THE DEPTHS OF THE SEA 15 



touched bottom and thus left only the tube and 

 the sample of the bottom it caught to be 

 drawn up. 



At first thought one would not consider it 

 such a difficult matter to drop the various in- 

 struments and apparatus over a ship's side, 

 draw them along the bottom and haul them 

 in, but when we consider the miles of cable 

 required and its weight we can appreciate the 

 difficulties encountered by the earlier investi- 

 gators and we can understand why special ma- 

 chinery and appliances were necessary before 

 any great results could be accomplished in 

 deep-sea work. 



We would imagine that this world of ooze, 

 darkness and cold would be a dead, uninhab- 

 ited waste and for many years the foremost 

 scientists believed this to be the case. But we 

 now know that this is not true and that while 

 the very deepest abysses of the ocean are 

 scarcely inhabited, at least by any forms of life 

 that we can capture, yet in most places the 

 ocean's bed fairly teems with myriads of 

 strange creatures, the majority of which the 

 eye of man has never seen. 



