If the life of the sea has a dream, a wish, a confused desire, it is that of fixity. The violent and tyrannical embrace of the Shark, the fury of his union with the female give us an idea of a perfectly desperate love. Who knows if in other species, gentler and better fitted for families, who knows if this impotence of union, this eternal fluctuation of an objectless voyage, is not a cause of sadness? These children of the sea become owners of the land. Many of them ascend the rivers amorous with the fresh water, which they find so poor and possessed of so little nutriment, that they may deposit there, far from the raging waves, the hope of their posterity. At the very least they approach the shore in search of some sinuous and land locked creek. At this time they even become industrious, and with sand, mud, and grass endeavor to make little nests. A touching effort! They have none of the implements of the insect, that marvel of animal industry. They are far more destitute than the bird. By sheer dint of perseverance, without hands, or claws, or beak, and solely with their poor bodies, they yet pass and repass over it till they have pressed it into a sufficient cohesion, as Coste informs us in his description of the Sticklebacks. And what obstacles still await them! The female, blind and greedy, threatens the eggs, the male will not quit them, but guards and protects them, more motherly than the mother herself. This instinct is found in several species, especially in the humblest, the Gobies, a small fish, unfit for food, held in such contempt that if, by chance, caught, it is thrown back again to the water. Well, this lowest of the low is a tender father. Weak, small, destitute as he is, he, nevertheless, is the ingenious architect and laborious workman of the nest, and constructs it unaided, save by his tenderness and his strong will. It moves one to pitying reverie, to perceive that such an effort of the heart is arrested at the first effort of art, and by the fatality of the world, in which its nature detains it. We feel that that world of waters is not all sufficient for itself. Great mother that hath commenced life, thou canst not perfect it; allow thy daughter, the Earth, to continue the work. You see it, even in your bosom; your children think of Earth and long for its fixity; they approach her, offer her their homage. It is for thee still to commence the series of new beings, by an unexpected prodigy, a grandiose rough draft of the warm amorous life, of blood, of milk, of tenderness which will have its development in the terrestrial races. CHAPTER XII. THE WHALE. "The fisherman belated at night in the North Sea," says Milton, "saw an isle, a shoal, which, like the back of an enormous mountain, lay upon the water, and in that isle or shoal he fastened his anchor. The isle fled and carried him away. That isle was Leviathan."