"When we go down to the low-tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the earth itself -- the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflict and eternal change.  For us as living creatures it has special meaning as an area in or near which some entity that could be distinguished as life first drifted in shallow waters -- reproducing, evolving, yielding that endlessly varied stream of living things that has surged through time and space to occupy the earth." —Thank you, Rachel Carson, for The Edge of the Sea, 1955, p.vii.