Page:The Journal of geology (IA journalofgeology21894univ).pdf/15
its mouth and gathered a host of small fishes to snatch the fragments as they drifted away with the tide.
Many important fishes, like the cod, pasture on the bottom, but their pasturage consists of molluscs and annelids and crustacea instead of plants, and the vast majority of sea fishes are fierce hunters, pursuing and destroying smaller fishes, and often exhibiting an insatiable love of slaughter, like our own blue fish and tropical albacore and barracuda. Others, such as the herring, feed upon smaller fishes and the pelagic pteropods and copepods; and others, like the shad, upon the minute organisms of the ocean, but all, with few exceptions, are carinvorous. In the other great groups of marine animals we find some scavengers, some which feed upon micro-organisms, and others which hunt and destroy each other, but there is no group of marine animals which corresponds to the herbivora and rodents and the plant-eating birds and insects of the land.
There is so much room in the vast spaces of the ocean, and so much of it is hidden, that it is only when surface animals are gathered together that the abundance of marine life becomes visible and impressive; but some faint conception of the boundless wealth of the ocean may be gained by observing the quickness with which marine animals crowded together at the surface in favorable weather. On a cruise of more than two weeks along the edge of the gulf stream, I was surrounded continually night and day by a vast army of dark brown jelly fish, (Linerges mercutia) whose dark color made them very conspicuous in the clear water. We could see them at a distance from the vessel, and at noon when the sun was over head we could look down to a great depth through the centre-board well, and everywhere, to a depth of fifty or sixty feet, we could see them drifting by in a steady procession, like motes in a sunbeam. We cruised through them for more than five hundred miles and we tacked back and forth over a breadth of almost a hundred miles, and found them everywhere in such abundance that there were some in every bucketful of water which we dipped up, nor is this abundance of life restricted to tropical waters, for Haeckel tells us