On the beach you might see a lone dragger lifting and falling, moving slowly parallel to the shore, beyond the measured fall of the green surf. A herring gull flies by. The vast sky swings overhead; the wind flies down the sand. Purple stones, driftwood, an occasional dead skate or dogfish comes to your attention as you walk on. A black crow pecks at seaweed far ahead. A sanderling flits by. You notice a finger sponge attached to a large mussel or a sea scallop, broken loose and washed in from offshore beds, and that seems to be all, in a relatively empty world; but between these single things, a grain of sand, a stone, a bird or bird track, a wave, you become conscious of a bounty of space. The sea and its shores are still not caught, still relatively immune to human claims. Fill them with knowledge and with crowds and they still escape us, outrunning us like the sunlight on the water. Specifically, this age which is able to measure everything but mystery, might tell you just how capacious the oceans are. They comprise two thirds of the earth’s surface; they have a close relationship to the atmosphere and are in large measure responsible for our weather; and we know, with the assurance of conquerors, that if all else fails we may be able to save the human race from dying of thirst and starvation by extracting water and food from them, providing our atomic wastes do not prohibit it. We are also learning how to mine the ocean floors for their minerals, how to harness the tides, and how to use their depths for concealment. Oceanography is one of the great modern sciences and it has revealed mountains, rifts, plains, and canyons on a scale that would astonish us if we saw them on earth, as it has also brought us more knowledge of marine animals at all depths. It has made great contributions to the restless modern mind. How can we look at the sea without at some time thinking of our earth’s submerged geology, gigantic, uneroded by wind, sun, or rain, in calm waters inhabited by strange aquatic lives? Strange is still the word for them. No amount of assessment of the sea’s contents quite translates them for us. What, for example, is a fish? What is that flat creature the skate lying there on the sand, with its tough hide and the small slit of a mouth on the same side as its belly? There is an aquarium at Woods Hole with a collection of many of the kinds of fish that inhabit the waters off Cape Cod. They seem foreign, weird, almost unexampled when you see them in their captured state. I saw a woman standing in front of one of the windows looking at some toadfish, little fat animals with great mouths, squat, with round-edged fleshy fins that gave the appearance of warts and knobs, expertly camouflaged in varied patterns so that they can at once sink in and become a part of the bottom: “Oh!” she cried. “Horrible!”