202 THE ARCTURUS ADVENTURE 



creatures which for years I had watched go past 

 out of reach, then my distant longings began to 

 change into intimate acquaintanceships, and I 

 learned to admire and to have a real affection for 

 these little fellow beings who lived their lives with 

 me on this whirling planet. 



Hummingbirds vibrate before flowers, alba- 

 trosses skim for hour after hour over the waves, but 

 sooner or later every bird must come to rest — its 

 muscles exhausted, its wings aweary. But for the 

 mid-ocean folk there is no rest as we know it. 

 Somehow or other they must keep themselves 

 suspended. A list of possible ways, thinking as 

 always from our own experience, would include 

 swimming or flying, treading water, balloons of air 

 or gas, or clinging to some bit of floating wi*eckage, 

 whether from a storm-broken ship, a bit of porous 

 lava, or a pinion dropped by a passing seabird. 

 All these and many others are actually in use, and 

 had been so for millions of years before man had 

 brain enough to make a list. 



Oblong pieces of whitish scum had tantalized 

 me for many voyages, and even when I had 

 emptied one of these bits from my net into a small 

 aquarium I could make nothing of the mass of 

 bubbles, until I looked beneath the surface and 

 there saw that exquisite violet sea-shell with the 

 euphonious name of lanthina. Although this 

 snail lives in a home of tissue-thin lime, it yet 

 spends its entire life at the surface of the ocean. 

 Its relations which we know on land leave a trail 

 of glairy slime wherever they walk, and lanthina 



