THE TEEMING LIFE OF THE WATERS 



form great masses; sometimes sparse and scattered, 

 they can be caught from a boat in a landing net, or 

 collected in a glass bowl with a sufficiently broad 

 opening. Professional fishermen, who often come 

 across them, know them well; and though they may 

 have little use for them because they have no market 

 value, they have many stories to tell about them, the 

 origin whereof goes back to the remote past. They 

 point to portions of the clothing of Venus, the daughter 

 of the ocean and goddess of beauty, though, truth to 

 tell, there was not very much of it — a girdle and a pair 



Fig. 5. — Floating larvae of Crustacea. Left, spiny lobster; right, 

 common shore crab. The former is called Phyllosoma or the glass- 

 crab, and the latter Zoea. As they grow, they become heavier, 

 and end by sinking to the bottom where they become adult. 



of slippers. The girdle is to be seen in the broad, flat, 

 translucent body of a Ctenophore, Venus's Girdle, 

 which swims with an undulating movement; the 

 slippers are the transparent shells of floating wing- 

 footed molluscs, Cymbulias, which sometimes disport 

 themselves in shoals on the surface of the water. 



These varied, diverse creatures are not the only 

 ones. Beside them, among them, and, like them, 

 always floating about, may be reckoned the different 

 species of fish which hunt them down and pursue them 

 for the sake of their flesh, hunting and pursuing one 

 another for the same purpose at the same time. In 

 good weather, I have seen boats all round me, manned 

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