DEEP-SEA DREDGINGS. 145 



No light can be supposed to penetrate to the enor- 

 mous depth just spoken of. Therefore, how certainly 

 we might conclude that there can be no life there. If, 

 instead of dealing with the habitability of planets, 

 Whewell, in his * Plurality of Worlds,' had been con- 

 sidering the question whether at depths of two or three 

 miles living creatures could subsist, how convincingly 

 would he have proved the absurdity of such a suppo- 

 sition. Intense cold, perfect darkness, and a persistent 

 pressure of two or three tons to the square inch, 

 such, he might have argued, are the conditions under 

 which life exists, if at all, in those dismal depths. 

 And even if he had been disposed to concede the bare 

 possibility that life of some sort may be found there, 

 then certainly, he would have urged, some new sense 

 must replace sight the creatures in these depths can 

 assuredly have no eyes, or only rudimentary ones. 



But the recent deep-sea dredgings have proved that 

 not only does life exist in the very deepest parts 

 of the Atlantic, but that the beings which live and 

 move and have their being beneath three miles of 

 water have eyes which the ablest naturalists pro- 

 nounce to be perfectly developed. Light, then, of 

 some sort must exist in those abysms, though whether 

 the home of the deep-sea animals be phosphorescent, 

 as Sir Charles Lyell suggests, or whether light reaches 

 these creatures in some other way, we have no present 

 means of determining. 



If there is one theory which geologists have thought 

 more justly founded than all others, it is the view that 



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