344 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



of an idea, and an illusion as the false appreciation of real sensa- 

 tions." 



And he further claims that, however real a phantom may be to the 

 vision, mental or physical, and however impossible it may be at pres- 

 ent, anatomically, to fix the source and centre of the disease by the 

 examination of victims after death, there is something in the human 

 body which, however minute, would explain the malady of the mind, 

 if only the microscope of science were subtle enough to discover it. 



NATURE OF THE DEEP-SEA BED, AND THE PRESENCE OF 

 ANIMAL LIFE AT VAST DEPTHS IN THE OCEAN. 



The following paper, contributed to the London Engineer Journal 

 by Dr. G. C. Wallicn, the naturalist who accompanied the recent 

 expedition sent out by the British government to make soundings in 

 the extreme North Atlantic (with a -view of determining the practica- 

 bility of laying a submarine telegraph cable between England and 

 Ireland and the American continent), will be found to contain mat- 

 ters of great and novel interest : 



Although the depth of the sea over widely-extended areas has been 

 approximately ascertained, hardly any attempts were made to inves- 

 tigate the character and composition of the ocean-bed until the period 

 when submarine telegraphs were first undertaken. In the absence of 

 any special object, such attempts would have been far too costly and 

 difficult to be practicable. It has been ascertained, however, that the 

 floor of the ocean is but the reflex, as it were, of the dry land ; that it 

 is in no place unfathomable ; that along its deeper portions certain 

 muddy deposits are to be met with, in many cases made up, more or 

 less entirely, of minute calcareous shells belonging to one of the most 

 simple order of beings with which we are acquainted ; and that to- 

 gether with these are also to be found, but in comparatively speaking 

 small quantity, the minute, flinty skeletons of other organisms derived 

 both from the animal and vegetable kingdoms. But no conclusive 

 evidence has been produced to show whether any, or all of these or- 

 ganisms normally lived and perished at the profound depths from 

 whence they were obtained by the sounding lead, or whether, having 

 inhabited distant and perhaps shallower seas, their dead remains 

 alone, after being transported by currents or other agencies, had 

 gradually subsided into the deep hollows of the ocean. Taking into 

 consideration the very important part played by these organisms in 

 the structure of the earth's crust, that vast strata have in ages gone 

 by been built up of them, and that similar strata are at the present 

 time being deposited along the beds of existing seas, the investiga- 

 tion of these questions becomes of the highest consequence. The dis- 

 tribution of animal life in the upper waters of the sea is determined 

 by climate, by the composition of its waters, the nature of its bed, and 

 its depth in any given locality ; the last of these items necessarily in- 

 volving the relative degrees of temperature, light, aeration, and pres- 

 sure, as compared with those to be met with near the surface. Of 

 these conditions, climate exercises a very powerful influence ; for it is 

 found, as we advance from the equator towards the poles, that a grad- 



