The weekly mountain Democrat. [volume] (Placerville, El Dorado County, Calif.) 1861-1862, 1862-10-25
GFrOn tAs NswOsFypsrs HsRA1.1
A Day ON Salisbury Beach.
LIFE UNDER THE OCEAN WAVE.

tn see tho Distant fishers tsfke their prey,
and are thinking of the habits of fishes
and the waters they inhabit. The beauty
of the sea plants to which we have allu
ded, is beyond description. We take the
ocean flower from the surf, that was torn
from its place in the deep by the last
storm, and find its lines and curves and
forms as beautiful and delicate, and its
colors as rich as the most valuable Of any
cultivated plants; indeed IN many respects
it far surpasses them. And even those
broad and Shiny kelps and weeds that in
the open air we avoid, seen waving in the
waters and rejecting the softening and
suhdued sunbeams that give them gor-
geous hueS, awaken our admiration.
These many colored flowers carpeting
the ocean floors, variegating the hill and
valleys and plains of the great deep with
! their thousand forms and tints, from the
ruddy and unstretched branches of the
coral to the deep rich vevety green of the
water violets, which seek their food by
the gentle motion of their rich golden sta.
mems, belong to the kingdom Of the fishes.
There in this lower world, as if 10 shade
them from the too glowing kiss of the ar
dent sun, are forests Of giant and dwarf
trees and shl ubs; and from tee to tree
feathery spirals stretch and interiace like
the loving and embracing tendrils 1.-The
vine, but finer and infinitely more splendid
in their variegatei and singularly har.
monizing colors.
True, the ocean floor is not all so en-.
chanting. There are broad plains of bar.
rem sands, the Saharas of the deep and
rough, bald-headed mountains higher than
our Alps and Andes, against the sides of
which the everlasting waters beat and
dash as the storms and winds of this up
per world do upon the great hills; and
there are deep caverns, like the gorges Of
the Himalayasor the gulches of the Rocky
Mountains; and while the warmer waters
exhibit these delicate forms and brilliant
colors, the colder are filled by the driving
ice that bounds and breaks on the bill0wS,
AS our storm clouds go drifting along the
winter skies. Let us not dream of the
waters as wanting varlety-the beautiful,
the sublime, the awful.
Perhaps all that We see Of natural things
on the land, many have their counterparts
in the ocean, and upon grander SCALE
That world has what corresponds to our
continents and islands; to our lakes and
hills, rivers and tradew winds to our DIES.
erts and fields, our gardens and forests
and is fuller Of life than is the world that
we inhabit, and its varieties OF creatures
are more numerous. We see the "great
leviathan," the whale of hundred feet in
length, which is five times as large as the
elephant, the greatest animal of the land.
Then the turtles will sometimes weigh al.
most as much as the elephant.
Under these are all forms correspond
ing to heaSts-the sea-lionS, tigers, cows,
horses. wolves, and so on down to the
most minute insects-thc animalcnln,
that fill the waters from the tops of the
highest waves, which they, phosphoric
creatures, convert into crests of light, at
times making the wide ocean like sea of
fire, down to where Captain Ross dropped
his plummet in the Arctic Seas, bringing
them up from depth exceeding the hight
Of our loftieSt mountains. These animals,
nutritious food for the larger, are SO small
as only to come to our observation by the
aid Of the microscope, and so numerous
as to form vast extents Of land, by their
decayed bodies, in the upper ATTITUDES, as
do the coralS in the warmer CliineS.
To illustrate, we Scr the common white
chalk, which every body uses. 1t is found
over portion of Europe more than a
thousand miles long by eight hundred
miles broad-from the north of ireland tn
the Black Sea. and from Sye1<,p 70 France
tits many hundred feet thick, moulded
into swelling bills and tiowcry wales, af-
fording the best fields and richest pastures
in the world. Take this chalk and dis
solve it in water, and under the magnifer
it presents innumerable small .heets-
each particle the skeleton OF minute ma
rine crustacean-a relation to the crab.
the lobster. and the infinite variety of
that species of fish. II takes million of
such skeletons to form cubic inch.
These are like the animalcul@ that ex-
plorers have brought up from the ocean
bottom Of late. Think. then, from this
one fact, OF the infinite multitude of fishes,
from the whale, the lord of oil, to toe
smallest, and no more look upon the wa
ters MS destroyers, but rather as swarm.
ing and teeming with life to their last
drop.
We have a world of beauty then on the
ocean, and we have a world of life. All
OF these different varieties in the waters
under the earth have their countries,
states, homes as much as those over the
earth. The monarch whale does not 90
from pole to pole; his kingdom has limits,
and SO with all below him The mackerel
and the shad are at the south in the win.
ter and at the north in the summer; the
sardine Of the Mediterranean in the spring
goes westward, and in the fall eastward
so the salmon, the sturgeon, the herring,
that are sometimes seen in such shoals as
to extend over miles, and so deep down
that the harpoon will not sink between
them--even damming up large rivers with
their countless multitudeS--have their
| seasons to visit the same spots.
They invariably return to the places
where they were spawned Sometimes
stream will be full of fishes and another
near by never know them; and the same
variety OF fish can be distinguished by the
| fishers, in one river, as for instance the
Shad of the Merrimac, from those of an
other, as the shad of the Kennebec but
take the Spawns of the salmon from the
'Merrimac and hatch them in the Saco,
and the next year these salmon will re-
turn to the Saco, though one was never
known there before. So very easily may
lake or pond, bay or river, be stocked
with fishes.
AS nature feeds itselGabove the waters,
the weaker, the less artful, or the inferior
of life going to. sustain the higher. so in
the.ocean kingdoms is ceaseless warfare
fierce bloodshed. infinite hates. and
boundIeSs destruction. From these con-
tentions the ocean is charnel house. All
the bottom of the sea iSAStrewn. with the
bones and shells of the dead. The modes
of destruction among fishes, too, are as
numerous as among tHen. Xou will find
the mere jelly-6sh having the means to
suck the clam or oyster from between his