The thick and close columns ceaselessly reproduce themselves _en route_.

At sunrise the waves are greasy and viscous,--replete with life that is fermenting rapidly.

For a space of hundreds of leagues the salt ocean around them is like milk.
The fecundity of these fishy masses was placing the world in danger.
Each individual could produce up to seventy thousand eggs.

In a few generations there would be enough to fill the ocean, to make it solid, to make it rot, extinguishing other beings, depopulating the globe....
But death was charged with saving universal life.

The cetaceans bore down upon this living density and with their insatiable mouths devoured the nourishment by ton loads.