A WONDERER UNDER SEA II 



able to live in a world with water, at the same time, place 

 and temperature. 



This thought brings us a vision of the terribly narrow 

 confines of life. Let us suppose that we are comfortable 

 and happy at seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit, surrounded 

 and supported by the vast assemblage of plants and ani- 

 mals which exists with us today on our little planet Earth. 

 If we descend deep enough into the ground or approach 

 too close to a volcano or become long exposed to high 

 noon in a desert, or if the atmosphere should very slightly 

 thin so that there was a permanent rise of one hundred 

 and forty degrees, all life would be boiled to death; or 

 if we went toward the north or south pole, or high enough 

 up a lofty mountain, or if again the atmosphere should 

 thin out, and the temperature slip irrevocably down forty 

 degrees, sooner or later the life of every plant and animal 

 would be snuffed out in a world of solid ice. 



As long as the Earth offers some areas between these 

 extremes of two hundred and twelve and thirty-two de- 

 grees, then human beings can love and hate, hope and 

 despair, smile and sneer, eat, breathe, and sleep. It is good 

 for us sometimes to consider not only our brief threescore 

 years and ten but the temporal and spatial limits of human 

 existence as a whole, always with water as an index of 

 life itself. We look at the sun with its swirling atmosphere 

 of super-heated metallic vapor, and at the cold, dead, air- 

 less, waterless moon and we recognize the youth and old 

 age of our own Earth. We fill our conscious life with a 



