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Wyville Thomson's book, and the notices of the "Challenger's" dredgings which appear from time to time in the columns of "Nature;" for want of space forbids my speaking of them here.
Plain men may be puzzled to understand why Dr. Wyville Thomson, not being a cynic, should relegate the "Land of Promise" to the bottom of the deep sea, they may still more wonder what manner of "milk and honey" the Challenger expects to find; and their perplexity may well rise to its maximum, when they seek to divine the manner in which that milk and honey are to be got out of so inaccessible a Canaan.
The Challenger has explored the Antarctic seas in a region intermediate between those examined by Sir James Ross's expedition; and the observations made by Dr. Wyville Thomson and his colleagues in every respect confirm those of Dr. Hooker:
Wyville Thomson puts it, picturesquely enough, "in going down the sea water became, under the pressure, gradually heavier and heavier, and that all the loose things floated at different levels, according to their specific weight, skeletons of men, anchors and shot and cannon, and last of all the broad gold pieces lost in the wreck of many a galleon off the Spanish Main; the whole forming a kind of 'false bottom' to the ocean, beneath which there lay all the depth of clear still water, which was heavier than molten gold."
These words have more than fulfilled themselves since they were written. Those Deep-Sea dredgings, of which a detailed account will be found in Dr. Wyville Thomson's new and most beautiful book, "The Depths of the Sea," have disclosed, of late years, wonders of the deep even more strange and more multitudinous than the wonders of the shore.
Carpenter and Dr. Wyville Thomson have done for the North Atlantic, and open one more page of that book which has, to us creatures of a day, though not to Him who wrote it as the Time-pattern of His timeless mind, neither beginning nor end. So, for want of animal life to study, we were driven to study the human life around us, pent up there in our little iron world.
This mud, more than three miles deep, was dredged up in latitude 20 degrees 19' N., longitude 4 degrees 36' E., or about midway between Madeira and the Cape of Good Hope. The recent deep-sea dredgings in the Atlantic conducted by Dr. Wyville Thomson, Dr. Carpenter, Mr.
Here then were organisms, as old as the cretaceous epoch, still alive, and doing their work of rock-making at the bottom of existing seas. What if Globigerina and the Coccoliths should not be the only survivors of a world passed away, which are hidden beneath three miles of salt water? The letter which Dr. Wyville Thomson wrote to Dr.
Wyville Thomson surpasses the owner of the watch in his loving-kindness towards a donkey-engine. "This little engine was the comfort of our lives. The trawl is a sort of net for catching those fish which habitually live at the bottom of the sea, such as soles, plaice, turbot, and gurnett.
But it is none the less certain that the presence of this light cannot always be designed to serve this purpose, for many of the animals so endowed are blind. Such is the suggestion of Dr. Carpenter, Sir Wyville Thomson, and Mr. Gwyn Jeffries; and it is possible that this actually is one of the effects of the phosphorescent property.
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