30 NATURAL SCIENCE. July, 



work, I came year by year more to admire the rare qualities of man 



united in Dr. Murray, which enabled him to accomplish this gigantic 



task ; his general scientific knowledge and philosophic spirit, his 



practical skill and administrative capacity, and his admirable survey 



over all parts of his immense field. If, after eighteen years of labour, 



the fifty big volumes of the " Challenger " Report, with their thirty 



thousand pages of letterpress and their more than three thousand 



plates, have now really finished publication, the British nation may 



be proud of this " monumentum aere perennius," and it is in the 



first place indebted for its accomplishment to the singular genius of 



John Murray. 



Ernst Haeckel. 



Expectations and Results. 



Scientific interest in the nature of the sea-bottom had been 

 aroused by a series of earlier investigations. In 1819 Sir John Ross, 

 dredging in the " Erebus," had brought up worms from a depth of 

 1,000 fathoms, and had suggested that life extended even to deeper 

 recesses. But these results were little known to naturalists, and 

 when Wyville Thomson, from the results of the " Lightning " 

 Expedition, urged an extended exploration of the ocean-floor, he was 

 unable to say certainly that life extended much below a depth of 650 

 fathoms. To determine the depth to which it extended and the 

 nature of the fauna was the first zoological problem in the mind of 

 those who organised the Expedition. 



But hopes of a wider nature were entertained. It was generally 

 believed that a large number of the sedimentary rocks had been 

 formed at the bottom of deep oceans, and it was hoped that in the 

 deeper parts of the existing oceans there would be found alive repre- 

 sentatives of strange new types, and living forms corresponding to 

 Tertiary fossils. Wyville Thomson specially insisted upon this, and 

 there can be no doubt that it was a considerable disappointment to 

 the naturalists to find few primitive types. No trilobites, blastoids 

 or cystids, and no primitive vertebrates of any kind were discovered. 

 In fact, from the point of view of connecting links, the voyage of the 

 ^' Challenger " was almost barren. The most important linking 

 animals, such as Ornithovhynchns, Amphioxus, Balanoglossus, Pevipatus, 

 and Liniuliis, are not inhabitants of the depths of the ocean. 



The actual results of the Expedition were, in the first place, the 

 discovery of a vast number of new forms, which, although they 

 seldom added to our knowledge of the connections between existing 

 groups, added vastly to our knowledge of the infinite variety of 

 morphological structure among groups. As a simple extension of 

 knowledge, the results of the " Challenger " were prodigious. 



Next, the " Challenger " results laid the foundation for important 

 conclusions as to the relative distributions of land and water at various 

 times on the surface of the globe. The permanence of the great 

 oceans and the enduring character of the great land masses are 



