504 



THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 



its cluster of eggs upon the surface of 

 the sea. These and many other smaller 

 creatures are occasionally cast up upon 

 our shores by summer storms, but their 

 destruction along our coast is as nothing 

 compared with the thousands of dried 

 floats of Velella and Porpita and the 

 broken shells of Janthina which often 

 lie heaped in drifts over southern 

 beaches. 



It is curious and indeed largely un- 

 explained, that floating animals tend 

 to appear in swarms. No matter how 

 rare the creature, if the townet reveals 

 one, others will almost certainly be 

 caught in its near neighborhood. 



I have seen a swarm of the brown- 

 rimmed southern jellyfish, Stomolophus, 

 in which individuals were rarely more 

 than ten feet apart, yet for over sixty 

 miles we passed constantly through 

 them. But swarms of creatures in the 

 tropics are as little in comparison with 

 the vast numbers of individuals which 

 gather in the frigid seas. In cold waters 

 one finds many individuals but few 

 species, whereas in the tropics the spe- 

 cies are many and the individuals 

 relatively few and far between. 



Everywhere protection is the keynote 

 of their coloration for in the depths 

 where no red light can penetrate, the 

 animals are of the peculiar "deep-sea 

 red"; for being red in the absence of 

 red causes them to appear black in the 

 dimly lighted regions they inhabit. 

 Similarly, the backs of floating animals, 

 especially in the blue waters of the 

 tropics, are blue, while on their sides 

 they shade through silver into glistening 

 white on the underparts, in accordance 

 with Abbott Thayer's law of protective 

 coloration. 



It is to that vast, unsteady, but domi- 

 nant swirl of tropical surface waters 

 into the north Atlantic that we owe the 

 occasional presence of a few West In- 



dian creatures along our northern New 

 England shores; but at least a hundred 

 to one of our shore animals are those of 

 the cold gray -green waters which creep 

 slowly down hugging closely to our 

 beaches all the long way from the chill, 

 fog-haunted region of Nova Scotia to the 

 sparkling strand of Florida. It is this 

 long gray streak of cold water clinging to 

 our coast that gives the raw chill to winds 

 blowing over the ocean upon our shores ; 

 and the prevailing northeast gales from 

 November to April drive the cold waters 

 steadily southward so that x\rctic marine 

 animals flourish at this season off the 

 New Jersey coast. Even Florida is not 

 exempt, as all who have experienced the 

 rush of a black "norther" along her 

 shores must know. 



This cold shore water of our eastern 

 coast has commonly been called the 

 "Arctic current," but this is a popular 

 fallacy for the true Arctic current is of 

 clear green water which sheers out into 

 the open Atlantic from the eastern 

 shores of Newfoundland, bearing ice- 

 bergs within it far out into the mid- 

 Atlantic, never down our New England 

 coast. 



Through the narrow passage, only 

 forty-four miles in width, between the 

 Bahamas and Florida, there pours the 

 true Gulf Stream flowing northward at 

 a rate of full three miles an hour. Al- 

 though often checked by northerly 

 winds or accelerated by favoring breezes, 

 this vast body of water rushes as a 

 mighty river out into the free expanse 

 of the ocean to be lost in the wide world- 

 eddy that passes northward between 

 our shores and Bermuda, to bend ever 

 eastward and finally when less than half 

 way across the Atlantic to die into a 

 mere drift borne still eastward by the 

 prevailing winds to the shores of grate- 

 ful Europe. 



Along the coast of Florida, one often 



