Here is Long Island Sound in three dimensional miniature – 56 inches west to east and 6 ⅞ inches deep at

                                   The Race. This scientifically executed model was commissioned by ON THE SOUND to define the land-

                                   bound sea around whose shores its readers live. On the following pages and cover, we look down into the

                                  Sound’s bottom, from end to end of its 115 mile reach and across its girth, at deep and shoal, at tide race

                                  and rock and sheltered cove. The model – in views no eye has ever seen – illustrates why the 4 million who

                                  live here are able, despite the pressures of an overpowering city, to lead lives with an extra dimension of

                                  space and nature. The model, and these color photographs of it provide an opportunity to explore – by realistic

                                  proxy – the depths that underlie a protean surface whose many moods the people around it know with greater

                                  intimacy. Three articles accompany these photographs. One details the art science of transferring the Sound’s

                                  bottom contours to the model. The other two explore the past, present and future of the Sound itself. In the

                                  first of these, geologists probe back over the evidence laid down by millions of years to recall the primeval

                                  forces which sculptured this declivity – the massive creep and grind and retreat of the glaciers, and the heave

                                 of the Earth’s crust. In the last article, oceanographers at the New Ocean Science Laboratory in Montauk

                                 describe their present efforts to chart the forces surging in and out of this unique sea.. Meanwhile they plan a

                                 future model of their own which, hydraulically operated, will actually duplicate the tides.