238 



NATURE 



[July 13, 1876 



Smith's Sound, large masses of free, undifferentiated, 

 homogeneous protoplasm which contained no trace of the 

 well-known coccoliths. On account of its truly Spartan 

 simplicity, I called this organism, which I was able to 

 observe in the living state, ' Protobathybius.' It will be 

 figured and described in the Report of the expedition. 1 

 will merely state here that these masses consisted of pure 

 protoplasm, with only accidental admixture of calcareous 

 particles, such as formed the sea-bottom. They formed 

 exceedingly viscid, net-like structures, which exhibited 

 beautiful amoeboid movements, took in carmine- particles 

 as well as other foreign bodies, and showed active granule- 

 streaming." 



This is certainly a very deliberate and definite state- 

 ment on the part of Dr. Bessels, who is a well-known and 

 accomplished observer. It will be interesting to see how 

 these observations can be reconciled with the view taken 

 by Sir C. Wyville Thomson and Mr. Murray. 



DINNER TO THE ''CHALLENGER" STAFF 



ON Friday last, Sir C. Wyville Thomson and other 

 members of the Challeni;er si&H vftrt entertained at 

 dinner in the Douglas Hotel, Edinburgh, by a large and 

 distinguished company. Besides the civilian chief him- 

 self, the other members of the staff present were Mr. J. Y. 

 Buchanan, Mr. J. Murray, Lieut. Balfour, Dr. Crosbie, 

 and Paymaster Richards. The Lord Provost occupied 

 the chair, the croupiers, as the vice-chairmen are 

 called in Scotland, being Professors Huxley and Turner. 

 The speeches were unusually happy and spirited, but we 

 have space to give only a few quotations from that of 

 Prof. Huxley in proposing the health of the scientific staff 

 of the Challenger, and their director. Sir C. W. Thom- 

 son. After referring to previous Government expeditions 

 for ocean exploration, Prof. Huxley pointed out that 

 the peculiarity of the Challenger Expedition was that in 

 her case the cruise became secondary and the scien- 

 tific object primary ; that she was, in fact, fitted up and 

 instructed with the view of obtaining certain scientific 

 data which were requisite for the further progress of 

 natural knowledge. In her case the duty of geographical 

 exploration was reduced to nil, and the duty of scientific 

 investigation had become paramount. 



After showing the great importance of a knowledge of 

 the nature of the sea-bottom, Prof Huxley went on — 



" Thirty years ago it would have been absolute mad- 

 ness for anyone — I was going to say — to have hoped to 

 obtain any knowledge of the nature of the sea-bottom or 

 of the things which lived there at depths of 5,000, 6,000, 

 15,000, or 20,000 feet. But then here comes one of those 

 admirable examples of the way in which the theoretical 

 life of this world and the practical life interlock with one 

 another, and interact with one another. Theoretical 

 science, abstract investigation, carried on without re- 

 ference to any practical aim whatever, that sort" of 

 abstract investigation which recent Acts of Parliament 

 have endeavoured to throw a slur upon in this country, 

 though I am happy to say that that has been removed in 

 the House in which it originated — that kind of abstract in- 

 vestigation without immediate practical result, gave us the 

 electric telegraph. When the electric telegraph was got, 

 practical men desired to use it as a means of connecting 

 remotely removed countries. For that purpose it was 

 necessary to lay submarine telegraphs. For that purpose 

 it was necessary to improve our means of sounding ; and 

 so out of the electric telegraph came those means of 

 sounding at great depths of the sea, which have enabled 

 us, for the first time, to bring up from the bottom, from a 

 depth of two or three, or it may be four miles of sea- 

 water, the actual things which are to be found at that 

 enormous depth. That took place twenty years ago. In 

 1858, my friend Commander Dayman was engaged in the 

 survey of the Atlantic for the purposes of the cable ; and 



the Americans, who joined in the like service, had in- 

 vented means by which specimens could be brought up 

 from that depth. So that, if I may so say, ten years ago 

 it was in the air to apply those new methods supplied by 

 practical life to scientific purposes, to apply the methods 

 of sounding, the methods of dredging, and the methods 

 of ascertaining temperature which had been devised for 

 the purposes of the telegraph engineer, to further investi- 

 gation of the contents and nature of the sea. But it is all 

 very well for ideas to be in the air. It needs clear brains 

 to get them out of the air, and in this case there were two 

 very clear brains at work on the subject — one of them the 

 brain of our distinguished guest of to-night, Sir C. Wyville 

 Thomson — and the other the brain of my friend Dr. 

 Carpenter, who is well known to the scientific world." 



Prof Huxley then referred briefly to the history of recent 

 deep-sea exploration and to the influences brought to bear 

 on the Admiralty to send out the Challenger. He spoke 

 of the object of the expedition and of the important 

 results which have been achieved. " It was a very con- 

 siderable task," he said, " it was a task which would have 

 been absolutely chimerical thirty years ago, but it was a 

 task which had been rendered possible, and which has 

 been actually performed in the most satisfactory manner. 

 The Challena^er has brought home, I am informed, the 

 records of such operations performed at between 300 and 

 400 stations— that is to say, at 300 or 400 points along 

 that 70,000 miles, we know exactly the depth of the sea, 

 the gradations of temperature, the distribution of super- 

 ficial life, and the nature of what constitutes the sea- 

 bottom ; and such a foundation as that for all future 

 thought upon the physical geography of the sea up to this 

 moment not only had not existed, but had not even been 

 dreamed of. I won't detain you by speaking of the great 

 results of the expedition, for one very good reason, that I 

 don't know them. They are in the breast of my friend at 

 the opposite end of the table. But he has been good 

 enough to favour us at the Royal Society from time to 

 time with reports of what he has been about, and some 

 of the discoveries which have been made by the Chal- 

 letiger are undoubtedly such as to make us all form new 

 ideas of the operation of natural causes in the sea. Take, 

 for example, the very remarkable fact that at great depths 

 the temperature of the sea always sinks down pretty much 

 to that of freezing fresh water. That is a very strange 

 fact in itself, a fact which certainly could not have been 

 anticipated d. priori. Take, again, the marvellous dis- 

 covery that over large areas of the sea the bottom is 

 covered with a kind of chalk, a substance made up entirely 

 of the shells^ of minute creatures— a soit of geological 

 shoddy made of the cast-off clothes of those animals. The 

 fact had been known for a long time, and we were greatly 

 puzzled to know how those things got to be there. But the 

 researches of the Challenger'hz.vt proved beyond question, 

 as far as I can see, that the remains in question are the 

 shells of organisms which live at the surface and not at the 

 bottom, and that this deposit, which is of the same nature 

 as the ancient chalk, differing in some minor respects but 

 essentially the same, is absolutely formed by a rain of 

 skeletons. These creatures all live within 100 fathoms of 

 the surface, and being subject to the fate of all living 

 things, they sooner or later die, and when they die their 

 skeletons are rained down in one continual shower, falhng 

 through a mile or couple of miles of sea-water. How 

 long they take about it imagination fails one in supposing, 

 but at last they get to the bottom, and there, piled up, 

 they form a great stratum of a substance which, if up- 

 heaved, would be exactly like chalk. Here we have a 

 possible mode of construction of the rocks which com- 

 pose the earth of which we had previously no conception. 

 But this is by no means the most wonderful thing. When 

 they got to depths of 3,000 and 4,000 fathoms, and to 

 4,400 fathoms, or about five miles, which was the greatest 

 depth at which the Challenger fished anything from the 



