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We have already spoken enough about these sea-animals and their eggs, which luxury-loving people stupidly prefer to the eggs of chickens or ducks. Let us add some further details outside our subject. We have above described the entrance to the Gulf of Uraba, and said the different countries washed by its waters were strangely different from one another.
The Chinese, on the contrary, being under no restraint, eat, besides pork, dogs, cats, frogs, lizards, serpents of many kinds, and a great variety of sea-animals, which the other inhabitants of this country do not consider as food: They also eat many vegetables, which an European, except he was perishing with hunger, would never touch.
A few Folks have made a study of the different kinds of shells that have floated or been carried to the shore, and have been able to tell the class of sea-animals to which they have belonged. They once were the coats or outside garment of a swimmer or a clinger of the sea. One day a mother-Dolphin missed her boy-Dolphin, and as he was quite a young fellow, she felt much distressed.
Yet again that land would sink, and over it fresh layers were formed by the ocean-waters, with fresh remains of sea-animals buried in with the layers of sand or lime; and once more the sea-bottom would rise, perhaps then to continue as dry land, until the day when man should discover and handle these hidden remains.
At this Vrihaspati became angry and cursed the Ocean, saying, 'Since thou continuest to be so dirty regardless of the fact of my having come to thee for touching thee, since thou hast not become clear and transparent, therefore from this day thou shalt be tainted with fishes and sharks and tortoises and other aquatic animals. From that time, the waters of the ocean have become infested with diverse kinds of sea-animals and monsters.
Land-animals can, as a rule, have been so preserved, only when they have been drowned in ponds or rivers, or mired in bogs and swamps, or overtaken by frost, or swept out to sea. Sea-animals, on the contrary, have been so preserved on land whenever that land has been under the sea; and this appears to have been the case, at one or another past age, with the greater part of our present continents.
It is wonderfully shown sometimes in fossil wood, where all the tiny cells and delicate fibres remain distinctly marked as of old, only the whole woody substance has changed into hard stone. But although the fossil remains of quadrupeds and other land-animals are found in large quantities, their number is small compared with the enormous number of fossil sea-shells and sea-animals.
It is probable that with the whale, as with the smaller sea-animals, some privilege or perquisite is given to the first striker; and, like our own fishermen, they take a pride in having it known that their spear has been the first to inflict a wound. They meet with the most whales on the coast of Einwīllik.
You will then be able to picture to yourself the coral animal as a kind of sea-anemone, something like those which you have often seen, like red, blue, or green flowers, putting out feelers in sea-water on our coasts, and drawing in the tiny sea-animals to digest them in that bag of fluid which serves the sea-anemone as a stomach.
And more: they found out, to their surprise, that the oozy mud of the Atlantic floor was made up almost entirely of just the same atomies as make up our chalk, especially globigerinas; that, in fact, a vast bed of chalk was now forming at the bottom of the Atlantic, with living shells and sea-animals of the most brilliant colours crawling about on it in black darkness, and beds of sponges growing out of it, just as the sponges grew at the bottom of the old chalk ocean, and were all, generation after generation, turned into flints.
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