CREATURES OF THE SEA 



CHAPTER I 

 INTRODUCTION 



THERE has of recent years grown up a very 

 pleasant practice with certain writers, notably 

 the lamented Richard Jefferies, the inimitable 

 Kipling, and Ernest Thompson-Seton, not to go 

 further in cataloguing names, of supplementing the 

 standard works on Natural History with intimate 

 personal details of the every-day lives of wild 

 animals from the highest to the lowest, not ex- 

 cluding insects. I said pleasant practice, but would 

 add profitable to the reader of whatever age, for 

 I think no one except some dry-as-dust, blear-eyed 

 professor, groping amid the dry bones of his museum 

 all his life, would fail to agree that a story like 

 Kipling's White Seal, for instance, must convey to 

 the average reader, whether young or old, more 

 retainable knowledge of the creatures it treats of 

 than a whole weighty volume of dry facts, mostly 

 in dead languages, even supposing it was read. Of 

 course, the desideratum is that the information pre- 

 sented in this narrative form shall be correct, that 

 where the imagination is called in to supply the 







