60 THE DEPTHS OF THE SEA. [CHAP. II. 
and all kinds of suctorial copepods. One of them will 
take a crab or a large fusus or buccinum quietly out 
of one’s hand, and with a slight movement transfer it 
down its capacious throat into its stomach, where it 
is very soon attacked and disintegrated by the power- 
ful gastric secretions. In a welled smack I visited 
on one occasion, one of the fish had met with some 
slight injury which spoiled its market, and it made 
several trips in the well between London and Feéroe 
and became quite a pet. The sailors said it knew 
them. It was mixed up with a number of others in 
the tank when I was on board, and certainly it was 
always the first to come to the top for the chance of 
a crab or a bit of biscuit, and it rubbed its ‘head 
and shoulders’ against my hand quite lovingly. 
On the 15th and 16th we dredged over the Fééroe 
Banks at a depth of from 200 to 50 fathoms, the 
bottom gravel and nullipore, and the temperature 
from 8° to 10° C. The banks swarm with the com- 
mon brittle star Ophiothrix fragilis, with the Norway 
lobster Nephrops norvegicus, large spider crabs, several 
species of the genus Galathea, and many of the genus 
Crangon. So ample a supply of their favourite food 
readily accounts for the abundance and excellence of 
the cod and ling on the banks. 
There is some rough rocky ground on the Féroe 
Banks, and notwithstanding all possible care and the 
use of Hodge’s ‘accumulators’ to ease the strain on 
the dredge ropes, we lost two of our best dredges and 
some hundreds of fathoms of rope. On the morning 
of the 17th we sighted Féroe, as usual only getting 
now and then a glimpse of the islands of this remote 
little archipelago by the lifting of the curtain of mist 
