THE TEEMING LIFE OF THE WATERS 



of the miraculous to our activity, and makes the ragged 

 fisherman who stands upright in his boat some distance 

 away, a glorious being, illuminate, superhuman, with 

 a halo of purple and gold about his head. 



Some distance from the shore, where its influence 

 and that of its waters are unfelt, I lean over the side 

 and examine the pure deep water that alone surrounds 

 me. It is perfectly transparent, with a limpidity which 

 even the clearest fresh water can never attain. When 

 I plunge my hand into it, I can distinguish every fold 

 in the skin even more clearly than I can in the air. 

 Nothing seems to disturb its purity. Yet, if I put 

 out my plankton net and trail it for a few moments, 

 then pull it out of the water to see what is in the glass 

 bowl, I find a host of minute bodies in suspension, 

 some motionless, some active, all clearly to be seen 

 against the light. They are a proof that the sea, though 

 it seems so pure, harbours multitudes of living beings. 

 These creatures, mostly transparent and with hardly a 

 suggestion of colour, are scattered and comparatively 

 few, so that when we look at the water from the boat 

 they do not affect its clearness. But when they are 

 caught in the net, and collected in the little bowl, they 

 are much more easy to see than when scattered, as 

 they usually are, over a much greater area. Some, 

 which are fairly large, measure several millimetres. 

 But there are smaller ones which are difficult to see, 

 larvae or other tiny little animals. Some of them, the 

 most numerous, are infusoria and unicellular algae, 

 and these we shall only discover with the help of a 

 microscope in our laboratory. 



Sometimes this astonishing world suspended in the 

 water reveals itself more clearly. This happens when 

 the sea, ceaselessly stirred by streams and currents 

 interlacing in all directions, gathers in some of these 

 currents the creatures it maintains. Then, more 

 numerous than in other places, they increase rapidly 

 and accumulate. Their quantity affects the purity of 



