EQUIPMENT. 27 
bly, obviating all fouling, and doing away with the frequent 
delays so annoying when the ordinary single-beam trawl is used 
in deep water. It was practically a double trawl, bearing the 
same relation to the old beam-trawl which the ordinary dredges 
bear to the old oyster dredge, and sure to do its duty, on mun 
ever side it might happen to fall; the runners were made ellip- 
tical, high enough to give fair scope to the lead line of the 
trawl, and thus it became a matter of indifference on which 
side of the runners the trawl landed. Under these conditions 
the hauls were always successful. 
At great depths, where a light ooze covers the bottom, the 
trawl soon becomes completely filled with the mass of sticky 
mud which finds its way into it; and when brought to the 
surface it is found that but little has been washed out through 
the meshes of the trawl-bag. The labor of sifting this large 
mass of mud (often as much as a ton) is very considerable. 
It is done by washing off the mud in sieves provided with 
handles, and shaken in tubs of water. The United States 
Fish Commission use a table-sieve upon which plays a hose; 
this quickly disposes of a large amount of mud. It-became im- 
portant to do the sifting as far as practicable while trawling. 
To aecomplish this, the bag of the trawl was greatly shortened 
(reduced to fifteen feet), and the meshes of the outer net made 
coarse, while only a very small part of the bag was fine enough 
to allow the accumulation of mud. The result proved the wis- 
dom of this change. We were now rarely overwhelmed with the 
masses of mud which had rendered so much additional work of 
sifting necessary during the first cruises. After this change it 
also became possible to drag the trawl with considerable rapidity 
over the bottom (sometimes as fast as three and one-half miles 
an hour) and thus to catch the more active fishes and crus- 
tacea, which keep out of the way of the trawl when it moves 
slowly. We also tried dragging a heavy tow-net rapidly over 
the ground at great depths, in hopes of accomplishing the same 
object but we Tand that, after all, no deep-sea machine worked 
years of dredging and sounding off the count of the apparatus will be found in 
coast of the United States in the “Fish the Annual Reports of the United States 
Hawk" and “ Albatross.” A full ac- Fish Commission. 
