THE MOVING WATERS 



and the tidal wave travels at the formidable speed of 

 500 miles an hour. 



Science can only guess how the lives of countless 

 millions of creatures in the world's oceans are affected by 

 the monotonous pulsing of the tides. 



Their life durations, their periods of gestation, their 

 habits : all these and many other factors in their multi- 

 tudinous existences are influenced by the tides on the 

 ocean's surface, and those deeper and more mysterious 

 movements of the undersea waters. Down to the utter- 

 most depths of the world's oceans, through miles of dark 

 water, such tidal influences continue, even as the lives 

 of creatures on the world's land surfaces are influenced 

 by the movements of the distant stars.* 



Even as no man lives to himself, so the ocean does not 

 exist as an isolated entity. It is related to the land, the 

 sea and the sky in numerous ways, many of them com- 

 plicated relationships and some of them very mysterious. 



The rains which fall upon its surface do not merely 

 affect the sea's volume as they assist the rivers to replace 

 its continual loss by evaporation: they affect the lives 

 and habits of countless creatures near its surface, and, 

 more remotely, the lives of vast numbers of animals in its 

 depths. So with land erosions, and with the millions of 

 tons of top-soil which are carried into the sea. And so 

 with the winds — they intimately affect life in the oceans. 



The tidal waves which follow the moon are not uni- 

 formly three feet high — that is the range as the piled-up 

 waters sweep across the oceans under normal conditions. 

 We already have some idea of the tidal range in the Bay 

 of Fundy. As we have seen, it varies throughout the Bay. 

 Other parts of the world — parts of Mexico and Australia, 

 northern France and south-west England — have tidal 

 ranges of as much as twenty feet. Such variations in tidal 



*Flammarion and other authors have suggested that ants are guided in their 

 wanderings by the stars ; not merely by the Hght from them, nocturnally, but by 

 mysterious rays, beyond the range of our present knowledge. Birds, bees and other 

 creatures may be guided in their migrations by invisible rays from outer space. 



87 



