14 THE NOETH-EAST ATLANTIC. 



opposing polar stream contributes fislies and other living creatures from tlie north. 

 Thus it hap23ens that in the cold zone of the Fiiroer Channel nearly all the echino- 

 derms belong to the same species as those of Scandinavia and Greenland.* And 

 although the European waters, especially on the Brit:sh and Scandinavian coasts, 

 have been by far the most carefully studied, yet every fresh exploration reveals 

 organisms hitherto unknown to science. 



Some idea of the boundless life of the North Atlantic may be derived from the 

 geological formations which this animal world is ceaselessly creating. Between 

 Norway, the Fiiroer, and Iceland the bottom of the ocean at 1,000 fathoms and 

 upwards consists everywhere of a greyish calcareous clay, formed to a very great 

 extent of the remains of a species of foraminifer called Binoculina by the 

 naturalists. This organism plays the same geological part in the Norwegian that 

 the Olobigerina does in the Greenland waters. These new formations, which are 

 being incessantly deposited on the bed of the AtLntic, are compared to chalk by 

 Thomson and Carpenter, who have suggested that the chalk period has, so to 

 speak, been continued uninterruptedly, and is still being continued in the northern 

 seas. In fact, the chalk now being formed in these waters is so like that of the 

 English cliffs that the most skilful microscopist is not always able to distinguish 

 them. It also contains many forms identical with the fossils of the older chalks,t 

 while the different species present the same tj^pe. They seem to have been slowly 

 modified during the course of ages. Forchhammer's chemical analyses, subse- 

 quently confirmed by the English explorers, have shown that the waters richest in 

 calcareous substances are precisely those between Ireland and Newfoundland. 

 Here the animalculte find in superabundance the elements which they have to 

 transform into those rocky strata in which as many as 500,000 calcareous shells 

 are sometimes found in a square inch. In the inlets of the Atlantic, such 

 as the Kattegat and Baltic, the proportion of calcareous matter is still greater,^ 

 the detritus on the banks of the streams constantly furnishing materials to the sea 

 for the formation of new rocks. 



During the last ten centuries the fauna of the North Atlantic may have been 

 slightly modified by the action of man. The Basque fishermen first of all exter- 

 minated the species of whale frequenting their shores, and later on the Baîœna 

 franca, formerly met with off the European coasts in all the northern waters, was 

 relentlessly pursued by the Basques and others, so that since the beginning of the 

 eighteenth century it has retreated farther and farther towards the Polar Sea. At 

 the opening of the present century over a thousand whales were yearly taken in 

 the Spitzbergen waters ; in 1814 as many as 1,437 were captured, but they became 

 rarer from year to year, and in 1840 had disappeared altogether. At present 



* Wyville Thomson, "Depths of the Sea," p. 43. 



t According to Eupert Jones, 19 in 110 fcraminifera. 



X Proportion of calcareous matter in the Atlantic (according to Forchhammer) :— 



Average of the ocean 296 in 1,000. 



North Atlantic, between latitude 30" and bb" . . 3-07 „ 



Kattegat 3.99 ,, 



Baltic 3.59 



