26 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



OK" SOME OF THE EESULTS OF THE EXPEDITION OF 



H. M. S. CHALLENGER. 



Bt PKor. THOMAS H. HUXLEY, F. K. S. 



IN May, 1873, I drew attention, in the pages of this Meview, to the 

 important problems connected with the pliysics and natural his- 

 tory of the sea, to the solution of which there was every reason to 

 hope the cruise of H. M. S. Challenger would furnish important con- 

 tributions. The expectation then expressed has not been disappointed. 

 Reports to the Admiralty, papers communicated to the Royal Society, 

 and large collections which have already been sent home, have shown 

 that the Challenger's staff have made admirable use of their great op- 

 portunities ; and that, on the return of the expedition in 1874, their 

 performance will be fully up to the level of their promise. Indeed, I 

 am disposed to go so far as to say that, if nothing more came of the 

 Challenger's expedition than has hitherto been yielded by her explora- 

 tion of the nature of the sea-bottom at great depths, a full scientific 

 equivalent of the trouble and expense of her equipment would have 

 been obtained. 



In order to justify this assertion, and yet, at the same time, not to 

 claim more for Prof. Wyville Thomson and his colleagues than is their 

 due, I must give a brief history of the observations which have pre- 

 ceded their exploration of this recondite field of research, and endeavor 

 to make clear what was the state of knowledge in December, 1872, and 

 what new facts have been added by the scientific staff of the Challen- 

 ger. So far as I have been able to discover, the first successful at- 

 tempt to bring up from great depths more of the sea-bottom than 

 would adhere to a sounding-lead, was made by Sir John Ross, in the 

 voyage to the arctic regions which he undertook in 1818. In the Ap- 

 pendix to the narrative of that voyage, there will be found an account 

 of a very ingenious apparatus called " chlams " a sort of double scoop 

 of his own contrivance, which Sir John Ross had made by the ship's 

 armorer; and by which, being in Baffin's Bay, in 72 30' north, and 

 77 15' west, he succeeded in bringing up from 1,050 fathoms (or 6,300 

 feet), " several pounds" of a "fine green mud," which formed the 

 bottom of the sea in this region. Captain (now Sir Edward) Sabine, 

 who accompanied Sir John Ross on this cruise, says of this mud that 

 it was " soft and greenish, and that the lead sunk several feet into it." 

 A similar " fine green mud" was found to compose the sea-bottom in 

 Davis Straits by Goodsir in ] 845. Nothing is certainly known of the 

 exact nature of the mud thus obtained, but we shall see that the mud 

 of the bottom of the antarctic seas is described in curiously similar 

 terms by Dr. Hooker, and there is no doubt as to the composition of 

 this deposit. 



