I/O AT THE END OF THE SPECTRUM 



that the organism had struck against the outer surface 

 of the glass and was stimulated to a hundred brilliant 

 points instead of one. Instead of all these vanishing as does 

 correspondingly excited phosphorescence at the surface, 

 every light persisted strongly, as the creature writhed and 

 twisted to the left, still glowing, and vanished without 

 my being able to tell even its phylum. 



The above notes and many more of less popular sig- 

 nificance seem casual and deliberate enough but they rep- 

 resent the few coherent ideas which remain from the de- 

 scent. If the scene and the inhabitants of the outer water 

 had been of the same type as I had seen in dives of lesser 

 depth, together with even the slightest amount of light, 

 reporting would have been a simple matter. Nothing 

 which I had seen at 1400 feet in 1930, nor down to 1700 

 feet on this occasion, prepared me in any way for this 

 spectacular display of lights. Theories have been advanced 

 throwing doubt upon the actual function of many ap- 

 parent light organs, and questioning whether the outline 

 of the organism could be made out from its own illumina- 

 tion: Judging from the contents of hundreds of nets 

 drawn in these waters, fish and all invertebrates of appre- 

 ciable size would seem to be rare and far between: Photo- 

 graphic plates have been fogged by light at a depth of 

 3000 feet, so that my present depth of 2200 feet might 

 be thought to show at least a faint solar luminosity to my 

 eye. 



My experience on this dive gave me a new perspective 



