III. 



DISCREPANCIES. 



I USE the term at the head of this chapter for lack of a 

 better. There are no real discrepancies in nature, but I 

 may conveniently employ the word to distinguish a class 

 of phenomena not without interest. We occasionally 

 meet with animal or vegetable life existing under condi- 

 tions, not which are not as truly proper to them as the 

 jungle to the tiger or the river to the crocodile, but whicli 

 appear to us strange and incongruous ; which create in 

 us surprise, as the most prominent emotion of the mind, 

 surprise at finding life, or any particular phase of it, in 

 circumstances where we should not a priori have at 

 all expected to find it. Examples will best explain what 

 I mean. 



Take, then, the existence of animal life at groat depths 

 of ocean. The researches of Sars, MacAndrew, and others, 

 in the Norwegian seas, and those of Edward Forbes in 

 the ^Egean, have shewn that mollusca exist under two 

 hundred fathoms of water. Dead shells, indeed, are con- 

 tinually dredged from far greater depths ; but these may 

 have been voided by the many fishes which feed on mol- 

 lusca, and would, of course, fall to the bottom, whatever 

 the depth of the sea in which the fish might happen to be 





