CHAPTER XIII_The Book of the Ocean

ANIMAL LIFE IN THE SEA

The primitive idea of the ocean was that it was a vast desert, and a

strange disbelief in its being inhabited by more than the very few

forms that everybody was compelled to recognize persisted up to quite

modern times among those who should have known better. Pliny boldly

asserted, for example, that nothing remained in the Mediterranean Sea

unknown to him after he had made a list of 176 marine animals! But now

we know that the sea teems with living beings as densely as do the

fresh waters or the air. In it began the life of the globe, for the

fossil records of the rocks show that the first animals lived in the

ocean, and that ages passed before any of them began to people the

newly formed lands and breathe the atmosphere instead of the air in the

water; and, abundant as oceanic life now is, the paleozoic seas held

immensely greater hordes, of which many forms were giants as compared

with those of our day. Some of the old straight chambered shells were

twelve feet long; and I have seen fossil ammonites, extinct relatives

of our coiled pearly nautilus, which when alive must have been too

heavy for a man to lift. The fishes, too, could tell great stories of

the glory of their ancestors in size and strength and numbers. Some of

them wore solid coats of mail upon their heads, and could do battle

even with the huge swimming reptiles that were the dreaded tyrants of

the Mesozoic deep.

Life in the ocean in those old geologic days was a long guerrilla

warfare—every animal guarding against attack, and at the same time

watching sharply for an opportunity to seize and prey upon some weaker

companion. As for the foraminifers and other microscopic creatures,

they were countless, and their skeletons, singly invisible, have by

accumulation built up great masses of rock, like the chalk-beds of

England and France.

Though lessened in numbers and reduced in size, because the land has

gradually won over to its side many sorts of animals which in former

ages were exclusively confined to the water, and for other reasons, the

sea still holds its share of every “branch” and “class” (except birds,

and it may almost claim some of them, such as the albatross, penguins,

and petrels), and a majority of the “orders” of animal life. Glance at

the catalogue: Foraminifers, sponges, and polyps are chiefly confined

to salt water; starfishes, urchins (or sea-eggs), and the like, wholly

so: mollusks (next higher) are principally oceanic, and the majority

of the crabs inhabit salt water. Among the last-named one species, the

common horse-foot (_Limulus_) of our shores, remains as the solitary

representative of that immense and varied group, the trilobites, which

so crowded the Paleozoic sea-bottom that some rocks—for instance, the

limestones of Iowa—are packed almost as full of their fossils as is a

raisin-box of raisins.

None of the insects is truly marine, yet some of them are seafaring,

truly, for they spend their lives on drifting sea-wrack, or on beaches

just out of reach of the tides; but most of the true worms are dwellers

in the mud of sea-shores and sea-bottoms. No one knows of any land

fishes; but I need not tell you that fishes throng in the fresh waters

as well as in the salt, and that many species inhabit both at different

seasons.

In respect to the reptiles, of which the ancient oceans contained

gigantic and horrid types, I do not know any now that are truly oceanic

except the turtles, if you leave out the “sea-serpent,” of which we

hear so many wonderful and not quite satisfactory tales. You will hear

of “sea-snakes” in the East Indies, but they are only certain kinds

of serpents which swim well, and pass the most of their time in the

salt water, as several species of our own country do in the rivers and

ponds; all the oriental sea-snakes are venomous.

It is in this manner, too, that we may count certain birds, such as the

petrels, auks, penguins, albatrosses, frigate-birds, and their kin,

as belonging to the ocean. They spend all their life flying over the

waves, seeking their food there, and some of them rarely go ashore,

except to lay their eggs and hatch their young on remote rocks, resting

and sleeping on the billows, when not busy at their hunting. In the

highest rank of all, however, the mammals, several families are natives

of the “great deep”—the whales, dolphins, and porpoises, the seals and

walruses, and the manatees and dugongs. But all these must come to the

surface to breathe, not having gills like fishes, but true lungs.

As it is only within the last thirty years that machinery suitable

for deep-sea dredging has been invented, so it is only lately that we

have been able to learn much as to the population of the ocean beneath

the surface layer and marginal shallows. Now by means of beam-trawls,

dredges, tangle-bars, etc., worked by steam-machinery on shipboard,

naturalists may scrape up the bottom-ooze and obtain living objects

or their bony relics at the depth of even 3000 to 4000 fathoms or more

than four miles, for living beings are found in these profound abysses.

Many scientific expeditions, such as those of the English exploring

steamer _Challenger_, about 1874, have carried out these dredging

investigations, and the United States Fish Commission possesses the

large, specially built, sea-going _Albatross_, provided with all the

necessary apparatus for deep-sea exploration. By means of these and

other vessels an enormous amount of study—all useful in ascertaining

the habits and methods of reproduction of food-fishes—has been carried

on by American marine naturalists.

It appears that as you go further and further from shore, and into

deeper and deeper water, the fewer animals and plants are obtained, and

that very few species indeed which live along shore are to be found

also at a depth greater than about 100 fathoms.

[Illustration: LANDING THE BEAM-TRAWL ON DECK.]

Almost all animals, moreover, have a limited distribution in the

sea, as is the case among those on land, though we cannot always, or

perhaps often, say why the limits we find should exist; one sort of

crab, or mollusk, or polyp, appearing _here_ and another different one

exclusively _there_, when the conditions seem to us very similar, and

no barrier is perceptible. It is not easy to explain why a certain

sort of cowry, for example, should be found only along a particular

strip of coast, when nothing that we can see prevents its extending

its range much further. It is believed that the _temperature_ of the

water is the chief fact which sets these invisible boundaries to the

wanderings of animals living near the surface, only a few of which are

very wide-spread in their distribution. The direction and character of

the ocean currents have much to do with the geographic distribution of

oceanic life, as has been mentioned in Chapter II (page 25).

Now in deep-sea life the case is different. Here temperature cannot be

of so much account, since only a short distance down, the water becomes

almost as cold as ice, and preserves this uniform chill all around

the globe. The life found at a great depth, too, is very wide-spread,

instead of restricted in its range, often occurring in two or more

ocean basins; but here the restriction is an up-and-down one, rather

than horizontal, and the secret is found in the word _pressure_. Few

animals are able to live both in the shallows and under the enormous

weight of sea water three or four miles deep.

[Illustration: A TYPICAL JELLYFISH.

This species (_Pelagia cyanella_) is a characteristic oceanic

discophorous medusa, common along the Atlantic coast of the United

States; it is semi-transparent and lustrous pink.]

This has recently (1897) been summed up very clearly by Prof. Arthur P.

Crouch, in an article in “The Nineteenth Century,” from which it will

be worth while to quote a paragraph or two:

The conditions under which they [that is, deep-sea animals] have

to live in the abysmal areas seem very unfavorable to animal

existence. The temperature at the bottom of the ocean is nearly

down to freezing-point, and sometimes actually below it. There is a

total absence of light, as far as sunlight is concerned, and there

is an enormous pressure, reckoned at about one ton to the square

inch in every 1000 fathoms, which is 160 times greater than that of

the atmosphere we live in. At 2500 fathoms the pressure is thirty

times more powerful than the steam pressure of a locomotive when

drawing a train.[7] As late as 1880 a leading zoölogist explained

the existence of deep-sea animals at such depths by assuming that

their bodies were composed of solids and liquids of great density,

and contained no air. This, however, is not the case with deep-sea

fish, which are provided with air-inflated swimming-bladders. If one

of these fish, in full chase after its prey, happens to ascend beyond

a certain level, its bladder becomes distended with the decreased

pressure, and carries it, in spite of all its efforts, still higher

in its course. In fact, members of this unfortunate class are liable

to become victims to the unusual accident of falling upwards, and no

doubt meet with a violent death soon after leaving their accustomed

level, and long before their bodies reach the surface....

The fauna of the deep sea—with a few exceptions hitherto only known

as fossils—are new and specially modified forms of families and

genera inhabiting shallow waters in modern times, and have been

driven down to the depths of the ocean by their more powerful rivals

in the battle of life, much as the ancient Britons were compelled

to withdraw to the barren and inaccessible fastnesses of Wales.

Some of their organs have undergone considerable modification in

correspondence to the changed conditions of their new habitats. Thus

down to 900 fathoms their eyes have generally become enlarged, to

make the best of the faint light which may possibly penetrate there.

After 1000 fathoms these organs are either still further enlarged or

so greatly reduced that in some species they disappear altogether

and are replaced by enormously long feelers. The only light at great

depths which would enable large eyes to be of any service is the

phosphorescence given out by deep-sea animals. We know that at the

surface this light is often very powerful, and Sir Wyville Thomson

has recorded one occasion on which the sea at night was “a perfect

blaze of phosphorescence, so strong that lights and shadows were

thrown on the sails and it was easy to read the smallest print.” It

is thought possible by several naturalists that certain portions of

the sea bottom may be as brilliantly illumined by this sort of light

as the streets of a European city after sunset.

[Illustration: THE BOTTLE-FISH AND THE PELICAN-FISH.]

[Illustration: AT THE BOTTOM OF THE TROPICAL SEA.

The large floating object is the phosphorescent, compound, oceanic

hydrozoan _Agalma elegans_, a physophore related to the jellyfishes.

Its tentacles trail over dead corals,—madrepore, brain-corals, etc.;

while the living reef beyond is crowned by branching corals, corallines

and seaweeds.]

One of the most striking examples of this vertical distribution, which

forms layers of animal life, as it were, in the ocean from the abysses

to the shallows, is shown by the coral-reefs. The foundations of these

polyp-built barriers or islands are laid by the millions of minute

individuals of one solid, heavy kind of coral which can flourish only

in pretty deep water. When these have reached their highest growth they

cease to propagate there, and a second kind comes and colonizes upon

the summit of this massive foundation and carries the work a little

farther up. Then these die off, and a third kind plants itself upon

their remains and carries the structure to the top, near the surface

of the sea, where many surface-corals, corallines, and various other

limy and flinty plants and animals help to erect a dry reef, upon which

land vegetation can find a root-hold, and where, after a while, men may

dwell. When these coral-built islands are ring-shaped they are called

_atolls_, and are believed to be living crowns about the summits of

submerged mountains.

Men make use of something in nearly every branch of ocean life, from

humblest to highest. The lowest of all, as I have already said, are the

foraminifers; it is their skeletons which make up our common chalk. A

close ally of theirs is the sponge, of which a dozen or so varieties

are sold in the shops. Sponges come chiefly from the Mediterranean,

the Persian and Ceylonese waters of the Indian Ocean, and from the

Gulf coast of Florida. In the Old World they are obtained chiefly

by diving. Men who are trained from boyhood to this work go out to

the sponge-ground in boats on fine days. Fastening a netting-bag

about their waists, and taking a heavy stone in their hands, they

dive head-foremost to the bottom,—often twelve or fifteen fathoms

below,—tear the sponges from the rocks, and rise with a bagful, to

be dragged almost utterly exhausted into their boat, often fainting

immediately after. This requires them to hold their breath under

the water for two minutes or more; but none but the most expert can

do that, and a diver does not live long. In Florida, however, the

sponge-gatherers do not dive, but go in ships to where the sponges

grow, and then cruise about in small boats, each of which contains

two men: one steers, while the other leans over the side searching

the bottom. In order to see it plainly, he has what he calls a

“water-glass”—a common wooden pail the bottom of which is glass.

Pressing this down into the water a few inches, he thrusts in his face,

and can then perceive everything on the bottom with great distinctness.

When he sees a sponge he thrusts down a long, stout pole, on the end of

which is a double hook, like a small pitchfork, set at right angles to

the handle, and drags up the captive.

The sponges, having been obtained, must be put through long operations

of rotting, beating, rinsing, drying, and bleaching before their

skeletons—the serviceable part—are fit for use. Only a few, however,

out of the large number of species of sponges have any commercial value.

The limy skeletons of the coral polyps form what we term “corals.” The

round white ones and the variously branching ones may come from any

one of several parts of the equatorial half of the globe, and are of

value chiefly as mantel ornaments. The red coral of which necklaces

and other bits of jewelry are made, especially at Naples, is procured

by divers about the shores of Sicily and Sardinia, and its gathering,

cutting and mounting into ornaments, form a flourishing industry in

southern Italy.

Rising in the zoölogical scale to starfishes and sea-urchins, I can

only say that the starfishes interest oystermen because they prey upon

their oysters, and the former often do enormous damage to planted

beds, especially in Long Island Sound. In the old days it was thought

that medicines made out of the “stars” and the “sea-eggs” were very

potent in certain diseases. The trepang—some one of several sorts

of holothurian, an elongated creature related to the starfish, and

covered with a prickly, leathery hide, so that it looks like a sort

of sea-cucumber—which is dried and eaten by the Chinese and Malayans,

belongs here too; considerable quantities of these queer food-creatures

are gathered by the Chinese along the coasts of Mexico, Southern

California and the outlying islands, and are sold in San Francisco

mainly for export to Asia. The sea-urchin itself is eagerly sought as

food by the Indians of the American northwest coast.

Coming to crustaceans—do we not eat crabs gladly, from the “shedder”

to the huge lobster? On the coast of Maine whole villages of sea-side

people get their support almost wholly by catching lobsters and canning

them to send abroad. In Virginia and North Carolina, at certain

seasons, hundreds of men are engaged in catching and shipping crabs

for market, and in Louisiana large factories are devoted to canning

shrimps, which are also extensively used as food in the Old World,

where they are cooked by parching or boiling, and sold by peddlers in

the streets.

This brings us to the mollusks, in our glance at the useful animals of

the ocean; and to prove _their_ importance, it is enough to remind the

reader that these include the “shell-fish” of our coasts—the oyster,

clam, mussel, scallop, cockle, and all the rest—not a few!

I found by my long study of the subject, when, in 1879 and 1880, I

was gathering statistics of the United States shell-fisheries for the

United States Fish Commission and the Tenth Census, that at that time

there were taken from our waters, of oysters alone, almost 23,000,000

bushels each year, worth to the oystermen about $13,500,000. During the

twenty years that have elapsed since that investigation—the figures of

which you may obtain in full in my Report to the Tenth Census upon the

Oyster Industries—these amounts have largely increased.

This business employs over 100,000 persons in this country alone; and

oysters, clams, and other shell-fish are gathered all round the globe,

forming one of the most important of all natural supplies of food. In

the most thickly populated parts of the world the natural supply of

oysters long ago ceased to suffice for the demand, and artificial

propagation and cultivation were resorted to and now prevail on both

sides of the North Atlantic, and to a less degree elsewhere.

[Illustration: STARFISHES AT HOME.

This is the common eastern American form (_Asterias vulgaris_) upper

and under views.]

The Romans, away back in the days of Horace, raised oysters in ponds

along the Italian coast, and Eastern nations preserved the custom

during the middle ages, when Europe was doing little except quarreling

and making pretty pictures on parchment. More recently the French of

the Channel coast took it up, and the English followed, finding that

their natural oyster and mussel beds were becoming exhausted. The same

fate has overtaken our oyster-beds everywhere north of the Chesapeake,

and largely there; so that now nearly all the oysters brought to market

are those which have been raised upon private planted beds, which men

own or lease and attend to as they do to estates on shore; indeed, it

is common to speak of such under-water estates as “farms.”

[Illustration: SEA-SHELLS IN THE SURF.]

An oyster-farm may be conducted in two ways. One is to place upon a

certain space of bottom, in some shallow bay, as many young oysters as

it will conveniently hold. These young oysters, generally hardly bigger

than your thumb-nail, are dredged in summer from certain reefs in deep

water, where the oysters are never allowed to grow to full size; and

to a large extent they are brought northward by the ship-load from

Maryland and Virginia, which have more “seed,” as it is called, than

they need for their own planting. These young oysters, protected from

harm, and having plenty of space to grow, come to a proper size for

market in about three years, and are then gathered by their owners and

sold.

Another method is to spread old shells, pebbles, etc., on the bottom,

to which the floating eggs emitted by adult oysters in the neighborhood

adhere. The thick “catch” of infant mollusks hatched from these captive

eggs is then taken up and respread in a more scattered way upon new

ground, and is allowed to grow to maturity. The oysters raised by

either of these methods are of better appearance and taste, as a rule,

than those that grow naturally, because each has room enough to perfect

its proportions.

[Illustration: MELEAGRINA.

_Meleagrina (Avicula) margaritifera._

_b._ byssal foramen or notch; _g._ suspensors of the gills.]

Mussels, clams of many varieties, and even sponges and peak-shells, are

also cultivated to some extent, each according to the plan its natural

habits make advisable. In this way certain great areas of favorable

ocean-bottom have become as valuable as the neighboring shore-land, or

even far more so, if you compare, acre for acre, the yield of the crops

below with those above the water-line.

But mollusks are useful in many other ways than as human food. As they

are known to be the principal food of several valuable fishes, enormous

quantities are devoted to baiting hooks in both hand-lining and

trawling for cod and similar commercial species. The quaint squids are

mollusks, and these are especially useful for bait in certain places

and seasons, and are taken in the North Atlantic in vast numbers for

that purpose.

The shells of mollusks are applied to a surprising variety of purposes,

from paving roads to making shirt-studs, while their natural beauty

has suggested their utilization as ornaments in a hundred ways. We

cut them up by the million into buttons and various small objects,

such as parasol handles, and polish and fashion them into all sorts

of knickknacks, thus giving employment to thousands of persons. Many

ship-loads of shells are brought to New York from the West Indies every

year for such purposes. I need not dwell upon this, but turn to the

interesting subject of pearls.

[Illustration: CASSIDIDÆ.

Helmet-shell (_Cassis flammea_).]

Mother-of-pearl is the bright inside surface, or _nacre_, of the large

oyster that gives us pearls, which are themselves composed of the same

substance formed in a nodule around some intruding substance, like a

grain of sand, which irritates the mollusk’s skin until it is made

smooth and comfortable by this iridescent coating.

Bivalves yielding this beautiful substance exist in various parts of

the world; but in America the only fishery for the pearl-oyster is in

the Gulf of California, and that is by no means as productive as it

used to be. The season for pearl-fishing on the Pacific coast of Mexico

is from June to December, but the diving can be done only in good

weather, and for about three hours at the time of low water, since the

tide there rises twenty feet, which would make a large dive of itself;

and, besides, the currents are troublesome during high water.

[Illustration: SCORPION-SHELL.

(_Pteroceras lambis._)]

At the right hour the Mexicans go out in their canoes, one man of

the four or five in each canoe paddling, while the rest scrutinize

the bottom. It may be rocky and weed-grown, but the water is clear,

and their practised eyes detect a single round oyster where you or I

certainly would overlook a dozen of them. Then down a man goes and

brings up his prize, with perhaps some additional ones. Sixty or eighty

feet is not too deep for these adventurous divers, who will stay a

whole minute upon the bottom. No food is eaten by these men on the day

they dive until their labor has been done.

Western Australia is another fruitful field for pearl-oysters, and

until a few years ago they were taken there by native blackfellows,

diving without weights or any other assistance in any water not more

than ten fathoms deep. The inshore shallows have now been so cleared of

shells that the only profitable industry is to go down in deep water

in diving-dress and make a thorough clean-up of each “patch” where the

shells seem numerous.

The divers find it an interesting and curious world where they

work, but one full of fright and peril. Some men who attempt it are

so unnerved that they will never make a second descent. None can

endure the practice long without ill health resulting; and the native

Australians will never enter a diver’s dress, declining to go down

where it is too deep to dive naked.

[Illustration: MITER-SHELLS.

_a._ _Mitra vulpecula._ _b._ _Mitra episcopalis._]

As for the dangers, drowning by some accident to the apparatus, or

through the stupidity of the boatmen above, is only one of them. The

warm waters in which these men work are the home of the largest and

most deadly sharks, and of various other submarine creatures one would

rather not meet in their own element. Of them all the sharks are most

to be dreaded, especially by the naked men. As a rule, however, they

are easily frightened away, or can be avoided by the clever swimmer,

who quickly stirs up the mud of the bottom, and rises in the fog before

the dull shark discovers that he has gone. East Indians are said to

fight sharks quite fearlessly, stabbing them with a knife as they roll

over preparatory to a close attack. I have read a story to the effect

that formerly the Mexican Indian divers on our western coast used

to take down with them a stick of hard wood about two feet long and

sharpened at both ends. When a shark was encountered from which they

could not readily escape, they would snatch this weapon from their

belts, grasp it in the middle, and thrust it dexterously crosswise

into the widely distended mouth of the monster, opened to seize them.

To shut down his jaws upon such a skewer would undoubtedly discomfit

a shark or anything else; but when one thinks of the time, nerve, and

sure aim it would require to accomplish this feat, he begins to doubt

whether it really ever was tried. I advise you, therefore, to prove the

story better than I have been able to do, before you pin _all_ your

faith to it.

[Illustration: VENUS’ COMB, ONE OF THE MURICES OF CHINA.]

[Illustration: A MUREX (“MUREX PALMA-ROSÆ”) OF CEYLON.]

An Australian pearl-diver, writing about this matter in “The Century”

magazine a few years ago, assures us that a fifteen-foot shark,

magnified by the water, and making a bee-line for one, is sufficient to

make the stoutest heart quake, in spite of the assertion that sharks

have never been known to attack a man in a rubber diving-dress. He adds:

Neither is the sight of a large turtle comforting when one does

not know exactly what it is, and the coiling of a sea-snake around

one’s legs, although it has only one’s hands to bite at, is, to say

the least, unpleasant. A little fish called the stone-fish is one

of the enemies of the diver. It seems to make its habitation under

the pearl-shell, as it is only when picking up a shell that any one

has been known to be bitten. I remember well the first time I was

bitten by this spiteful member of the finny tribe. I dropped my bag

of shells, and hastened to the surface; but in this short space of

time my hand and arm had so swollen that it was with difficulty I

could get the dress off, and then was unable to work for three days,

suffering intense pain the while. Afterward I learned that staying

down a couple of hours after a bite will stop any further discomfort,

the pressure of water causing much bleeding at the bitten part, and

thus expelling the poison.

All the oysters when brought ashore are opened in vats of water, and

carefully examined for the pearls they may contain half embedded in

their mantles; but very few reward the diver with gems worth selling

separately or otherwise than by weight as “seed” pearls. Many divers,

therefore, do not themselves take the trouble of opening what they

catch, but sell them unopened at a few cents a dozen, preferring the

small and steady assured income to the chances of failure or a fortune.

The round, flat, beautiful shells are saved, and their sale

(for mother-of-pearl work) brings nearly as much money into the

pearl-fishing communities in the course of a season as is derived from

the pearls themselves.

What beauty, as well as usefulness, have shells! And how wide is the

science (conchology) that deals with them, and tells us not only their

structure and manner of life, but interprets the part which their

extraordinary forms, ornaments, colors, and appendages play in their

“struggle for existence” down in that populous green under-world of the

waters!

[Illustration: ON THE GULF STREAM SLOPE, FROM ONE TO TWO MILES BELOW

THE SURFACE.]

I know a picturesque old house [writes a charming pen in one of

the early volumes of “Scribner’s Monthly”] that has a many-shelved

pantry devoted to the exhibition and sale of shells, collected in

many a long voyage to the remotest parts of the five oceans. Apart

from their scientific interest, their associations with alien races

and far-off countries, how beautiful these shells are in themselves!

and how readily might the prevailing vulgarities and absurdities in

the decoration of glass and porcelain be corrected by studying the

ceramics of nature! How, for instance, is our sense of cleanliness

served and our appetite wooed by the extreme smoothness, hardness

of surface, and pearly white of the oyster-shell! What decoration in

the part that receives the viand, what metallizing the surface or

changing it into artificial marble, or covering it up with pictures,

would take the place of the pure, colorless shell?

Every species of these shells has a principle of growth, or law of

form, peculiar to itself and yet based upon some more general law of

form common to other species.... In the comb of Venus, for instance,

the initial impulse of structure tends to produce a series of spines

of a peculiar curvature, and arranged after a certain order that

involves the use of similar curves. It is interesting to study the

development of this simple principle into the complex and singular

form of beauty comprised in the shell itself, the idea being carried

into the most minute particulars—even the dark markings at the mouth

being shaped like spines, and every small projection on the surface

evidently being an arrested development of spines. In the _Murex

haustellum_, on the contrary, nodules take the place of spines. In

the _M. endivia_ an entirely different idea is developed. Notice the

cross-striations. Instead of prolonging themselves into cylindrically

pointed spines, as in the case of the Venus’ comb, or bunching

themselves into knobs, as in the _M. haustellum_, they expand into

wonderful foliated projections, the edges of which are beautifully

fluted, like the leaves of the lettuce. Another fine effect is

afforded by the different texture of the inside and outside surfaces,

down to the smallest foliation, the inner parts exhibiting a polished

pearly white, and the outside a gray and wrinkled skin. Observe that,

however rough or dull of hue the outside of a shell, its lips are

always pure and often flushed with lovely color; for, as a rule (and

here is another hint to decorators), Nature distinguishes by some

adornment the most significant parts of her creatures, where life and

use are centered.... The ocean, indeed, beautifies all it touches.

Give it any rough shard, and it will so roll it about, and lick it

with its waves, and smooth it with their soft attrition, that it will

return you a polished and shapely nodule, exhibiting all the beauty

of color and surface of which the material is capable.

[Illustration: molluscs and plants]

FOOTNOTE:

[7] It does not follow that these creatures are conscious of this

pressure, any more than we are of the pressure upon us of the fourteen

pounds to the square inch of our atmosphere. The point is that they

_do_ feel it when they rise upward to a point where the pressure is

distinctly less, just as we are conscious of a difference when we

ascend in a balloon or climb a very high mountain, and after a time

we find that we cannot go any farther. Land animals therefore have a

vertical limit to their distribution as well as sea animals, and for

analogous reasons.—E. I.

[Illustration: Page heading decoration]

INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS

_Adler_ at Samoa, 200.

Agalma elegans, 264.

_Alabama_, the, in action, 136, 158.

Algæ, typical, 252, 254.

_Almirante Cochrane_, in action with _Huascar_, 141.

_America_, the yacht, 158, 195.

Antarctic scenery, 101.

Ardois night-signals at sea, 205.

Argonaut shell, 274.

Armada, style of ships of the, 115.

Balloon-sail, 158, 186.

Battle-ships, modern steel, 134, 142, 144, 147, 150, 153.