170 Prof. Ehrenberg on Microscopic Life 



I. The South Polar Voyage from 1841 to 1843. 



Very essential progress was made in our knowledge of the mi- 

 nute and invisible forms of organic life during the years devoted 

 to this expedition by Captain Ross. In the year 1840, the Royal 

 Society of London appointed a committee to prepare a series of 

 physical and meteorological questions to be solved by the pro- 

 posed expedition j and it was at the express desire of the author 

 that Alex. v. Humboldt undertook to suggest to that body the 

 importance of attention being paid to the study of the relations 

 under which minute organisms exist, as one likely to throw con- 

 siderable light upon the principal questions now agitated, in- 

 volved in the recent history of the earth's crust, and also to 

 recommend that the directions given by the author as to the 

 methods of collecting them should be adopted throughout the 

 whole voyage. Through the scientific ardour of Dr. J. Hooker, 

 son of the well-known botanist and a voyager on board the ship 

 Erebus, a variety of valuable materials were collected during the 

 expedition, and a short time back about forty packages and three 

 glasses of water were transmitted to Germany from the neighbour- 

 hood of Cape Horn and Victoria Land. About the same time also, 

 Mr. Darwin, the profound observer upon the formation of coral 

 reefs in the South-seas, contributed objects from other localities. 



The author set about examining carefully without delay, as 

 such an opportunity might not again recur, water which had 

 been taken from the South Polar sea of from 75° to 78° 10' 

 south latitude, and 162° west longitude, with a view of deter- 

 mining its relative amount of minute organic life. Of the dry 

 materials some packets only have as yet been examined, those 

 namely which from their localities appear to possess the great- 

 est interest, and among these were specimens of the remains of 

 melted polar ice and sea-bottom, taken under south latitudes 

 63° and 78°, from depths of 190 to 270 fathoms (i. e. 1140— 

 1620 feet), the greatest depths that have been hitherto sounded. 



The relations of minute organic life were found, as the author 

 had anticipated, to be the same at the south as at the north pole, 

 and generally of great extent and intensity at the greatest depths 

 of the ocean. 



Previous observations upon those loftiest mountains whose pin- 

 nacles are capped with eternal ice, had determined that a gradual 

 progressive disappearance of organic life takes place from the base 

 to their summit, and that too in accordance with particular laws ; 

 to the tree succeeding the lowly shrub, next grass and lichens, 

 till finally we arrive at the regions of perpetual snow, where there 

 is a complete absence of all life. In like manner the development 

 of organized beings has been conceived to diminish from the equa- 

 tor to the arctic regions of the earth, the latter becoming first 



