"To understand the life of the shore, it is not enough to pick up an empty shell and say 'This is a murex,' or 'That is an angel wing.'  True understanding demands intuitive comprehension of the whole life of the creature that once inhabited this empty shell:  how it survived amid surf and storms, what were its enemies, how it found food and reproduced its kind, what were its relations to the particular sea world in which it lived." —from Rachel Carson, in The Edge of the Sea, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955, pp. vii-viii