in. 



DISCEEPANCIES. 



I USE the term at the head of this chapter for lack of a 

 better. There are no real discrepancies in nature, but I 

 may conveniently employ the word to distinguish a class 

 of phenomena not without interest. We occasionally 

 meet with animal or vegetable life existing under condi- 

 tions, not which are not as truly proper to them as the 

 jungle to the tiger or the river to the crocodile, but which 

 appear to us strange and incongruous ; which create in 

 us surprise, as the most prominent emotion of the mind, — 

 surprise at finding life, or any particular phase of it, in 

 circumstances where we should not a priori have at 

 all expected to find it. Examples will best explain what 

 I mean. 



Take, then, the existence of animal life at great depths 

 of ocean. The researches of Sars, MacAndrew, and others, 

 in the Norwegian seas, and those of Edward Forbes in 

 the iEgean, have shewn that mollusca exist under two 

 hundred fathoms of water. Dead shells, indeed, are con- 

 tinually dredged from far greater depths ; but these may 

 have been voided by the many fishes which feed on mol- 

 lusca, and would, of course, fall to the bottom, whatever 

 the depth of the sea in which the fish might happen to be 



