Too many Jelly-fishes. 2 2 1 



time, and not only braves the tempest, but makes his 

 friends brave it with him, in order to gratify the wishes 

 of the lads at home. 



He did not, however, neglect the purpose for which 

 he had made the journey. There was a good deal of 

 dredging done, but as it was chiefly for ostracoda 

 and foraminifera, those little organisms took up little 

 time in preservation. He only took the siftings that 

 passed through a sieve of a quarter of an inch mesh, 

 and these were put up in bags holding about seven or 

 eight pounds weight of ooze, to be examined in future 

 at leisure. 



He had hoped, when planning the excursion, to do 

 some good work with the surface-net as well as with 

 the dredge, but he was very much baulked in this 

 expectation, not so much by want of favourable 

 weather as by the circumstance that frequently the 

 small medusae were so excessively abundant that the 

 net filled with them as soon as it entered the water, 

 and, even when there were fewer, they were still so 

 many as to overpower everything else, it being next 

 door to impossible to separate the rarer treasures from 

 this slippery gelatinous mass. The number of jelly- 

 fishes of various sizes cast up on the sea-shore are 

 sometimes sufficiently striking, but they bear but a 

 small proportion to what the ocean is capable of 

 supplying. One day, when the boat was taken in 

 between the rocks of Bressay and Noss, on looking 

 over the boat-side they saw the water thick with 

 small medusae as far as their eyes could penetrate 

 down into it. 



It would not be safe to depend on seeing the 



