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CHAPTER III. 
LIFE IN THE OCEAN. 
‘* See what a lovely shell, 
Small and pure as a pearl, 
Frail, but a work divine, 
Made so fairly well, 
With delicate spire and whorl, 
A miracle of design.” 
TENNYSON. 
“THE appearance of the open sea,” says Frédol, from whose work 
this chapter is chiefly compiled, “far from the shore—the boundless 
ocean—is to the man who loves to create a world of his own, in 
which he can freely exercise his thoughts, filled with sublime ideas of 
the Infinite. His searching eye rests upon the far-distant horizon. 
He sees there the ocean and the heavens meeting in a vapoury 
outline, where the stars ascend and descend, appear and disappear in 
their turn. Presently this everlasting change in Nature awakens in 
him a vague feeling of that sadness ‘which,’ says Humboldt, ‘lies 
at the root of all our heartfelt joys.’” 
Emotions of another kind are produced by the contemplation 
and study of the habits of the innumerable organised beings which 
inhabit this great deep. In fact, that immense expanse of water, 
which we call the sea, is no vast liquid desert; life dwells in its 
bosom as it does on that of the dry land. Here this mystery of life 
reigns supreme. It is among the most beautiful, the most noble, and 
the most incomprehensible of His manifestations. Without life, the 
world would be as nothing. All the beings endowed with it transmit 
it faithfully to other beings, they again to their successors, which will 
be, like them, the depositaries of the same mysterious gift; the 
marvellous heritage thus traverses years and hundreds of years without 
losing its powers ; the globe is teeming with the life which has been 
so bounteously distributed over it. 
In every living being thére are two powers, between which a 
