vii., p. 381, and is now reproduced here by the
courtesy of the proprietors.]
CHAPTER III
FLOATING CREATURES OF THE SEA
The Nature of Floating Life--Memoir on Medusae Accepted by the
Royal Society--Old and New Ideas of the Animal Kingdom--What
Huxley Discovered in Medusae--His Comparison of them with
Vertebrate Embryos.
As the _Rattlesnake_ sailed through the tropical seas Huxley came in
contact with the very peculiar and interesting inhabitants of the
surface of the sea, known now to naturalists as pelagic life or
"plankton." Although a poet has spoken of the "unvintageable sea," all
parts of the ocean surface teem with life. Sometimes, as in high
latitudes, the cold is so great that only the simplest microscopic
forms are able to maintain existence. In the tropics, animals and
plants are abundant, and sometimes by their numbers colour great areas
of water; or, as in the drift of the Gulf Stream, make a tangle of
animal and plant life through which a boat travels only with
difficulty. The basis of the food supply of this vast and hungry
floating life is, as on land, vegetable life; for plants are the only
creatures capable of building up food from the gases of the air and
the simple chemical salts found dissolved in water.
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