The term “sea snake” is somewhat of a misnomer. Actually the creatures spend most of their days asleep among rocks on beaches. They are excellent tree climbers and like to sun themselves in crotches of branches. At dusk, however, they move out to the reefs where presumably they spend most of the night pursuing small fishes, their principal food. They are excellent swimmers and their bodies have been somewhat modified, with flattened, paddle-like tails, for sea life. Fortunately, on land at least, they are sluggish and non-aggressive. They hardly can be induced to bite and will suffer almost any indignity without retaliating. About the only way a person would be likely to be bitten would be by stepping directly on the head of one of these snakes with bare feet. This is an unlikely event, for the sea snakes do not spend any time under shallow water where they would be a peril for bathers. Some are quite beautiful, about five feet long and banded with black and white. Their capture is easy. It is simply a matter of pinning down the head with a stick and picking up the snake by the neck. Throughout the entire sea snake area in the Pacific there are only five or six instances reported where the serpents have bitten humans. In every case the victim has died; there is no anti-venom against the sea snake toxin. Some years ago Dr. Herbert Clark, former director of the Gorgas Memorial Laboratory, dove off a boat in Balboa harbor and swam ashore, a distance of about 200 yards. As he neared the shore there were alarmed cries from the deck he had left. Dr. Clark looked around. He found he had unwittingly swum through a school of several thousand black and white serpents, each about two feet long. None had touched him. _Weird Plant-Animals_ Near the bottom of life’s pyramid there is a weird race of plant-animals. They are among the closest of all many-celled living things to the primaeval protoplasm from which all life arose. They are the slime molds found on decaying logs and tree stumps in damp woods or on piles of rain-soaked dead leaves in shady gardens. The nightmarish mycetozoa—botanists call them myxomycetes—are timeless survivals out of living creation’s dank, warm cradle. Some of the weirdest imaginings of malevolent life on other planets picture it in the form of gigantic slime mold aggregations—undifferentiated masses of naked protoplasm endowed with a malign intelligence which has evolved without the intermediaries of nervous systems or brains. These organisms can be considered one of nature’s probing experiments towards higher forms of life. The experiment was a failure, but unlike most of nature’s discards these organisms have survived. Even now they may be engaged in a process of evolution all their own.