CHAP. VI. | DEEP-SEA DREDGING. DEF 
hour. ‘The dredge was nearly full of a tenacious 
yellowish mud, through which sparkled innumerable 
long spicules of the Hyalonema ; indeed, if you drew 
your fingers slowly through the mud, you would 
thereby gather a handful of these spicules. One 
specimen of Hyalonema, with the long spicules in- 
serted into the mud and crowned with its expanded 
sponge-like portions, rewarded my first attempt at 
dredging at such a depth.”' This dredging is of 
especial interest, for it shows that although difficult 
and laborious, and attended with a certain amount of 
risk, it is not impossible in an open boat and with 
a crew of alien fishermen, to test the nature of the 
bottom and the character of the fauna, even to the 
sreat depth of 500 fathoms. 
In the year 1868, Count L. F. de Pourtales, one 
of the officers employed in the United States Coast 
Survey under Professor Pierce, commenced a series of 
deep dredgings across the gulf-stream off the coast of 
Florida; which were continued in the following year, 
and were productive of most valuable results. Many 
important memoirs at the hands of Count Pourtales, 
Mr. Alexander Agassiz, Mr. Theodore Lyman and 
others, have since enriched the pages of the Bulletin of 
the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and have greatly 
extended our knowledge of the deep-sea gulf-stream 
fauna; and much information has been gained as to 
the nature of the bottom in those regions, and the 
changes which are there taking place. Unfortunately 
a large part of the collections were in Chicago in the 
1 Notes on Deep-sea Dredging, by Edward Perceval Wright, M.D., 
F.L.S., from the Annals and Magazine of Natural History for 
December 1868. 
