Denizens of the Deep 



CHAPTER I 

 INTRODUCTION 



THERE has of recent years grown up a very 

 pleasant practice with certain writers, notably 

 the lamented Richard Jefferies, the inimitable 

 Kipling, and Ernest Thompson-Seton, not to go further 

 in cataloguing names, of supplementing the standard 

 works on Natural History with intimate personal details 

 of the every-day lives of wild animals from the highest to 

 the lowest, not excluding insects. I said pleasant practice, 

 but would add profitable to the reader of whatever age, 

 for I think no one except some dry-as-dust, blear-eyed 

 professor, groping amid the dry bones of his museum all 

 his life, would fail to agree that a story like Kiphng's 

 White Seal, for instance, must convey to the average 

 reader, whether young or old, more retainable knowledge 

 of the creatures it treats of than a whole weighty volume 

 of dry facts mostly in dead languages, even supposing it 

 was read. Of course, the desideratum is that the infor- 

 mation presented in this narrative form shall be correct, 

 that where the imagination is called in to supply the 

 absence of exact data it shall not be allowed to commit 

 indefensible extravagances, and that the stories as a whole 



9 



