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At the same time, it became desirable to ascertain and to indicate the nature of the sea-bottom, since this circumstance greatly affects its goodness as holding ground for anchors.
It was no refreshment to reflect that had we dredging apparatus long enough we could procure from the sea-bottom buckets of ooze that would have cooled our drinks almost to the freezing point. Scientists have done this. Lying Bill was loth to believe the story and the explanation, that an icy stream flows from the Antarctic through a deep valley in the sea-depths.
The same causes there continuing to depress the sea-bottom, room would be made for fresh accessions of sediment, and it would only be by a long repetition of the depositing process that the new matter could acquire weight enough to affect the temperature of the rocks far below, so as to increase or diminish their volume.
"Pearl-fishing will suit me down to the ground; and if the ocean holds pearls enough to satisfy you, you shall have them. Now, Professor Mildmay where must we go in order to get those pearls? For, of course, we must go to some definite spot to look for them; we can't go grubbing along the sea-bottom at random until we happen to stumble upon a bed of pearl-oysters, you know."
Originally an archaean sea-bottom rock this stone lay submerged in the ocean until during the Jurassic Period, under the lateral pressure of a cooling earthcrust the table-lands and mountain-chains of Arizona rose from the seas.
When we consider that the remains of more than three thousand distinct species of aquatic animals have been discovered among the fossils of the chalk, that the great majority of them are of such forms as are now met with only in the sea, and that there is no reason to believe that any one of them inhabited fresh water the collateral evidence that the chalk represents an ancient sea-bottom acquires as great force as the proof derived from the nature of the chalk itself.
The same whisper of a breeze held, and the Rattler slid through the smooth sea at a rate that would have been eminently proper for an island schooner had the breeze been thrice as strong. Fuatino was nothing else than an ancient crater, thrust upward from the sea-bottom by some primordial cataclysm.
For hours we unsuccessfully lowered the massive grapnel iron, where our charts indicated the cable should be, but without success until late in the afternoon, when the strain on the dynamometer indicated another "bight." Then it was pulled up very slowly, for we could not afford to have it break a second time, when suddenly it slipped the grapnel and was again lost at the sea-bottom.
Now suppose the whole sea-bottom is raised up, and a section exposed about the point A1; no doubt, at this spot, the upper bed is younger than the lower. But we should obviously greatly err if we concluded that the mass of the upper bed at A was younger than the lower bed at B; for we have just seen that they are contemporaneous deposits.
For now and again some part of the sea-bottom was upheaved, slowly or quickly, till it became dry land. On this dry land animals lived again, and thousands of them, too, died, and their bones crumbled into dust. But here and there one was caught in bog or frost, and his remains were preserved till, through lapse of ages, they turned to stone.
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