DIFFERENT WAYS OF SWIMMING 



Beyond its diversity, Nature displays its equally re- 

 markable multiplicity, its prodigious abundance, of 

 life. We must seek that out also, and find it, if we 

 are really to know things as they are. 



While watching, through the glass wall of the tank, 

 the goings and comings of the animals imprisoned 

 there, I have sometimes reflected that, in spite of their 

 number, if they were all taken out and piled up in a 

 heap, they would hardly fill an ordinary sized basket. 

 Then I have remembered the great trawls used in the 

 Atlantic Ocean, in which the net, after dragging 

 along the bottom for several hours three to six hundred 

 feet below the surface, brings up tons and tons of 

 fish and other animals. When the net is opened, it 

 lets loose upon the deck a flood of all these captured 

 creatures. The fishermen fill huge compartments of 

 the hold with them. We see, still moving, as in the 

 tank, skate, turbot, gurnard, not in ones and twos, 

 but in hundreds. Yet the net has only dragged a 

 mile or two over a space about thirty feet wide. This 

 space, inconsiderable when regarded in relation to the 

 immensity of the sea bottom, was sufficient. The net 

 seized this mass of creatures, and its contents give us 

 an idea of what subsists and lives on the bottom, or 

 not far from it. The fecundity, the diversity, the 

 richness of these lives surpass anything we can con- 

 template in our own world. The life that exists far 

 from our sight is out of all proportion to that which 

 we see around us. 



But we can get an idea of all this life by the help of 

 various individual observations made in our scientific 

 studies, completing them by a system of contrasts and 

 comparisons. The picture of the flat desert, desolate 

 beneath the burning sun, returns to the mind. The 

 space dragged by the trawls is also an immense plain, 

 a vast, flat, horizonless area, covered with soft mud as 

 the desert is covered with fine sand. Only, instead of 

 light air, it is surmounted by a thick sheet of water; 



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