She is a hundred times, a thousand times richer, and more rapidly fecund than the earth. She even builds up for earth. The increase of the land, as we have seen in the case of the Corals, is given by the sea; the sea is no other than the parturient and laboring womb of the globe. Her sole obstacle is in the rapidity of her births; her inferiority appears in the difficulty, which, so rich in generation, she finds in organizing Love. It is melancholy to reflect that the myriads upon myriads of the inhabitants of the sea have only a vague, elementary, and imperfect, Love. Those vast tribes that, each in its turn, ascend and go in pilgrimage towards pleasure and light, give in floods the best of themselves, their very life, to blind and unknown chance. They love, and they will never know the beloved creature in which their dream, their desire, was incarnated; they produce multitudes, but never know their posterity. A few, a very few of the most active, warlike, and cruel species love after our human manner. Those terrific monsters, the Shark and his female, are obliged to approach each other. Nature has imposed upon them the peril of embracing. A terrible and suspicious embrace. Habitually they devour, eagerly and blindly, everything that comes in their path--animals, wood, stone, iron--anything, but in their fierce love, they restrain their hunger. They approach each other with their sawlike and fatal teeth, and the female intrepidly allows the male to seize her with his, and thus fastened together, they sometimes roll furiously about for weeks, unwilling to separate, even though famishing, and invincible in their fierce embrace, even by the fiercer tempest. It is affirmed that even after they have separated, they lovingly pursue each other, the faithful male following his mate till the birth of his heir presumptive, the sole fruit of that marriage, and never, never devours him, but follows and watches over him. In fact, in case of peril to the sharkling, the excellent farther takes him into his vast throat, but to shelter, not digest him.