56 THE PROBLEMS OF THE DEEP SEA n 



and the Coccoliths should not be the only sur- 

 vivors of a world passed away, which are hidden 

 beneath three miles of salt water? The letter 

 which Dr. Wyville Thomson wrote to Dr. ^'Car- 

 penter in May, 1868, out of which all these expe- 

 ditions have grown, shows that this query had 

 become a practical problem in Dr. Thomson's 

 mind at that time ; and the desirableness of 

 solving the problem is put in the foreground of 

 his reasons for urging the Government to under- 

 take the work of exploration : 



"Two years ago, M. Sars, Swedish Government Inspector of 

 Fisheries, had an opportunity, in his official capacity, of dredg- 

 ing off the Loffoten Islands at a depth of 300 fathoms. I 

 visited Norway shortly after his return, and had an opportunity 

 of studying with his father, Professor Sars, some of his results. 

 Animal forms were abundant ; many of them were new to 

 science ; and among them was one of surpassing interest, the 

 small crinoid, of which you have a specimen, and which we at 

 once recognised as a degraded type of the Apiocrinidce, an order 

 hitherto regarded as extinct, which attained its maximum in 

 the Pear Encrinites of the Jurassic period, and whose latest 

 representative hitherto kno\vn was the Bourgucttocrinus of the 

 chalk. Some years previously, Mr. Absjdrnsen, dredging in 200 

 fathoms in the Hardangerfjord, procured several examples of a 

 Starfish (Brisinga), which seems to find its nearest ally in the 

 fossil genus Protaster. These observations place it beyond a 

 doubt that animal life is abundant in the ocein at depths 

 varying from 200 to 300 fathoms, that the forms at these great 

 depths differ greatly from those met within ordinary dredgings, 

 and that, at all events in some cases, these animals are closely 

 allied to, and would seem to be directly descended from, the 

 Fauna of the early tertiaries. 



"I think the latter result might almost have been antici- 



