FOURTH WEEK] June 169 



any near shore. Occasionally the head alone of a large 

 fish will appear, with the entire body bitten clean off, a hint 

 of the monsters which must haunt the lower depths. The 

 pressure of the air must be excessive, for many of the fishes 

 have their swimming bladders fairly forced out of their 

 mouths by the lessening of atmospheric pressure as they 

 are drawn to the surface. When a basket starfish finds 

 one of the baits in that sunless void far beneath our boat, 

 he hugs it so tenaciously that the upward jerks of the reel 

 only make him hold the more tightly. 



Once in a great while the fishermen find what they 

 call a " knob-fish " on one of their hooks, and I never 

 knew what they meant until one day a small colony of five 

 was brought ashore. Boltenia, the scientists call them, 

 tall, queer-shaped things; a stalk six to eight inches in 

 length, with a knob or oblong bulb-like body at the summit, 

 looking exactly like the flower of a lady-slipper orchid and 

 as delicately coloured. This is a member of that curious 

 family of Ascidians, which forever trembles in the balance 

 between the higher back-boned animals and the lower 

 division, where are classified the humbler insects, crabs, 

 and snails. The young of Boltenia promises everything in 

 its tiny backbone or notochord, but it all ends in promise, 

 for that shadow of a great ambition withers away, and 

 the creature is doomed to a lowly and vegetative life. 

 If we soften the hard scientific facts which tell us of these 

 dumb, blind creatures, with the humane mellowing thought 

 of the oneness of all life, we will find much that is pathetic 

 and affecting in their humble biographies from our point 

 of view. And yet these cases of degeneration are far from 



