The shells of dead diatoms rain down through the water and form thick deposits on the floor of the sea. The cliffs above the beach are full of them. Cities have been built on their fossilized shells. In their number the diatoms balance the magnitude of the sea. In size they are basic to the existence of the minuscule animals of the zooplankton that feed upon them, and are eaten by larger animals in turn. A diatom’s delicacy and sparkling beauty as it reflects the light could indicate that universal productivity must start with a jewel, and perhaps end with it too. That which is minute, like the diatoms, or cells, which are the basic structure of life, is a clue to the significance of things, leading from the simple to the complex and multifarious, but finally rounding us back to where we started. A man himself is the unique single cell with its own nature. Each life has its irreducible quality. I have been told that if you look at a diatom through an electronic microscope, from one increased magnification to another, you can see all its protuberances and layers disappear, and finally a sparkling crystalline form is revealed, like a cosmic surprise. I suppose it is part of my fate as a large and clumsy animal of the mammalian order, crashing through the underbrush, knocking down trees, and displacing earth’s other inhabitants, to miss a great deal, at least with my unassisted eyes. To learn about some new form of life which I may have been passing by for years is often something of a redemption. I can then say that we have not yet been so run down by our own traffic that we have lost the capacity to see. Not long ago a colony of bryozoans was pointed out to me, at least the gelatinous crusts of the compartments in which they lived, like little tufts and fringes attached to the fronds of seaweed cast up on the beach. They are tiny colonial animals that make cups and compartments joined together in branching stems, from which they send out little crowns of delicate, filamentous tentacles waving in the water. There are three thousand marine species of them, growing in different forms, and having different surfaces for their attachment. I had thought previously that the little pale-colored, branched tufts were a part of the seaweed. Now another small marvel had appeared on my horizon.