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some fishes this has been carried so far 
that the eyes have become like enormous 
goggles. 
Most deep-sea fishes have luminous 
organs of one kind or another, so that 
they carry their own light about with 
them. In some the entire body glim- 
mers, the coating of slime which exudes 
from the pores and lateral canals, 
emitting a soft silvery glow. In others, 
rows of minute, luminous organs run 
along the sides of the body, or there are 
flashing light-spots on the head or face. 
What a wonderful sight would be to us 
a small black fish flitting through the 
silence and darkness of the deep with 
its headlights and row of pores gleaming 
through the darkness like some small ship 
passing through the night with its port- 
holes all aglow! Some deep-sea fishes 
have a luminous organ at the end of a 
feeler on the head. This is waved to 
and fro to act as a lure to attract the prey. 
A pertinent question may be asked: 
How do we know these fishes glow and 
glimmer, since no human eye has ever 
beheld them in their abyssal home? 
We know this partly from analogy and 
partly from actual observation. When 
one is in a boat in the tropics, on one of 
those sultry nights when everything is 
a dead calm, and the black clouds hang 
so low that sky and sea form one con- 
tinuous blackness, then one may see 
the glimmering fishes darting out of the 
path of the boat, their forms, silvery 
and ghostlike, outlined for one moment 
against the blackness of the sea. This 
effect is chiefly due to the oxidizing of 
the slimy secretion covering their bodies. 
Why shall we not believe, then, that in 
deep-sea fishes a similar phenomenon 
takes place, particularly as in many of 
them, the slime pores and canals are 
greatly developed and must exude large 
quantities of slime? Then too, on deep- 
sea expeditions, on favorable occasions, 
THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 
as for instance, a dark calm night, fishes 
that have been brought to the surface 
and placed in water were seen to flash 
light from the ends of the tentacles or 
the phosphorescent pores, precisely as 
we should have expected from a study 
of these organs. Major Alcock, in his 
interesting volume, A Naturalist in 
Indian Seas, mentions a_ specimen 
brought up from a profound depth which 
“olimmered like a ghost as it lay dead 
at the bottom of the pail of turbid sea- 
water.”” So that by inference, as well 
as by actual observation, we must be- 
lieve that what we call luminous organs 
in deep-sea fishes, emit light into the 
darkness about them. In the case of 
fishes totally blind, the absence of light 
is compensated for by the development 
of enormous antenne-like feelers, modi- 
fied from fin rays, so that these fishes 
can feel their way, as it were, through 
the darkness. 
The absence of light however entails 
another important consequence. As is 
well known, no plant life can exist in 
darkness. There is, therefore, no vege- 
tation of any kind in the profound 
depths of the sea. The deep-sea fishes 
are, in consequence, all carnivorous, the 
more powerful ones seizing and devour- 
ing the weaker ones. It is a cold black 
world where might reigns supreme. 
Many have enormous mouths, and 
formidable teeth to insure holding the 
prey. In some forms the teeth are so 
large that the mouth cannot be shut! 
Moreover, since meals are perforce far 
between, they must be as large as pos- 
sible; hence many forms have extraor- 
dinarily capacious stomachs. Specimens 
have been dredged from the deep which 
were enormously distended through 
having swallowed fishes larger than 
themselves. 
The temperature of the water in the 
profound depths of the sea, is always low 
