DEEP-SEA FORMATIONS. 145 
others, dredged a few manatee ribs in the Straits of Florida, 
Neither the Fish Commission nor the “Blake” has been equally 
successful. The “Challenger,” however, dredged thousands 
of sharks’ teeth and cetacean bones in 2,300 to 2,800 fathoms. 
They were principally found in restricted areas, far removed 
from land, in the abyssal red-clay regions, where the rate of ac- 
cumulation is very slow, and where such bones are not likely to 
be buried by detritus coming from the shores, or by the more 
rapid deposition going on along continental shelves. These 
deposits may be analogous to the bone beds of the corniferous, 
or perhaps to the phosphate beds of South Carolina, or the 
Cambridge coprolite beds. On the east coast of the United 
States, and in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, sharks’ 
teeth have been dredged, but rarely. Either the sharks of 
former times were much more numerous, or, as has been sug- 
gested by Professor Verrill, their remains, as well as those of 
fishes! and other vertebrates, were not immediately devoured 
by other inhabitants of the deep sea. One would also expect 
that the bones of porpoises would be common in localities 
where they are often seen sporting by hundreds, as along the 
Windward Islands. Yet none were dredged by the “ Blake.” 
An examination of the fossils from many of the raised sea- 
beaches reveals types which the late explorations have shown 
to be deep-sea forms. Seguenza was the first, in studying the 
pliocene deposits of southern Italy, to show that some of them 
were deposited in deep water. He suggested that the forami- 
niferous, bryozoan, coral, and radiolarian beds were deposits 
which must have been laid down at considerable depths ; he was 
led to this conclusion by a comparison of their fossils with the 
animals of the present day found at great depths. Before the 
recent deep-sea investigations, geologists were misled by the 
strange forms contained in many of. the foraminiferal deep-sea 
deposits of the tertiary period, and looked upon these deposits 
as much older than they were in reality. 
Fuchs has also compared other beds of the tertiary, on account 
of their characteristic fossils, with certain deep-sea deposits. The 
1 Otoliths of fishes oecur not unfrequently in the fine muds of the Gulf of 
Mexico. 
