Navy, and his navigating skill as well as his private fortune were 

 soon being devoted to oceanography. The most obvious memorial 

 to his work is the magnificent and world-renowned marine station 

 at Monaco, but equally outstanding is the long series of volumes he 

 published on the collections he made during his many cruises. 



In 1889 a German group aboard the National surveyed for 

 plankton in the Atlantic. The years 1895-96 saw the Danish Ingolf 

 worldng off Iceland; 1898-99 the German Valdivia working in the 

 Atlantic and Indian Oceans; and in 1899 the Dutch Sihoga investi- 

 gated the waters of the Dutch East Indies. These last three expedi- 

 tions exempUfy how ocean-going expeditions complement the work 

 of shore stations. Each ship surveyed a particular part of the ocean 

 far beyond the reach of any shore station, and it did so systematically 

 and methodically, just as a shore station studies the shore and 

 shaUow seas. 



Before these expeditions Ufe in the deep seas had been virtually 

 a closed book. Darwin's theory of evolution had influenced thought 

 to the extent that many scientists tended to beHeve that Hfe in the 

 deep seas, if any, would consist of animals from earher geological 

 times. The general idea was that life had begun in the shallow seas 

 and had spread outward into the oceans and onto the land, and 

 that the primitive forms of Ufe had taken refuge in the ocean depths. 

 This theory was strengthened when, in 1866, an unusual animal 

 was brought up from the deep waters of the Lofoten fjords in 

 Norway. It was a living sea lily, closely related to certain remains 

 that had been found in rocks 3 5 o milUon years old and that were 

 believed to be the remains of a long-extinct species. 



Louis Agassiz, for one, had maintained that deep-sea collecting 

 would reveal the presence of "living fossils" - that in the depths 

 of the oceans was a kind of Lost World. But the collections made 

 by the Challenger showed that, while deep-sea animals might be 

 different from those living nearer the surface, it was only because 

 they were specialized to Ufe in the great depths. Some, indeed, 

 showed no differences at all. A recent find of a species of worm 

 (Pogonophoran) shows that this animal Uves at depths ranging 

 from fifteen fathoms to 6000 fathoms. One sea urchin brought up 



Until 1938 the coelacanth, whicti lived 

 seventy million years ago, was tliought to 

 be extinct, but fishermen off Madagascar 

 have been bringing them up in nets for 

 years. The drawing (below) was based on a 

 coelacanth fossil found In English chalk 

 cliffs before the first live coelacanth was 

 studied. 



