22 FAIRY LAND AMONG THE SPONGES. 



six hundred fathoms, or about two-thirds of a mile, being 

 given as the extreme limit of life, whether vegetable or 

 animal. All the vast expanse below it was assumed to 

 be a still, silent, dead desolation. 



But when the great deep-sea sounding expeditions 

 were undertaken, and specimens of the sea-bed were 

 raised from a depth of more than five miles, it was 

 found that there was no profundity to which the plum- 

 met could penetrate that did not produce examples of 

 animal life, some of them so delicate and so elaborately 

 constructed, that no one who saw them for the first time 

 could imagine that they could have sustained the tremen- 

 dous weight above them. Marvellous beauty of form was 

 found at depths so great that until late years men could 

 not reach the ocean bed with the plummet. Even now, 

 when deep-sea sounding is studied as an art, so great is 

 the friction of the water upon the wire rope, that when 

 the weights have once reached the bottom of the sea, they 

 cannot be drawn up again, but must be detached from 

 the scrapers and left among the submarine life which 

 they have been the means of discovering. 



Until a few years ago, the eye of man never saw these 

 beautiful forms, and up to the present time we have 

 only seen some of those which occupied a few square 

 inches of the sea bed. So with the glass-sponges. Who 

 would not have thought that they were created to 

 gladden the eye of man with their indescribable beauty ? 

 Had a stranger to them been asked in what seas they 

 had been found, he would naturally have turned his 



