TO DAVY JONES S LOCKER 1 3/ 



of organisms at best in the depths of the ocean as revealed 

 by our net hauls, and finally the small size of the aperture, 

 hardly as large as one's face — all these seemed handicaps 

 too severe to be overcome. Yet the hope of such observa- 

 tions was the sole object of the entire project. We never 

 thought of it as a stunt, as beating the record of anyone, 

 as the-first-white-man-who-had-ever, etc. 



This secret skepticism made the actual results all the 

 more satisfying. As fish after fish swam into my restricted 

 line of vision — fish, which, heretofore, I had seen only 

 dead and in my nets — as I saw their colors and their 

 absence of colors, their activities and modes of swimming 

 and clear evidence of their sociability or solitary habits, 

 I felt that all the trouble and cost and risk were repaid 

 many fold. For two years I had been studying the deep- 

 sea fish in a limited area of mid-ocean off Nonsuch, and 

 now when we were at the bottom of our pendulum I real- 

 ized that I, myself, was down where many hundreds of 

 nets had been hauled. During the coming year I should 

 be able to appreciate the plankton and fish hauls as never 

 before. After these dives were past, when I came again 

 to examine the deep-sea treasures in my nets, I would 

 feel as an astronomer might who looks through his tele- 

 scope after having rocketed to Mars and back, or like a 

 paleontologist who could suddenly annihilate time and see 

 his fossils alive. 



