But what could man do against the enormous fecundity of the cod? Nature knows well that our petty efforts of fleets and fisheries would be insufficient and that the Cod would conquer us; and nature evokes another and a more efficient destroyer of the superfluous life that would produce universal death. Down from its spawning bed in the river, thin, famishing, eager, fierce with hunger, comes the Sturgeon, that great devourer. Real rapture it is to the famishing glutton to find, on his return to the sea, ready fattened for him, the succulent and unctuous Cod, the concentrated substance of whole shoals of Herrings! This great devourer of the cod, though less fecund than its prey, _is_ fecund, producing fifteen hundred thousand eggs. The danger reappears. The Herring threatened with its terrible fecundity, the Cod threatened, the sturgeon threatens still. Nature, therefore, produced a creature superb in destroying, almost powerless to reproduce, a monster at once terrible and serviceable that could cut through this otherwise invincible and ruinous fecundity, an omnivorous monster, huge of jaw and constant in appetite, ready for all prey, living or dead, the great, the perfectionated, the matchless devourer--the Shark. But these furious devourers are anticipatively kept down; mighty in destroying, they are very slow in reproducing. The Sturgeon, as we have seen is less prolific than the Cod, and the Shark is actually sterile, if compared to any other fish. Not like them does it overspread and discolor the sea. Viviparous, it sends forth its rare youngling, fierce, fully armed, savage and terrible. In her dark and teeming depths, the Sea can smile in scorn at the destroyers to which she gives birth, well knowing, as the great proud fertile Sea does, that no might of destruction can surpass her might of reproduction. Her chief wealth, her most vast and countless produce, defies all the fury of the devourers, is inaccessible to their attacks. I speak of the infinite world of living atoms, of the microscopic atomies that live and love, enjoy, struggle, suffer and die from the surface to the utmost depths of the sea. It has been affirmed that, in the absence of solar light, life, also, must be absent; yet the darkest depths of the sea are studded with sea stars, living, moving, microscopic infusoriæ and molluscs. The dark crab, the phosphorescent seaworm, and a thousand strange and nameless creatures swarm in those uttermost depths and rise only now and then, describing long lines of variegated light upon the heaving surface. In its semi-transparent density, the sea has its own lucidity, its own glowing gleam, like that which fish, living or dead, reflect. The Sea! glorious Sea, hath her own lights, her own Sun, Moon, and Stars.