THE DEEP SEA WOELD.

Tuapeka Times, Volume VI, Issue 295, 25 September 1873, Page 6

THE DEEP SEA WOELD.

In the course of an article on " The depths of the Sea : an account of the Q-eneral Eesults of the Dredging Cruises of H.M.S.S. Porcupine and Lightning, during the summers of 1868, 1869, and 1870," by C. Wyville Thompson, LL.D., F.G.S., The "Times" has the following:— " lt was not until about 30 years ago — so new is the whole subject — that men began even to suspect the existence of a deepwater world. Till then scientfic men, gazing down into the ' blazing darkness, of the ocean blue,' and longing to know what strange forms might people the two mies of water beneath the ship, believed that at the bottom there could be nothing but a barren chaos of rocks, of mud, strewed with the ' thousand fearful wrecks ' which Clarence saw in his dream. No life, they held could exist in that total darkness, under a pressure of water so enormous that as Dr Wyville Thompson says a man at 5000 fathoms depth would bear on his back a weight equal to 20 locomotive engines, each with a long goods train loaded with pig iron. Had they known, likewise, that living creaturer down below would have to contend with all but freezing cold, they would have seemed to themselves even more justified than they actually were in their mistake. That mistake arose from a strange forgetfulness that if the fluids inside the body of a sea animal, or even of a man, were at the same pressure as those outside it, the two pressures would balance each other, and the body instead of being crushed in, might move as freely and safely as in air. Even as in air, as Dr Wyville Thompson reminds us, a sudden rise of an inch in the barometer piles nearly half a ton extra upon our body, and yet, the fluids of us having proportionately increased in density, 'we feel only the more cheery and buoyant, because it requires a little exertion to move in the denser medium.' It is difficult at first to conceive this certain rule, when we apply it to water under immense pressure. We fancy that watei, in this case, must stiffen or harden, forgetting that it remains, being all but incompressible, as liquid as ever, and that its particles, as far as we know, slide as freely over each oth9r at 5000 fathoms deep, as at the surface. Forgetfulness of that almost complete incompressibility of water gave rise to another fancy, which had a certain grandeur in it, and was not so absurd as it may look at first sight, namely, that, as Dr. Wyville Thompson 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 depths, according to their specific weights— skeletons of men, anchors, and shot, and cannon; and last of all, the broad gold pieces wrecked in the loss 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. ' A grand fancy, certainly, but a mere fancy, for at however vast a depth, the water, being incompressible, or nearly so, has, scaicely increased in density, and things heavier than it must sink through it almost as freely as at the surface, and bury themselves at least over the greater portion of the ocean floor, undisturbed by currents as it must be, dead under the teeming life of the slowly but perpetually increasing ooze. The nether darkness, so far from Wing a lifeless waste, teeros almost everywhere with creatures not only more, fantastic, but larger than their shallow-water cousins ; and the peddler about rock-pools and tide-sands at watering places will learn that far away at sea, over that 100-fathom line to the Westward, which mark the ancient shore of the European Continent, are found sea monsters far bigger, as well as far uglier, and far more beautiful, than were ever transferred to an aquarium ; that, to give two instances, the Caprella, /'the phantom shrimp,' which may be found on seaweed, sitting upright like a monkey, holding on by his hind claws, and, with ghastly grimaces, mesmerising all passers-by with his fore claws, sits in like guise upon sponges a mile or two deep in the darkness — there, however, not a quarter of an inch, but three inches long ; and the Nemphons — sea spiders, who crawl out from under stones, and who, having nobodp to speak to, carry theirstomacb, for economy of space, packed in brancher up the inside of each leg, are found in the depths of the ArcticJ Sea, not as here, half an inch but two feet in diameter. It is impossible to give even a sketch of the zoological treasures which have been brought to light by the cruises of the Lightning and Porcupine. Among [ their discoveries are true worms, seai urchins, starfish, including the magnificent Brimiga, worthily named from the goddess Freya'a favorite jewel, I Crinoida ('stalked flowers of living [stone') corals, and above all sponges I of forms either new or till now known 1 only as. fossil, or, strangely enough as inhabitants of shallow water. But the strangest, as well as the most beautiful, inhabitants of the deep sea ooae are ,the glassy sponges, in which the skeleton is composed, not of homy fibres, as in the sponges of our dressing-rooms, buc : of flexible flint often more delicate than ' the finest spun glass.. The best known !of these- ia the Venus' flower- basket, or ! Ewptectella, which lives embedded in the mud of th^ seast of the- PhUHpines, *§&*s&& tQJtadwgvp

round it like a Queen. Elizabeth's ruff.' Twenty years ago there was but one known specimen in Europe. It may be now bought for 305., or less* in amy curiosity shop, and it is strange that this — one of the most exquisite, both in form and texture, of all natural objeots — is not oftener seen, even already as a drawing room ornament., Equally curious, even more puzzling in its construction, is the glass-rope sponge, or Hyalonema, which roots itself in the mud by a twisted wisp of strong flint needles, somewhat on the principle of a screw pile, So strange and com« plicated is its structure, that learned men could neither make head nor tail of it, as long as they had only Japanese specimens to study. Which was top and which was bottom, which the thing itself, and which the parasite growing on it ; whether it was a sponge, or a zoophyte, or something itself could not be settled, and is in some men's minds scarcely settled now. Scarcely less beautiful are the Holtenias and their cognate forms; hollow sponges built up of glassy spicules, and rooted in the mud by glass hairs, in some cases between 2ft. and 3ft. long, as flexible and graceful as tresses of snow-white silk. If any one wishes at'once to gratify his curiosity and sense of beauty, let him I go up the great staircase of the British Museum, and on entering the second corridor, tnrn either right or left to the cases which contain these sponges and other deep-sea forms — to which, by the bye, in the present crowded state of the Museum, ghastly troops of monkeys serve as a foil — and there see how Nature is not only maxima in minimes, greatest in her least, but, pulelierrima in abditis, fairest in her bidden works ; and how the creator spirit has lavished, as it were, unspeakable artistic skill on low-organ-ised forms, never till now beheld by man, and buried not only in foul mud, but in the unsightly mass of their own living jelly. But so it was from the beginning; and this planet, with its complicated wonders and beauties, was not made for man alone. Countless ages before man appeared on earth, the depths of the old chalk ocean teemed with forms as beautiful and as perfect as those, their lineal descendants, which the dredge now brings up from the Atlantic Seafloor."