WHERE CURRENTS RIP 59 



boat that they were rocked and jarred, and not 

 having even a boat-hook, they began to row back 

 toward the ship. I never heard of such a happen- 

 ing before. 



What looked like oval, thick, greenish cigars 

 were floating pelagic anemones, mouth down. At 

 the top a small group of white bubbles — the float — 

 then a circular, dark-green, caterpillar-like body 

 mass, below this a ring of numerous, short, white 

 tentacles, and finally, at the bottom, the expanse 

 of greyish tissue about the mouth. They looked 

 like strange swollen green acorns, with a white 

 stem base and white cup. 



Although I have said it before, I must reiter- 

 ate that the teeming amount of life was unbeliev- 

 able. Two dips with a butterfly net yielded half 

 a pail of organisms. In one place the water for 

 ten square yards was tinged with deep purple, 

 thousands upon thousands of tiny salpas, each with 

 its large nucleus. The most consistently abundant 

 things wherever we rowed were uncounted myriads 

 of small, rounded, pale spheres, which proved to 

 be the eggs of some unknown species of mollusk. 



The strictly surface life was as teeming as that 

 beneath. In the bubbles and spray strung out 

 along the rip were hosts of oblong patches of finer 

 froth, and suspended from one end of this, was 

 always a beautiful purple-shelled lanthina snail. 

 Almost as numerous, and often in solid masses, 

 hundreds of the strange tufted nudibranch, Glau- 

 cus — dark ultramarine above, shading into mother- 

 of-pearl on the arms, and to ivory white below, 



