The Biology Of The Sea Shore Classic Reprint

Excerpt from The Biology of the Sea-Shore While the ecological aspect of the sea-shore has attracted a great number of research workers, from the point of view of teaching it would not seem to have received an equivalent amount of attention. It cannot be doubted that if a student confines himself, when on the sea-shore, purely to collecting and labelling species he is not obtaining a tithe of the benefit that his visit is capable of affording him. Consequently in planning this work, one of our chief ambitions has been to stimulate a wider interest on the part of the student by depicting for him something of the wonderfully vigorous and many-sided nature of the struggle for existence between tide-marks, and by drawing his attention to some of the innumerable problems connected with shore animals which still await investigation. We have had no wish to treat our subject exhaustively. For the most part we have confined ourselves to those British species with which we have first-hand acquaintance. To have foregone, however, all mention of foreign and, in particular, of tropical forms, would be to have excluded phenomena of the very greatest interest to our theme. It frequently happens, for instance, that a habit or an associa tion which is only slightly developed on our own shores has been brought to a high degree of specialisation elsewhere, especially in warmer seas. Consequently, we have not hesitated to give cases of this kind as large a measure of our attention as space allowed. For analogous reasons, while our main concern is with species occurring between tide marks, we have not infrequently extended our survey to include forms which more properly belong to the waters beyond the Laminarian zone. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.