THE DEEP-SEA WORLD. (Times.)

Waikato Times, Volume IV, Issue 188, 24 July 1873, Page 2

THE DEEP-SEA WORLD. (Times.)

It was not until about thirty years ago— so new is. th& whole subject — that men began even to suspect the existence of « deep-water woU'l. Till then the scientific men, gazing down into tho " blazing darkness of the ccean blue," and lonjin!? to know what strange forms might people the two miles of water beneath the ship, believed that at the hottom, at all events, there could be nothing but a barren chaoa of rooks or mud, strewed here and there with the " thousand fearful wrecks " which Clarence «aw in his last dream. Fo life, they held, could exist in that total darkness, under a pressure of water so enormous that, as Dr Wyville Thomson says, a man at 2,000 fathoms' depth would bear on his body a weight equal to twenty locomotive engines, each with a lon<j goods train loaded with pig iron. Had they known likewise that living creatures down below would have to contend with all but freezing cold, they would have seened to themselves even more justified than they actually were in their mistake. That mistake aiose from a strange forgetfulne3s that if the fluids mside the body of a sea animal, or even of a man, weie at the same pleasure as those outside it, the two pressures would balance each other, and the body instead of bein^ crushed in, might move as freely and safely as in air. Even in the air, as Dr Wyville Thomson reminds us, a sudden rise of An inch in the barometer piles nearly half a ton extra upon our body, and yet, the fluids inside of us having proportionately increased m density, " we feel only the more cheery and buoyant, because it requires a little leas exertion to move in the denser medium." It is difficult at iirst to conceive this cot tain rule when we apply it to water under immense pressure. We fancy that water in that case must stitfen or harden, forgetting that it remains—being all hut incompressible — as liquid as ever, and that its particles, as far as we know, slide as freely over each other at 5,000 fathoms' depth as at the surface. Forgetfulness of that almost complete mcompressibihty of water gave rise to another fancy, which had a certain gtandeur in it, and was not so absurd as it may look at first sight— namely, that, as Dr 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 depths, according to their specific weights— skeletons of men; anchois, and shot, and cannon ; and, last of all, the broad gold pieces wiecked 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 scarcely increased in density, and things heavier thon 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, deep under the teeming life of the slowly, but pe.-petually increasing ooze. The nether darkness, so far from being & lifeless waste, teems almost everywhere with creatures not only more fantastic, but larger than their shallow-w*ter cousins } and the paddler about rock-pools and tide-sands at watering-places v, ill learn that far away at sea, over that 1 00^ fathom lino to tho westward, which marks the ancient shore of the European continent, are found sea monsters far bigger, as well as far uglier and far more beautifulthan 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, hoWing on by his hind 'claws, and, with ghastly grimaces, mesmerizing all passers-by with his fore-claws, sits in like guise upon sponges a mile or two deep in the darkness — aie found in the depths of the Arctic 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 aad Porcupine. Among their discoveries are true worms, sea-urchins, starfish, including the magnificent and novel Bnmiga, worthily named after the goddess Freya's favorite jewel, C'rinoids (" stalked flowers of living stone"), corals, p,nd above all sponges of forms either new or known 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- ooze are the glassy sponges, in which the skeleton is composed, not of horny fibres, as in the sponges of our dressiug rooms, but of flexible flint, often more delicate than the finest spun glass. The best known of these is the Venus's flower basket, or Euplectella, which liv€s embedded in the mud of the seas of the Philippines, supported by a glass frill "standing up 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 30s, or less, in any curiosity shop ; and it is strange that this— one of the most exquisite, both in form and texture, of all natural objects — is not oftener seen, even alieady, as a drawing room ornament. Equally curious, even inoie puzzling in its construction, is vhe gUss-rope sponge, or Hyalonema, which ioo's itself in the mud by a twisted wisp of strong flint needles, somewhat on the principle of a screw pile. So. strange and complicated is its structure that learned men for a long while coukl literally make neither head nor tail of it, as long as they had only Japanese specimens to study. Which was top and which bottom, which thethiug itself, and which paiasites growing on it ;. whether it was a«. sponge, or a zoophyte, or something else, could not be settled, and is in some men's minds scarcely settled now. But the discoveiy of the same, or a closely allied, species, in abundance from the Butt of the Lews down to. Setubal, on the coast of Portugal, where the shark-fishers call it " Sea-whip," has given our aavans specimens enough on which to make up their minds, and has added another form to the list of those common, strangely.enough, to our seas and to those of Japan. Scarcely less beautiful and strange 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 to gratify at once his curiosity and hi* sense of beauty, let him go up the great staircase at the British Museum, and on entering the second corridor, turn either light or left to the casts which contain these sponges and other deep-sea forms— to which, by the bye, in the present crowded state of the Museum, ghastly tioops; of monkeys serve as a foil— and there see how Natuie is not only "maxima in minimis," greatest in hui least, but, "pulcherrima in alditis," fairest in her most bidden woiks ; and how the creative spirit has lavished, as it were, unspeakable artistic skill on low-organised 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 fp'in 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 Jineal descendants, which the dredge now brings up from the Atlantic sea*flpor.