«26 • KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



friends of the State and its prosperity, of science, of education and of popular en- 

 lightenment, will exert their influence to secure the adoption of the pending bill 

 and a vigorous prosecution of the important work it proposes. 



THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN. 



In the National Academy of Sciences, yesterday, in Columbia College, Prof. 

 A. E. Verrill, of Yale College, described the physical and geological character of 

 the bottom of the sea off our coast, especially that which lies beneath the Gulf 

 stream. He made 1,500 observations this summer for the United States Fish 

 Commissioners. He has cruised from Labrador to Chesapeake Bay and about 

 200 miles out to sea. About sixty miles outside of Nantucket is a streak of very 

 cold water, and animals dredged up are like those caught in Greenland, Spitz- 

 bergen, and Siberia. The water is fifty fathoms deep, and the bottom of the 

 ocean is of clay. Boulders weighing eight hundred or one thousand pounds 

 are dredged up. Prof. Verrill believes that they are brought down by icebergs 

 from the Arctic regions and dropped when the ice melts. The boulders are found 

 as far south as Long Island. Further out to sea, seventy to one hundred and 

 twenty miles south from the southeastern coast of New England, the bottom of 

 the sea, which has inclined very gradually eastward, forming a table land, takes 

 a sudden dip downward, so that whereas the water on the edge of the bluff is 100 

 fathoms deep, at the bottom of the basin it is 1,000 fathoms deep. The slope is 

 as high and as steep as Mount Washington, and on its summit, which is level, a 

 diver, could he go to so low a depth, could not put out his hand without touch- 

 ing a living creature. The bottom of the sea is covered just there with a fauna 

 which has never been before found outside of the Mediterranean Sea, the Gulf 

 ■of Mexico, the Indies and other tropical regions. 



The number of species of fish dredged up is 800, and over half of them have 

 never before been seen by naturaHsts. Seventy kinds of fish, ninety of Crustacea 

 and 270 mollusks have been added to the fauna. The age of many of the speci- 

 mens shows that they must be permanent in that region. The trawl let down 

 from the ships by a mile of rope brings up a ton of Uving and dead crabs, shrimp, 

 star fish, and as the trawl simply scrapes over a small surface the ocean bed is 

 plainly carpeted with creatures. 



Sharks are seen by thousands in this region, and countless dolphins, but it 

 seems strange that not a fish-bone is ever dredged up. A piece of wood may 

 be dredged up once a year, but it is honeycombed by the boring shell fish, and 

 falls to pieces at the touch of the hand. This shows what destruction is constant- 

 ly going on in these depths. If a ship sinks at sea with all on board it would be 

 eaten up by fish with the exception of the metal, and that would corrode and dis- 

 appear. Not a bone of a human body would remain after a few days. It is a 

 constant display of the law of the survival of the fittest. Nothing made by the 

 hand of man was dredged up after cruising for months in the track of ocean ves- 



