os THE ATLANTIC. (CHAP. 1. 
down the line until it is brought up by the toggle. By this 
plan the dredge takes a somewhat longer time to go down; 
but since we adopted it we have not had a single case of the 
fouling of the dredge in the dredge-rope—a misadventure 
which occurred more than once before, and which we were in- 
clined to attribute to the weights getting ahead of the dredge 
in going down, and pulling it down upon them entangled in 
the double part of the line. 
For the first two or three hauls in deep water, off the coast of 
Portugal, the dredge came up filled with the usual “Atlantic 
ooze,” very tenacious and uniform throughout, and the work of 
hours in sifting gave the smallest possible result. 
We were extremely anxious to get some idea of the general 
character of the fauna, and particularly of the distribution of 
the higher groups ; and, after various suggestions for modifying 
the dredge, it was proposed to try the ordinary trawl. We had 
a compact, well-balanced trawl with a fifteen-feet beam on 
board, and we sent it down off Cape St. Vincent to a depth of 
600 fathoms. The experiment looked hazardous, but, to our 
great satisfaction, the trawl came up all right, and contained, 
along with many of the larger invertebrata, several fishes. The 
plan seemed to answer so well that we tried it again a little far- 
ther south, in 1090 fathoms, and again it was perfectly suecess- 
ful. Since that time we have used the trawl frequently, and 
particularly in very deep water, where there is a certainty of 
finding a smooth bottom, free from rocks, and where the large 
area covered by the trawl greatly increases the chance of bring- 
ing up some record of the scanty and sparsely scattered fauna. 
The deepest haul taken with the trawl was on the voyage from 
Halifax to Bermudas, at a depth of 2650 fathoms. 
Fig. 18 represents the deep-sea trawl at present in use. A 
conical bag, 30 feet in length, is suspended by one side to a 
beam of hard wood by half a dozen stops; the other side of the 
mouth of the net hangs loose, and is weighted with closeset © 
