One gull flew down the beach with a ribbed mussel which it had found on the marsh and dropped it from high in the air. Then the bird retrieved its food and tried again, taking a chance on whether or not it would strike some boulders and break, since this is a haphazard and not a very knowledgeable game with the gulls. They pick up the habit from each other, by example rather than inheritance. Sometimes it works and just as often it does not. The seaways of soft feldspar green foamed and flew, and the clouds ran. Thin black strings of seaweed lodged in the sand were waggling back and forth in the wind. There was a swish of milky surf up the beach. Over the uncountable numbers of sand grains, each with its own size, shape, and color was a clean radiance, even a magic. Because in this realm of wide, majestic use, of continual advent, each offering was still of a proportion perfect for its moment in time. Each single action, the silhouette of the straw-colored grasses curving before the wind, or a gull shadow on a wave, a crystal grain sparkling in the light, was of such an excellence as to defy category or name. And they were magic and miracle in their shape and ways of use because they had life’s inveterate sanction, and that above all else is not subject to lessening or degradation in this world of nature. Like the lights that appear under the mist, or over the open barrens of the sea at night, like St. Elmo’s fire on the _Pequod_’s mast, there are electric tricks playing on the horizon, perhaps at all times, since there seems to be no end to light’s action over the waters with the sky’s depth behind it. As I walked up the beach there was a radiant white patch hanging up in the soft, scudding overcast, not in the sun’s direction--reflected off the water perhaps--but having a wild aura of its own. It gave me a feeling of communication with something which had a right to awe. We may have passed the primitive stage, but the primitive respect for what was beyond human control and the magic used to propitiate it or bring it to play may still have their sources. The light and its manifestations is still too quick for the eye, or for the facts. Science itself goes on proving that there is no infinite exactitude and that many things can only be explained in terms of probability. The fact that nothing is stopped by our constant search for a simple solution to life is what keeps science in business. The search into the nature of cells finds them full of inner whirlings, the motion of countless component parts, of a universal restlessness. They are structurally fantastic and each kind is manifestly different. Our voyage toward the invisible is unending. The molecule or the jellyfish, seen through one human lens or another, retain their share of the marvelous. And if we marvel, we are still capable of learning.