CHAP. I.] THE EQUIPMENT OF THE SHIP. Ag 
the sunshine on the surface of the sea, and having gradually 
sunk into the abysses after death. Dr. Wallich, the natural- 
ist to the Bull-dog Sounding Expedition under Sir Leopold 
M‘Clintock, reported that star-fishes, with their stomachs full 
of the deep-sea foraminifera, had come up from a depth of 1200 
fathoms on a sounding-line, and doubts began to be entertained 
whether the bottom of the sea was in truth the desert which 
we had hitherto supposed it to be, or whether it might not 
prove a new zoological region open to investigation and dis- 
covery, and peopled by peculiar faunze suited to its most pe- 
culiar conditions. 
This new view, however, progressed but slowly, for it was 
almost as difficult to believe that creatures comparable with 
those of which we have experience in the upper world could 
live at the bottom of the sea, as that they could live in a vaeu- 
um or in the fire. Of many of the conditions at great depths 
we as yet knew nothing, but some of them were as easily de- 
termined by calculation as by direct experiment, and we knew 
that an animal at a depth of 1000 fathoms must bear a weight 
of a ton on the square inch, and one at a depth of 3000 the 
almost inconceivable weight of three tons; and we had every 
reason to believe that the sun’s light is almost entirely cut off 
at a depth of 50 fathoms, and that therefore the existence of 
plants upon which animals primarily depend for their food is 
impossible at great depths. These considerations alone seemed 
almost sufficient to place this question beyond the region of 
reasonable inquiry, and it was not until a considerable amount 
of evidence had been brought forward that what was called the 
“antibiotic” prejudice was in any degree overcome. 
About this time another class of facts which gave the whole 
subject a singular interest were forcing themselves upon the 
attention of naturalists. Some dredgers, particularly our inde- 
fatigable brother-naturalists of Scandinavia, pushed their dredg- 
ing operations to the utmost limit practicable in the northern 
