NONSUCH 



developing no spores or organs of reproduction. It 

 exists, then, by an endless growth, a perpetual in- 

 crease of leaves and air-filled floats. But no matter 

 for how many centuries this has been going on, there 

 is no doubt but that the first weed was torn by 

 storms from the rocks and reefs of the West Indies, 

 and swept by wind and currents out into the great 

 dead center of two and a half million square miles 

 over which it is scattered today. So the floating 

 vegetation originally was a rock grower. 



While the Wanderer Crab spends its life far 

 from land, sighting it only by accident, yet it, too, 

 is not a swimmer by blood, for all its ancestors and 

 many of its living relatives are Cliff Dwellers such 

 as the scarlet Grapsus. But it has long since ex- 

 changed mineral for vegetable protection. A lum- 

 berman might be most expert in riding logs down a 

 series of rapids, but he would cut a poor figure and 

 would soon lose his life competing with a Swiss 

 mountain climber. So although the Sargassum crab 

 may be stranded at the very foot of rocks over which 

 his cousins are scampering, he can only hold tight 

 to the last to his bit of weed. 



When we come to examine Planes more closely 

 we find an exquisite adjustment to the exigencies 

 of his life. As soon as a fish begins to become less 

 conservative and starts climbing among the fronds 

 of alg£e or creeping along the bottom or even 

 clambering out upon the shore, his fins begin to 

 suffer. But somewhere between the climbing out 

 and the tearing of the webs Nature steps in and in 



190 



