In her dark and teeming depths, the Sea can smile in scorn at the destroyers to which she gives birth, well knowing, as the great proud fertile Sea does, that no might of destruction can surpass her might of reproduction. Her chief wealth, her most vast and countless produce, defies all the fury of the devourers, is inaccessible to their attacks. I speak of the infinite world of living atoms, of the microscopic atomies that live and love, enjoy, struggle, suffer and die from the surface to the utmost depths of the sea. It has been affirmed that, in the absence of solar light, life, also, must be absent; yet the darkest depths of the sea are studded with sea stars, living, moving, microscopic infusoriæ and molluscs. The dark crab, the phosphorescent seaworm, and a thousand strange and nameless creatures swarm in those uttermost depths and rise only now and then, describing long lines of variegated light upon the heaving surface. In its semi-transparent density, the sea has its own lucidity, its own glowing gleam, like that which fish, living or dead, reflect. The Sea! glorious Sea, hath her own lights, her own Sun, Moon, and Stars.
Gaze inquisitively and intelligently on a mere salt well and you at once perceive how prolific the ocean depths must be; that seeming deposit of dead and inert matter hath its real life; it is a mass of infusoriæ, microscopic, but organized and sentient. All voyagers on the wide Ocean concur in telling us that in their far wanderings they still and ever traverse living waters. Freynel saw millions of square yards covered by a crimson glow—that glow, consisting of living animalculæ so minute that a myriad is packed into every square inch. In the bay of Bengal, in 1854, Captain Kingman sailed for thirty miles through one vast white blotch which made the sea look like a great snow field. Not a cloud above, but one unbroken leaden grey, in strange contrast with the brilliant whiteness beneath. Look closely and you see that that seeming snow is gelatinous; bring your microscope into play and you see that that seeming jelly is a mass of living, moving, phosphoric animalculæ, flashing forth strange and marvellous lights.
Peron, too, tells us that for thirty leagues his good ship ploughed her way through what seemed a sort of greyish dust; examined with the microscope, this seeming dust was seen to be the eggs of some unknown species, covering and concealing the waters over all that immense space.
Even along the desolate shores of Greenland, where we vainly fancy that prolific nature must needs expire, the sea is enormously populous. Through waves two hundred miles by fifteen you sail through deep brown waters, colored by microscopic medusæ, of which, de Schleiden tells us, more than a hundred and ten thousand live and love, battle, and die in every cubic foot. These productive and nourishing waters are supersaturated with all sorts of fatty atoms adapted to the delicate nature of the fish which lazily drink in the nourishment provided for them by the fertile and generous common mother. Do they know what they thus swallow? Scarcely. Its minute but abounding nurture, its nourishing mother's-milk, comes to it without its care, and is received without its gratitude. Our great fatality, our sad calamity, fierce and terrible hunger, is known only on the land. Exertion and want of food are unknown in the great world of waters. There, life must glide away like a glad dream. What can the creature there do with his strength? All use of it is superfluous, impossible;—all save only one; all strength, all energy, are reserved for the great work of love.
The one great law, the one great work of the seas, is to increase and multiply. Love fills up the whole of its fecund depths, and is wealthiest in reproduction among those which are so small that to our unassisted eye they are invisible, unknown as though they were non-existent. We have spoken of mere atomies; but are there, in reality, any such? When we imagine that we have got the lowest, the utterly indivisible, we have but to examine with more earnest and penetrating gaze and we see that this seemingly frail atomy still loves, still reproduces itself in miniature. At the very lowest stages of life you find all the forms of life and reproduction.
Such is the Sea, such the great Female of the Globe, whose ceaseless yearning, whose permanent conception, whose production and reproduction, never end.