78 ANIMAL LIFE 



by a side-dish of fly-juice, so vegetarian animals may 

 lose their strictness and vary their menu with flesh, 

 and only after obtaining a commanding station do 

 their succeeding generations revert to that safe but 

 laborious habit of grazing from which they set out. 



The quest for prey : I. The supply of food in the sea. 

 We speak, and rightly speak, of the heaped measure 

 of plant life and of the dependence of animals upon 

 the pastures so provided. But there are common- 

 wealths in which plants shrink to an invisible factor 

 where yet animal life abounds. The high seas and 

 the depths of the ocean teem with animals, yet it is 

 only in the Sargasso Sea that weeds are visible, and 

 much below the surface they are unable to live. Lakes 

 and broad rivers, Arctic and Antarctic lands, sandy 

 coasts and volcanic districts, are only fringed or 

 powdered, as it were, with plant life. Yet in all these 

 regions animals are found, and it would only be pos- 

 sible for them to maintain a strictly vegetarian diet 

 by an enormous reduction in their numbers. As a 

 matter of experience we know that many animals 

 are carnivorous by preference and nature. The mole 

 would die in the richest garden mould that contained 

 no worms, and the spider would starve in a well-kept 

 hothouse. How this carnivorous mode of life has 

 been attained is the problem before us. 



Drifting on the waters and raining down into its 

 depths is a motley collection of flotsam, part plant, 

 part animal. Covering the rocks and weeds are the 

 infusoria, sponges and barnacles, hydroids and coral 



