Must people who visit the seaside for their summer holiday find themselves more or less interested in the manifold forms of animal life that they encounter as they scramble over the weed-covered rocks, or walk along the sandy foreshore, or swim and bathe in the sea itself. It is possible that their interest is only transient and that once past the object of inspection their minds turn to other things, and they forget all about it. There are those, even, who pass things by without taking any note of them at all. The parson, whose introspective mind is busy with his next Sunday's sermon; the merchant, who though on a holiday has not been able to shake off the cares of business; the lovers, wrapped up in themselves aryl the enormous seriousness of life's great adventure—these might well miss the crafty crab creeping over the sand for his hole at their approach. But Sonny and his sister will not. Sec them race for the timid one, missing him by but the merest hair's breadth as he dives sideways into the perpendicular shaft. Watch them dig furiously wb the sand till, having reached a depth of a foot or two, they extricate the weird little. creature with his eyes popping out of his head, as it were from__ fright. Triumphantly they place him in their tiny pail, and carry him away to form part of their collection of died sea creatures, or to become an inmate of their marine aquarium, where they may study more of his ways and appearance at their leisure. mankind, while philosophers are forced to look to him for solutions of many of the great problems of nature. Thus the study of animal and plant life has received a great impetus, and year by year we find an ever increasing flood of enchanting literature pouring from the press for our edification and enjoyment. And of all places of interest in_ which to contemplate the animate works of nature the seashore easily leads.
There are many reasons for this. First of all life by the sea_ is always abundant and varied. Then there is the theory held by many naturalists that life on this earth probably began at the point where sea, land, and air meet, that is to say, along the littoral of the first great continental masses, wherever they may have been, in the dim red dawn of things. Geology tells us that they were not where they are to-day, and that brings us to a third reason why the life of the seashore is so interesting: we see in it a duplication of what was when the geologic strata were in process of formation, and our familiar fossils were laid on the floors of shallow seas or buried in the deltas of rivers for their agelong rest later to help us to classify, in these days of intensive scientific investigation, the sedimentary rocks in which they occur. Though we may not realize it, it is probable that forms we see to-day are being buried in just the same way as their ancestors of millions of years ago, to form a record, should there be any to read it, a million years hence of life and conditions now Naruravisy AND SEASHORE. prevailing upon the earth.
One's sympathies are with the children, and there is no shame attached to one's becoming for the time being a child again in such mutters. There was a time when naturalists were looked upon as a more or less crazy lot of people, of little or no value to the community at large, and more to be pitied and endured than encouraged. But} those days are gone, and, though a naturalist in the popular eye is still an old man, with grey locks, spectacles, and a butterfly net, mooning about in the open, poking about in ditches and slimy ponds, or frantically dancing a wild/ fapdango under thei }street lamp catching moths and beetles that fly by night, the public has come to realize that there is method in his madness since he has discovered many facts of the greatest value to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.