Even the alewives, which migrate by the hundred thousands, are only suggestive of the far running but hidden nature of the oceanic depths. Most of us, failing a glass-bottom boat or a glass-sided submarine, have to stand on the beach and take in the vast motions of the sea surface with only the vaguest idea of what is happening below. Sometimes it looks like a bowl of dazzling, dashing light, and at others a gray, monotonous range under a raw wind with white-groined waves constantly moving across its distances. The sea takes all the light and air, the storms, clouds, moon, and stars, in endless, various reflections over its watery reaches, with a monumental acceptance. Are there not a thousand ways to describe the sea which in their sum amount to inscrutability? How can you translate its abundance even by counting so many thousands of protozoa in a drop of water? Who can fathom the range of appetite it contains, the ferocity of the life its amplitude allows? One day in early fall I traveled from the Cape with a party of people in a chartered boat, heading for an area some ten or fifteen miles out. The offshore breezes coasted over smooth, sun-bright waters that carried some of the land’s litter with them, sticks, leaves, petals, and even butterflies. At one point a dragonfly skimmed past us; and silky seeds of milkweed and dandelions went sailing and twisting by to land eventually where they could never take root. Farther out, oceanic birds like jaegers, shearwaters, and phalaropes began to appear. When we were plowing out across the open ocean with its short-crested waves we came upon a broad path of waters which were foaming and flashing and leaping, a white windrow of fish flipping violently above the surface, lasting perhaps a mile or more. Evidently we had come upon an area that was rich in plankton, attracting many small fish, attacked in turn by larger ones. What we were seeing was part of the classic food chain that leads, in terms of size, from microscopic plants and animals to whales. The sea was splitting its sides with riches, and a kind of savagery that most of us hardly dare admit, although as a race we are not so far removed from it ourselves. As the glass on the aquarium window separates the spectator from the world of the fish, so the long nearly unbroken line of the Outer Beach stands between us and the vast, alien reaches of the North Atlantic. It is not _our_ natural environment, and so we can legitimately call it treacherous, sullen, cold, and grim, and even in its hours of brilliance and warmth it seems to lead us off in no terms we can call familiar. It is full of fickle changes, fogs, and storms, unpredictable shifts in mood. We are still unable to set forth on the open ocean without the skill of a sailor or the protection that a technical civilization affords us.