THE LIVING STRUCTURES 129 



It may be the hideous viper fish with teeth so long that 

 they fold outside of his mouth like the tusks of a wild 

 boar, or the snipe eel with its bill like its name sake and 

 a body like a length of whip cord or the queer pelican 

 fish that will swallow a fish much larger than itself and 

 somehow digest it, or a dead ribbon fish with its almost 

 transparent body, 20 feet long and a foot wide and half 

 an inch thick, or a great red jelly fish full of poisonous 

 darts coiled up in its body, and ready to shoot out their 

 venom against any touch. In New England and arctic 

 waters some of these jelly fish grow to enormous size , 

 their bodies measuring six or eight feet across and their 

 pendent streamers reaching down seventy feet or more. 

 I may mention also the giant squid or cuttle fish thirty 

 feet long, a whitish colored beast that is always found 

 dead, the same being true of the giant octopus with its 

 reach of seventy feet from tip to tip of its huge arms. 

 "The jewel beauties, swimming about rather tamely 

 would be helpless against the ravenous pursuers were it 

 not that they live in shallow tide pools and near coral 

 reefs where these pursuers dare not follow them. Why 

 not? Because coral reefs are full of stings of the 

 live coral creatures, stings that hurt a man's hand if he 

 touches them and might destroy the eyes of any big fish 

 that ventured among them. And tide pools abound in 

 sea urchins with sharp barbed spines, hundreds of them 

 that break off inside the wound." The fierce struggle for 

 existence that has been going on in the sea for ages has 

 produced these wonderful individuals, in the same man- 

 ner that the struggle for place and power that is now 

 going on in the war between the English and the Ger- 

 mans is causing inventions of many kinds, and 

 weapons and engines of destruction of different char- 

 acters. We must keep in mind that the builders of all 



