WHERE CURRENTS RIP 51 



creatures, as of the lesser, wind-driven, current- 

 swept folk. 



These last helpless ones have been given the name 

 plankton, which is appropriate, for when the Greeks 

 used it, they meant Wanderer. Here we saw what 

 must have amounted to many, many tons of these 

 minute beings — diminutive crustaceans, both adult 

 and larval, the myriad species of jellyfish and pe- 

 lagic mollusks, worms, larval fishes, single-celled 

 animals such as those which light up the sea at night, 

 and my jolly little friends, the flying snails. W^here 

 these are gathered together in numbers, there will 

 the self-determined fish be, tiny little chaps who 

 dash about and feed upon the living soup of the 

 sea. These in turn, attract middle-sized fish, and 

 these still larger ones. This would seem like a 

 straight line — a linear chain of life, but it is, in 

 reality, a great segment of a curve, the circle being 

 completed when one of the great marauders dies, 

 and furnishes food, not only for his former victims, 

 but for the minute creatures that he would have 

 disdained as nourishment. 



Although compressed within so narrow a longi- 

 tudinal area, yet the slow procession of the won- 

 derful fauna was far from uniform. Whether we 

 use the simile of corpuscles tumbling along a stream 

 of blood, or some less apt memory, the nodes 

 in the line of life were the logs and other debris. 

 The number and diversity of these were beyond 

 belief, and I longed for a botanist to identify them 

 all and perhaps to tell from what exact coastal or 

 river forest or jungle they had drifted. Of one 



