116 FOUNDERS OF OCEANOGRAPHY 



encounter, for next morning, before I sailed, Agassiz had 

 shipped from his vessel to mine some 600 fathoms of steel 

 dredging wire and an odd assortment of store bottles and 

 tubes left over from his expedition. 



I had thought of him before as a quiet, reserved man of 

 great determination and ability. It has been said of him in 

 America : " He was a colossal leader of great enterprises 

 fully as much as he was a man of science." But at that time 

 at Colombo, and also since, I have felt that he was also very 

 thoughtful for others and of a kindly and generous disposition. 



When the " Challenger " expedition carried her explora- 

 tions down through the central Southern Pacific, she found 

 a rather puzzling state of things. In deep water relatively 

 very few animals were captured on the bottom of the ocean 

 when compared with those taken in the Great Southern 

 Ocean or nearer continental shores ; those obtained were, 

 however, of rather pronounced archaic types. The deposits 

 in the same area were of surpassing interest ; large quantities 

 of a deep-brown clay were hauled up, in which were imbedded 

 enormous numbers of manganese nodules and concretions, 

 some of them being formed around sharks' teeth, ear-bones 

 and other bones of whales, and others around volcanic 

 fragments mostly converted into the mineral palagonite. 

 Sometimes hundreds of sharks' teeth and dozens of whales' 

 ear-bones were captured in a single haul, and most of them 

 belonged to extinct species ; some of the teeth were of such 

 size that the sharks must have been 100 feet in length. 

 Small zeolitic crystals and crystal balls were also mixed up 

 in these red-brown clays, evidently formed in situ. More 

 extraordinary still were the minute spherules, having a hard 

 black coating and an interior of pure iron and nickel, as 

 well as other minute spherules, called chondres, found 

 hitherto only in meteorites. These spherules are believed to 

 have an extra-terrestrial origin, and to have formed at one 

 time the tails of meteorites or faUing stars. This was a 

 strange assemblage of things, and some scientific men argued 



