18 



THE OPAL SEA 



Origin of 

 life. 



The organic 

 in the in- 

 organic. 



Not the dry land alone but the life of the 

 globe, did it not also come up and out of the 

 sea? Oeeanus was the parent of the gods. 

 He was the beginner, the original, from which 

 all things sprang. Merely a pretty myth, it 

 may be said. Yes, but myths are incorporated 

 traditions — early beliefs of mankind. Per- 

 haps there was a time when there was naught 

 but the omnipresent sea, circling as a flashing 

 ball in the solar system. Perhaps it was then 

 a mass of life, and there was no inorganic mat- 

 ter existent until some of that life began to 

 die. The skeletons of the dead that sank 

 through the waters and hardened in a mass at 

 the center, were the first formed strata of the 

 solid earth. The trail of the organic is still 

 apparent in the inorganic. Leonardo da Vinci 

 recognized the sediment of the sea in the shell 

 layers of the Apennines; and the blocks of the 

 Colosseum at Eome, the pyramids at Ghizeh, 

 still show these minute shells under the micro- 

 scope. The Alps and the Andes are but so 

 much hardened ocean ash, and perhaps the 



taining the give and take of land and sea as regards the 

 shallower depths. That our present dry land was once 

 under the sea is hardly to be questioned, but that the 

 present deep sea bed has ever been thrust up into land 

 is open to doubt. 



