168 STUDIES IN INSECT LIFE, ETC. 



that of his uncle, Sir John Ross, to Baffin Bay, 

 many classical soundings were made. Depths of 

 over 1,000 fathoms were plumbed in the Arctic, 

 and for the first time it was realised that animals 

 abounded at great depths in the ocean. Worms, 

 Crustacea, and " corallines " were found living on 

 a substratum of gravel and clay. Places even of 

 1,000 fathoms were dredged and yielded living 

 creatures, and Sir John Ross's expedition for the 

 first time demonstrated the existence of animal 

 life at great depths of the ocean. 



In the middle of the last century many ex- 

 peditions, most of which were British or North 

 American, were investigating the economics of 

 the sea, but in nearly every case they had some 

 commercial object and were not exclusively 

 scientific. The invention of telegraphy and the 

 possibility of telegraphic messages being con- 

 veyed by submarine cables made the problem 

 of the deep a " financial proposition/' as the 

 Americans say. In surveying a possible route 

 for a cable to the United States, Dr. Wallich, in 

 1860, on board H.M.S. " Bulldog/' traversed the 

 Atlantic and was one of the first to appreciate 

 the fact that plant life hardly exists in the sea 

 below the zoo-fathom line, and he further noticed 



