WINDOW IN THE SEA.

By Ralph NadingHill '39. New York: Rinehart if Company,Inc., 1956. 208 pp. Illustrated with over 70 photographs. $3.50.

Marineland, the oceanarium near St. Augustine, Florida, cost more than a million dollars to build and ten years of effort expended by W. Douglas Burden (cousin of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney) and Ilia Tolstoy (grandson of Count Leo Tolstoy), With glass windows these very large steel tanks pumping four to five million gallons of sea water daily were designed to equip a laboratory for the scientific study of fish and to furnish opportunities for photography and documentary films. This outdoor aquarium has proved so popular an attraction that 700,000 persons a year come to view the curiosities: a male sea horse giving birth to dozens of sea horses from a pouch in which a designing female has deposited eggs; a good-natured whale with a paunch developed from eating 25 pounds of squid a day; sharks with shark sucker fish using adhesive disks for a free ride between meals after which the sucker fish, detached momentarily, clean up the sharks' leftovers; octopuses with a sixfoot tentacle spread; and cucumberlike spiny box fish, silvery wafer-thin lookdowns, trunkfish in hard flat-bottomed carapaces, queen trigger fish, and barracudas with teeth sharp and long enough to bite off a human leg and with a large evil eye with which they scare their prey half to death.

Aided by ichthyologists and curators, Ralph N. Hill has written an account as informative as it is dramatic of lives and loves on a simulated ocean reef. If Mr. Hill were not so accomplished a writer, one would say that the 70-odd photographs alone were worth the price of the book. They complement the text and the descriptions of how to collect, feed, train, and doctor sea specimens.

More attractive than Butch, the sea lion, or than Herman, the pilot whale who wanted to be a porpoise and died of a broken heart, is Splash, the porpoise. Splash can jump out of water and ring a bell by catching on to its clapper and banging it, run wild with a hookless lure cast by a trainer, play sailfish by bending a stout fishpole, tow a surf board with a dog standing on it, rescue a drowning man, put out a camp fire, sing and shake hands with his trainer, catch a football in a high forward pass, and plunge through a paper-covered hoop.

But Splash is outdone by the amazing Algae, the porpoise holding the world record for the high jump. Here is how. After swimming to the far end of the pool, Algae veers swiftly, in very few yards picks up enormous speed, and, zooming upward at just the right moment and correct angle, he hurtles, perfect porpoise athlete, fifteen feet clear of the water upward to the baton held in his trainer's hand. Seven feet long, weighing 250 pounds, Algae is as beautiful, poised in midair, as an Olympic highdiver. Few prima donnas at operatic first nights get more applause from entranced audiences.