DEEP-SEA DREDGINGS. 163 



a supposition ! Intense cold, perfect darkness, and a 

 persistent pressure of two or three tons to the square 

 inch such, he might have argued, are the con- 

 ditions 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 onty rudi- 

 mentary 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 the three-mile mountain 

 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 how light may reach 

 these creatures, we have no present means of deter- 

 mining. 



If there is one theory which geologists have 

 thought more justly founded than all others, it is the 

 view that the various strata of the earth were formed 

 at different times. A chalk district, for example, lying 

 side by side with a sandstone district, has been referred 

 to a totally different era. Whether the chalk was 

 formed first, or whether the sandstone existed before 



