UNDER SEA WITH HELMET AND CAMERA 



swimming. Some of our summers were spent on the New Jersey coast. 

 We formed, with some boys we met there, a sort of "club," at least it had 

 sufficient organization for us to procure uniform caps (or perhaps our 

 mothers did this for us) . The chief accomplishment of the club was mak- 

 ing a collection of specimens of life along the shore of a small inlet from 

 the sea. We dried our small fishes and preserved more bulky ones in 

 alcohol. The conditions at this inlet must have been unusual^ for we ob- 

 tained many sea horses, pipe fish and star fish. All other kinds of fish died 

 very soon after being placed in bowls or buckets, but these lived for a long 

 time. We luckily obtained the sea horses at spawning time and witnessed 

 the young emerging from the pocket in which the parent carries them. 

 They were so small that I mounted some on microscope slides. This 

 pastime gave to me a lasting interest in life beneath the surface of the sea, 

 fresh water ponds and streams. 



At home, swimming took precedence over all other summer amuse- 

 ments. Our "swimming hole" was in the 'Brandy wine Creek among the 

 gunpowder mills which lined its banks for two miles. At the place we had 

 chosen, a sycamore tree, its roots undermined by the stream, had started 

 to fall into the water but had apparently changed its mind just before it 

 was too late. It leaned over the stream at an angle which made walking on 

 its trunk an easy matter. We built a platform for diving where the height 

 above the water was about ten feet and made a rope-ladder to get back to 

 the platform. Sometimes the "girl-friends" were allowed to go with us. 

 Diving, swimming under water, collecting stones from the bottom became 

 matters of great interest and competition. One of the boys made a pair of 

 glasses to aid his vision when beneath the surface. Then we became in- 

 terested in devising a means for breathing and so initiated ourselves into 

 the elementary problems of submarine diving. The first and most obvious 

 experiment was to place a short section of garden hose in the mouth, then 

 submerge, and breathe in and out through the hose. We found that when 



