A DESCENT INTO PERPETUAL NIGHT 1 99 



mined, but whether by their own or by reflected Ught I 

 cannot say. These are colonial creatures like submerged 

 Portuguese men-o'-war, and similar to those beautiful be- 

 ings are composed of a colony of individuals, which per- 

 form separate functions, such as flotation, swimming, 

 stinging, feeding, and breeding, all joined by the common 

 bond of a food canal. Here in their own haunts they swept 

 slowly along like an inverted spray of lilies-of-the-valley, 

 alive and in constant motion. In our nets we find only the 

 half-broken swimming bells, like cracked, crystal chalices, 

 with all the wonderful loops and tendrils and animal 

 flowers completely lost or contracted into a mass of tan- 

 gled threads. Twenty feet lower a pilotfish looked in upon 

 me — the companion of sharks and turtles, which we 

 usually think of as a surface fish, but with only our piti- 

 ful, two-dimensional, human observation for proof. 



When scores of bathyspheres are in use we shall know 

 much more about the vertical distribution of fish than we 

 do now. For example, my next visitors were good-sized 

 yellow-tails and two blue-banded jacks which examined 

 me closely at 400 and 490 feet respectively. Here were 

 so-called surface fish happy at 80 fathoms. Several silvery 

 squid balanced for a moment, then shot past, and at 500 

 feet a pair of lanternfish with no lights showing looked 

 at the bathysphere unafraid. 



At 600 feet the color appeared to be a dark, luminous 

 blue, and this contradiction of terms shows the difficulty 

 of description. As in former dives, it seemed bright, but 



