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After I had learned a great many interesting things about the life and habits of the children of the sea how in the midst of dashing waves the little polyps build the beautiful coral isles of the Pacific, and the foraminifera have made the chalk-hills of many a land my teacher read me "The Chambered Nautilus," and showed me that the shell-building process of the mollusks is symbolical of the development of the mind.
It is still fresh enough to form the abode of fish and mollusks; and the irrepressible young lady of the present generation is perhaps even aware that it contains numbers of seals, being in fact the seat of one of the most important and valuable seal-fisheries in the whole world. It may be regarded as a typical example of a yet youthful and lively inland sea.
All at once marble takes an animal shape, the dead come to life, the history of the world is laid open before you. After countless dynasties of giant creatures, races of fish and clans of mollusks, the race of man appears at last as the degenerate copy of a splendid model, which the Creator has perchance destroyed.
Thus it is that corals, crustacea, insects, mollusks, and a few other kinds of lower forms constitute the greater mass of invertebrate palæontological materials because of their supporting structures of one kind or another.
We learn, indeed, from the observations made in 1859, by the Reverend R.T. Lowe, that more than one-half, or fifty-three in ninety, of the marine mollusks collected by him from the sandy beach of Mogador are common British species, although Mogador is 18 1/2 degrees south of the nearest shores of England.
And all the while, the woman, just as she had come ashore, was keeping life going similarly crawling about, always near the creek, crossing the beach at low tide to the mud flats and rooting among the mollusks, and stuffing herself with any kind of sea-growth that tasted good enough.
Meanwhile, as the sun got progressively higher, it lit up the watery mass more and more. The seafloor changed little by little. Its fine-grained sand was followed by a genuine causeway of smooth crags covered by a carpet of mollusks and zoophytes.
The long snake was covered with seashell rubble and bristling with foraminifera; a crust of caked gravel protected it from any mollusks that might bore into it. It rested serenely, sheltered from the sea's motions, under a pressure favorable to the transmission of that electric spark that goes from America to Europe in 32/100 of a second.
He recognized four types, which correspond exactly to Cuvier's four plans, though he calls them by different names. Let us compare them. Cuvier. Baer. Radiates, Peripheric, Mollusks, Massive, Articulates, Longitudinal, Vertebrates. Doubly Symmetrical. Though perhaps less felicitous, the names of Baer express the same ideas as those of Cuvier.
From then on, no more mollusks, no more zoophytes, no more articulates. Just a few large fish sweeping by like shadows. During the night of February 16-17, we entered the second Mediterranean basin, whose maximum depth we found at 3,000 meters. The Nautilus, driven downward by its propeller and slanting fins, descended to the lowest strata of this sea.
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