12 ANIMAL LIFE 



whilst, under the ice, so numerous were the shrimps 

 that a seal's head let down amongst them at night 

 was a clean skull next morning. As ships sailed 

 through the ice-packs the patches of discoloured water 

 showed the whales' food — myriads of small organisms 

 drifting south with the cold Labrador current. Voy- 

 agers to the southward saw the water aflame with 

 phosphorescent light, each glowing point a living 

 animal. From the surface downwards, for some 

 twelve hundred feet, tow-nets showed the sea teeming 

 with animals, and, at greater depths, a peculiar but 

 less abundant deep-sea life flourishing amid intense 

 cold and darkness. 



The bountifulness of nature lies on every hand if 

 we have but the second sight to discover it. The little 

 brown scales on an orange, for instance, are sedentary 

 female insects, other kinds of which attack the apple 

 and hawthorn, the larch and birch. These the tomtits 

 know better than we, and take for their winter food. 

 Greenfly, unseen in winter, becomes a plague in 

 summer, covering our flowers and shrubs, crops and 

 trees ; blown from overhanging boughs on to the corn 

 beneath ; eating the roots at one stage, the leaf at 

 another; and finally, some close, warm day, drifting 

 in a winged swarm over the countryside. The hum 

 of life, now faint, now clear, is the sign of summer's 

 abundance. But even winter is not lifeless to those 

 who know how to seek. Where leaves have drifted out 

 of the wind into shelter, under the warm covering of 

 moss, among clods of hedge-banks, in the earth under 



