SARGASSO WEEDS AND WAVES 31 



a rush hour on the forward deck ; everyone, except 

 possibly the stokers and the officer on watch, 

 crowded around to see the catch. After the first 

 week the crew was convinced of our insanity. 

 Their standard of excitement was governed en- 

 tirely by size, and to see fourteen grown-up peo- 

 ple go into ecstasies over such tiny specimens was 

 to them one of the funniest and most inexplicable 

 sights in the world. What if we did catch a fish 

 whose eyes stood out on stalks almost half as long 

 as its entire body, and through whose transparent 

 skin a minute heart and nervous system were 

 plainly visible? If the whole creature was less than 

 three inches long, the crew derived nothing from it 

 but a hearty laugh. As the majority of deep-sea 

 animals are small, the sailors seldom lacked 

 comedy. On one occasion, when there was a shout 

 of "Whales astern!" and every door erupted flying 

 figures that raced aft, the oldest able seaman, a 

 big, bored Scandinavian, was heard to mutter, "I 

 seen plenty whales. I never seen such funny folks." 

 There were hundreds of specimens that must be 

 sorted out as fast as possible, and soon every desk 

 in the laboratory had an absorbed worker, armed 

 with forceps, spoons and pipettes, disentangling 

 fish from sagitta, crustaceans from jellyfish, squids 

 from siphonophores. If it were only feasible to 

 label the nets "For fish only," or "Jellyfish enter 

 here"; the oceanogi-apher's life would be much sim- 

 plified. The heterogeneous mass that is scrambled 

 together by a trailing net is mostly of such fragile 

 structure that it seems a miracle to float out a 



