There is something of this suggestion in many specific aspects of animal, or even plant, life in the sea. In a sense their fascination lies in what has not yet been discovered about them, but just as much, from the average human point of view, in the way their actions are those of the sea rather than the land to which we are accustomed. In fact all of us are obliged to make surface discoveries a great deal of the time, even with respect to what is around us, or even inside us, like fishermen following the seasonal movement of fish, sometimes predictable but often hidden and unreliable, or students who chase after migratory birds in planes. So the sight of grunions wiggling in California sands, depositing and fertilizing their eggs, bound to a complex interrelationship of spring tides and the moon, still excites our curiosity, being a phenomenon that is not fully understood, taking place in a proximate but different world. Migrant fish, like the alewives, may return not only during the same season each year but very close to the same day as a run of the year before. Perhaps the cycles involving sea and climate average out very accurately, but it is too complex a phenomenon to say that it goes like clockwork. Tides are measurable but constantly changing in time and amplitude. Environmental conditions in sea water are various and the seas coordinate relationship to the atmosphere is an elaborate one. Rhythmic response in an organism may be simple and spontaneous--like a fucus, or rockweed, only ready to spawn after a period of exposure at low tide--and it will have its causes, but the causes themselves are greatly complex in nature. The sea’s discovery will not be made by factory ships that process their huge catches of fish, by killer submarines chasing after whales, or by mining equipment. We can physically affect its life with our one-sided power, but it will remain protean and indifferent and we will go on imagining our conquest of it. On this overdiscovered and overexploited earth the sea remains a wilderness, a resource not of goods but of what is rich and wild. That which we have been unable to use up, or harry to extinction, has the power to renew. The sea is a positive mystery. I hear the surf’s continual breathing in the distance; I see the stars that literally cover the sky over the beach on a winter’s night like white animal plankton in the spring waters; and I realize that I know no more about them than I know about myself. The depths are still ahead, with the fear and the temptation that the undiscovered arouses in us.