A Hundred Years ago the English speaking world considered the oceans its particular province. The vast reaches of the watery globe ahd been charted by such men as Captain Cook, Sir James Ross and own Lt. Charles Wilkes - the great adventure of exploration in unknown seas were over, although Sir John Franklin was blithly preparing for his expedition to disaster. While the barriers of the seas were being converted into highways of commerce British tea packets and Yankee clippers and th smoke of steamers was already clouding the horizon, the interest of curious landlubbers turned from the possibililty of unknown lands and unexplored seas to the sea itself, its chemical and physical nature, and the creatures that lived in its waters.
Hence it is still possible to prepare a reasonably up to date popular guide to the seashore animals of most of our coastal regions except the north east coast between Maine and Chesapeake Bay. While such handbooks should rightly be considered only in terms of the purpose they are intended to serve, at least one, Between Pacific Tides, by E.F. Ricketts and Jack Calivin, is of more than local interest because it considers its subject from the standpoint of environment rather than from the conventional one of cut and dried classification. A recent effort to make literature out of marine life on the East Coast, Rachel L. Carson's Under the Sea Wind, does not seem to have had the success its author obviously hoped for it. Nor, for that matter, did Steinbeck adn Ricketts' amibitious Sea of Cortez, an interesting attempt to combine philosophy, travel and "pure science," fulfill its publishers' expectations. Nevertheless, both of these recent books belong in any complete library on marine biology.
Joel Hedgpeth 1952 Foreward in BETWEEN PACIFIC TIDES
Joel Hedgpeth 1953 Pacific Discovery article (magazine now called Wild California)
Joel Hedgpeth 1956 Note in BETWEEN PACIFIC TIDES
Joel Hedgpeth 1962 Foreward in BETWEEN PACIFIC TIDES
Joel Hedgpeth 1971: De Mirabili Maris - in - Royal Society of Edinburgh Proceedings
