DA^^Y JONES' GOBLINS 359 



for it. And so the Missing Link is christened, 

 Proheehei mirabilis, for we were convinced that 

 Father Neptune had sent a special greeting by this 

 messenger to his brother-in-fins WilHam Beebe, 

 the Director of the Arcturus Expedition." 



Among the fishes in this haul were eight little 

 sharks hardly as long as one's hand. They were 

 slender, with dull glowing eyes of emerald green 

 and with stout spines in front of the dorsal fins. 

 Delicate white markings were difficult to account 

 for except as a heritage from some ancestor who 

 lived where there was sufficient light to permit a 

 sharklet to see whether he was white or black. I 

 found they had been feeding on small scarlet 

 prawns of a species which we had not been able to 

 capture. In the same net were several giant 

 shrimps so armed and armored that in a battle be- 

 tween them and one of the sharks, the latter would 

 undoubtedly have been worsted. 



In the midst of all this richesse, a compound 

 thrill was vouchsafed, when in the midst of a mass 

 of grey sponge and a scarlet haze of shrimp an- 

 tennee, there shone out a rainbow glint, and I un- 

 covered a half dozen large snail shells of solid 

 mother-of-pearl luster. They were quite dead and 

 their food was mud and globigerina ooze, and yet 

 in the cold blackness almost three-fourths of a mile 

 below the surface, the living snails had been clad 

 in a gay livery of orange, green, black and white. 



If I should consider the deep sea and its mhabi- 

 tants solely from the point of view of technical 

 science, I could never use such words as terrible. 



