PREFACE 



IN this age of progressive scientific achievement, 

 which fosters experimental activity at the expense of 

 contemplative meditation, we seem to be in some 

 danger of losing our sense of wonderment. Because the 

 miraculous has become commonplace, the commonplace 

 has ceased to be miraculous in the sense conveyed by 

 Whitman's words : "To me every hour of the light and 

 dark is a miracle. Every cubic inch of space is a miracle." 

 Many books of recent years survey the world's oceans 

 and describe their teeming life-forms more comprehen- 

 sively than this book, and my research through numbers 

 of them has deepened my admiration and respect for all 

 whose scientific investigations and explorations have con- 

 tributed to our knowledge of the seas. Yet the subject is 

 so vast, and has so many ramifications, that even as the 

 light of the sun penetrates only a Httle way down into the 

 oceans (the last trace of light vanishing at 3,500 feet 

 below the surface) so all the accumulated knowledge of 

 man regarding the world's seas remains superficial. Be- 

 neath every carefully-acquired fact regarding any of the 

 sea's characteristics or living creatures lie infinities of 

 further facts : an incredibly vast realm of undiscovered 

 truth comparable with the dark, mysterious abysses of 

 the ocean itself, unpenetrated and virtually impenetrable. 

 Carlyle linked wonderment with worship in a signi- 

 ficant passage in which he said : ''The man who does not 

 habitually wonder ... is but a pair of spectacles behind 

 which there is no Eye." This thought is strikingly con- 

 firmed in a sentence written by the joint authors of the 

 first connected story of man's relationship to the sea, a 

 quotation from which appears at the beginning of this 



II 



