146 THE DEPTHS OF THE SEA. [cHAP. IV. 
hastening to join the dodo and the gair-fowl among 
the creatures of bygone times. 
We now steered somewhat to the north of west, and 
early on the 1st of September sounded in lat. 60° 17’, 
long. 2° 53’, at a depth of 103 fathoms, and a bottom 
temperature of 9°2C. We were still in the shallow 
water, and had not touched the arctic stream. All 
day we slipped over the edge of the plateau, dredging 
chiefly well-known Shetland forms, and the tempera- 
ture falling slightly, reaching in the afternoon ata 
depth of 203 fathoms, 8°7 C. (Station 74). The next 
sounding, about ten miles farther north, gave us the 
stratum of intermixture, a temperature of 5°5C. at a 
depth of 250 fathoms. We ran about thirty miles in 
the night, and early next morning dredged in the 
frigid water again in lat. 60° 36’ N., long. 3°58" W., at 
a depth of 344 fathoms, with a bottom temperature of 
—1°1C., the temperature at the surface being 10°1 C. 
Five-and-twenty miles to the westward, we sounded 
again at noon of the same day at 560 fathoms, with 
—1°2C. 
In these two or three last cold dredgings the 
character of the bottom was much the same—gravel 
of the older rocks, and clay. The preponderance 
of echinoderms and sponges was again remarkable, 
and the paucity of mollusca, though in this region 
we took a single specimen of a mollusk which 
seemed to be greatly out of its latitude. This was a 
pretty little brachiopod, Platydiaan omioides, SAccH1 
(Morrisia, Davipson), hitherto found only in the 
Mediterranean. The size of this specimen greatly 
exceeded that of Mediterranean examples of the 
same species, a singular circumstance which leads 
