The number of terrestrial animals is most insignificant compared with the maritime ones. Upon the earth's surface (much smaller than the ocean) the beings occupy only the surface of the soil, and an atmospheric canopy of a certain number of meters. The birds and insects seldom go beyond this in their flights. In the sea, the animals are dispersed over all its levels, through many miles of depth multiplied by thousands and thousands of longitudinal leagues. Infinite quantities of creatures, whose number it is impossible to calculate, swim incessantly in all the strata of its waters. Land is a surface, a plane; the sea is a volume.
The immense aquatic mass, three times more salty than at the beginning of the planet, because of a millennarian evaporation that has diminished the liquid without absorbing its components, retains mixed with its chlorides, copper, nickel, iron, zinc, lead, and even gold, from the metallic veins that planetary upheaval deposits upon the oceanic bottom; compared with this mass, the veins of mountains with their golden sands deposited by the rivers are but insignificant tentacles.
Silver also is dissolved in its waters. Ferragut knew by certain calculations that with the silver floating in the ocean could be erected pyramids more enormous than those in Egypt.
The men who once had thought of exploiting these mineral riches had given up the visionary idea because the minerals were too diluted and it would be impossible to make use of them. The oceanic beings know better how to recognize their presence, letting them filter through their bodies for the renovation and coloration of their organs. The copper accumulates in their blood; the gold and silver are discovered in the texture of the animal-plants; the phosphorus is absorbed by the sponges; the lead and the zinc by species of algae.
Every oceanic creature is able to extract from the water the residuum from certain metals dissolved into particles so incalculably tiny that no chemical process could ever capture them. The carbonates of lime deposited by the rivers or dragged from the coast serve innumerable species for the construction of their coverings, skeletons, and spiral shells. The corals, filtering the water across their flabby and mucous bodies, solidify their hard skeletons so that they may finally be converted into habitable islands.
The beings of disconcerting diversity that were floating, diving, or wiggling around Ferragut were no more than oceanic water. The fish were water made into flesh; the slimy, mucilaginous animals were water in a gelatinous state; the crustaceans and the polypi were water turned to stone.
In one of the tanks he saw a landscape which appeared like that of another planet, grandiose yet at the same time reduced, like a woods seen in a diorama. It was a palm grove, surging up between the rocks, but the rocks were only pebbles, and the palm trees,—annelides of the sea,—were simply worms holding themselves in upright immovability.
They kept their ringed bodies within a leathern tube that formed their protective case, and from this rectilinear, marble-colored trunk sent forth, like a spout of branches, the constantly moving tentacles which served them as organs for breathing and eating.
Endowed with rare sensitiveness, it was enough for a cloud to pass before the sun to make them shrink quickly within these tubes, deprived of their showy capitals, like beheaded palm trees. Then, slowly and prudently the animated pincers would come protruding again through the opening of their cylindrical scabbards, floating in the water with anxious hope. All these trees and flower-animals developed a mechanical voracity whenever a microscopic victim fell under the power of their tentacles; then the soft clusters of branches would contract, close, drawing in their prey, and the worm, withdrawing into the lowest part of the slender tower secreted by himself, would digest his conquest.
The other tanks then attracted the attention of the sailor.