364 THE ORIGIN OF THE OLDEST FOSSILS. 



which hide in tlie t]ii<;ket and that all the aj)parent plants are really 

 animals. 



The delicate star-like tiowers are the vermilion heads of boring anne- 

 lids or the scarlet tentacles of actinias, and the thicket is made up of 

 pale lavender l)ushes of branching- madrepores, and green and brown 

 and yellow and oli ve masses of brain coral, of alcyonarians of all shades 

 of yellow and purple, lilac and red, and of black and brown and red 

 sponges. Even the lichens which incrust the rocks are hydroid corals, 

 and the whole sea garden is a dense jungle of animals, where i)lant 

 life is represented only by a few calcareous alga^ so strange in shape 

 and texture that they are much less plant-like than the true animals. 



The scarcity of plant life becomes still more notable Avhen ayc study 

 the ocean as a whole. On land herbivorous animals are always much 

 more abundant and prolific than the carnivora, as they must he to keep 

 up the supply of food, but the animal life of the ocean shows a most 

 remarkable ditference, for uuirine animals are almost exclusively car- 

 nivorous. 



The birds of the ocean, the terns, gulls, petrels, divers, cormorants, 

 tropic birds and albatrosses, are very numerous indeed, and the only 

 parallel to the pigeon roosts and rookeries of the laiul is found in the 

 dense clouds of sea birds around their breeding grounds, but all these 

 sea birds are carnivorous, and even the birds of the seashore subsist 

 almost exclusively ui)on animals such as mollusca, Crustacea, and 

 annelids. 



The seals pursue and destroy fishes; the sea elephants and walruses 

 live upon mollusks; the whales, dolphins and porpoises and the marine 

 reptiles all feed upon animals and most of them are fierce beasts of prey. 



There are a few fishes which i)asture in the fringe of seaweed which 

 grows on the shore of the ocean, and there are some which browse 

 among the floating tufts of algiv upon its surface, but most of them fre- 

 quent these places in search of the small animals which hide among the 

 plants. . 



In the Chesapeake Bay the sheepshead browses among the alga* upon 

 the submerged rocks and piles like a marine sheep, but its food is 

 exclusively animal, and I have lain upon the edge of a wharf watching 

 it crunch the barnacles and young oysters until the juice of their bodies 

 streamed out of the angles of its mouth and gathered a host of small 

 fishes to snatch the fragments as they drifted away with the tide. 



Many important fishes, like the cod, pasture on the bottom, but their 

 pasturage consists of mollusks and annelids and Crustacea instead of 

 plants, and the vast majority of sea fishes are fierce hunters, ])ursuing 

 and destroying snuiller fishes, and often exhibiting an insatiable love 

 of slaughter, like our own bluefish and tropical albacore and barracuda. 

 Others, such as the herring, feed upon smaller fishes and the pelagic 

 pteropods and copepods; and others, like the shad, upon the minute 

 organisms of the ocean, but all, with few exceptions, are carnivorous. 



