SARGASSO W^EDS AND WAVES 27 



ings that have been taken in years past, one's im- 

 agination pictures the ocean floor as thickly and 

 bumpily carpeted with seventy-five -pound pear- 

 shaped balls of iron. The cold light of statistics, 

 however, reveals the fact that so little is actually 

 known of the depths of the ocean that, outside the 

 thousand-fathom line, there is in the Atlantic an 

 average of only a single sounding record for each 

 twelve thousand square miles. So, after all, 

 the ocean bottom is far from being cobbled with 

 iron. 



When the sounding tube broke the surface on 

 its return journey, and was emptied of the sample 

 of the bottom which it had sucked up, any ab- 

 surd fancy about man's puny efforts was banished. 

 The dishful of Globigerina ooze was a pinch of the 

 stuff with which millions of square miles of the sub- 

 marine world are covered. Under the microscope 

 the greyish white gravel resolved into the fragile 

 shells of infinitesimal creatures, which in un- 

 thinkable quadrillions spend their lives floating near 

 the surface and, dying, sink slowly through the 

 black depths to add their tiny homes to the vast 

 piles of their fellows'. In a world without color, 

 because it is without light, totally lacking in vege- 

 table life, where an unchanging iciness of tempera- 

 ture prevails, and where the pressure to the square 

 inch amounts to an added ton for every added mile 

 of depth, there are huge areas where the bottom is 

 deeply covered over by the bleached remnants of 

 these single-celled little beings, each smaller than 

 a grain of sand. And over them swim and crawl 



