532 LIFE AS RELATED TO PHYSICAL CONDITIONS 



an upright position or to float freely in the water. Usually 

 they abound near the shore where the water is shallow. 



The vast surface of the open sea supports few plants 

 except the minute one-celled plants, the diatoms, of which 

 there are many species and an almost infinite number of 

 individuals. These furnish about the only food for the 

 animals of the open sea except that obtained by preying 

 upon one another. 



A great quantity of detached seaweed (Sargassum) , filled 

 with multitudes of small marine animals and the fishes 



which prey upon 

 them, covers the sur- 

 face of the middle 

 Atlantic, the center 

 of the oceanic eddy. 

 Through this Colum- 

 bus sailed from the 

 16th of September 

 to the 8th of Octo- 

 ber, 1492, greatly to 

 his own astonishment 

 and to the terror of 

 his crew, who had never before heard of these " oceanic 

 meadows." 



The animals of the sea vary in size from the microscopic 

 globigerina (page 400), whose tiny shells blanket the beds 

 of the deeper seas, to the whale, that huge giant of the deep, 

 in comparison with which the largest land animals are but 

 pygmies. Although monarch of all the finny tribe, it is 

 not a fish at all, but a mammal which became infatuated 

 with a salt-water life and so through countless ages has more 

 and more assumed the finny aspect. It is obliged to rise 



A SMALL SHARK 

 Photographed under water. 



