems to have business of importance down at the bottom of the bottle. He's thinking perhaps of
Where his rude shell by the Gulf Stream lay,
There were his little Sea Snails all at play,
There their Amoeboid mother, he their sire
Butchered to make a whale's holiday.
On June 5th, Doyle reported that "John is well and hearty," and on the 6th, he wrote:
John was up before me and took a heavy breakfast. He is now gyrating round the top of his bottle surveying his new kingdom apparently and meditating a map. I put him in a bucket every evening where he wanders fancy free for an hour or two.
Unfortunately, on the 10th, Doyle reported that John Thomas had departed the mortal plane.
John Thomas
died on the 8th of June, regretted
by a large circle of acquaintances
He wrote a touching eulogy for his tiny friend:
He was a right thinking and high minded Clio, distinguished among his brother sea snails for his mental activity as well as for physical perfection. He never looked down upon his smaller associates because they were protozoa while he could fairly lay claim to belong to the high family of the Echinodermata or Annulosa. He never taunted them with their want of a water vascular system, nor did he parade his own double chain of ganglia. He was a modest and unassuming blob of protoplasm, and could get through more fat pork in a day than many an animal of far higher pretensions. His parents were both swallowed by a whale in his infancy, so that what education he had was due entirely to his own industry and observation. He has gone the way of all flesh so peace be to his molecules.
John Thomas' descendants still live in the Arctic Ocean today, and they look pretty cool!
