WHITEFISH OF THE LAKE OF GENEVA 



share of the feast, and form so many secondary links 

 in the chain. 



The sea, in its enormous mass carrying to extremes 

 what the lake can only sketch on a much smaller scale, 

 clearly expresses the reality of things. There are no 

 large plants in it: the true herbivorous animals have 

 no place there. Only animals confront one another, 

 animals compelled to feed that they may live, devouring 

 one another, the larger the smaller, the stronger the 

 weaker, each serving as prey to another. So down to 

 the most minute microscopic vegetables which are 

 directly maintained by the environment upon which 

 this prodigious meal is finally based. Their flesh, 

 passing from body to body, is continually changed, 

 carried hither and thither, modified all the time. The 

 living substance of which they are composed, cease- 

 lessly taken and retaken in this alternation of de- 

 vourers and devoured, goes from one to the other in 

 a continual cycle of nutritive exchanges. All, bound 

 together by their need for nourishment, make mutual 

 use of transformers. The whole vast mass of 

 the waters in its depths, in the darkness which reigns 

 there, is the scene of one fearful massacre, one eternal 

 sacrifice. In its abysses, going down all the way from 

 the surface, the fight for nourishment goes steadily on, 

 a grim and merciless struggle. 



The contrast between the waters and the air is very 

 great here. In the air, on terra firma, directly and 

 brightly illuminated by the sun's rays, the struggle for 

 food goes on as it does in the water, but it is less 

 urgent. The vegetable kingdom, which is necessary 

 to the subsistence of the animal kingdom, has a more 

 important place: the destruction of the plant, in the 

 feeding of herbivorous animals, does not entail such 

 disastrous results. The carnivorous animals have not 

 a predominant, or almost exclusive, part. The cycle 

 of nutrition exists indeed, but the struggles which 

 accompany it are neither so many nor so impressive. 

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