"The appearance of the open sea," says Frédol, from whose elegant work this chapter is chiefly compiled, "far from the shore--the boundless ocean--is to the man who loves to create a world of his own, in which he can freely exercise his thoughts, filled with sublime ideas of the Infinite. His searching eye rests upon the far-distant horizon. He sees there the ocean and the heavens meeting in a vapoury outline, where the stars ascend and descend, appear and disappear in their turn. Presently this everlasting change in nature awakens in him a vague feeling of that sadness 'which,' says Humboldt, 'lies at the root of all our heartfelt joys.'" Emotions of another kind and equally serious are produced by the contemplation and study of the habits of the innumerable organized beings which inhabit the great deep. In fact, that immense expanse of water, which we call the sea, is no vast liquid desert; life dwells in its bosom as it does on dry land. Here this mystery reigns supreme in the midst of its expansions, luxuries, and agitations. It pleases the Creator. It is the most beautiful, the most brilliant, the noblest, and the most incomprehensible of His manifestations. Without life, the world would be as nothing. The beings endowed with it transmit it faithfully to other beings, their children, and their successors, which will be, like them, the depositaries of the same mysterious gift; the marvellous heritage thus traverses years and hundreds of years without losing its powers; the globe is redolent with the life which has been so bounteously distributed over it. In the words of Lamartine, "We know what produces life, but we know not what it is;" and this ignorance is perhaps the powerful attraction which provokes our curiosity and excites us to study. Every living being is animated by two principles, between which a silent but incessant combat is being carried on--_life_, which assimilates, and _death_, which disintegrates. At first, life is all powerful--it lords it over matter; but its reign is limited. Beyond a certain point its vigour is gradually impaired; with old age it decays; and is finally extinguished with time, when the chemical and physical laws seize upon it, and its organization is destroyed. But the elements, though inert at first, are soon reanimated and occupied with a new life. Every plant, every animal is bound up with the past, and is part of the future, for every generation which starts into life is only the corollary upon that which expires, and the prelude of another which is about to be born. Life is the school of death; death is the foster-mother of life.