CHAPTER 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 ani- 

 mal or vegetable life existing under conditions, 

 not which are not as truly proper to them as the 

 jungle to the tiger or the river to the crocodile, 

 but which appear to us strange and incongruous ; 

 which create in us suiprwe, 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 great 

 depths of ocean. The researches of Sars, Mac- 

 Andrew, and others, in the Norwegian seas, and 

 those of Edward Forbes in the Aegean, 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 mollusca, and would, of course, fall 

 to the bottom, whatever the depth of the sea in 

 which the fish might happen to be swimming. 

 Deutalium entale, Leda pvgnh-ra, nnd Crvptodon 

 flexuosus have been taken alive in the northern 

 seas at two hundred fathoms' depth: in the 

 Aegean Sea, Kellia abyssicola and Newra cuspi- 

 data, two little bivalves, were dredged, the former 

 in one hundred and eighty, the latter in one hun- 

 67 



