422 ALEXANDER AGASSIZ 



up vast quantities of fishes, Salpse, Medusse, Crustacea, 

 and other forms of pelagic life. On one occasion the 

 mass of the pelagic hauls consisted entirely of small 

 brown copepods, the contents of the nets looking like 

 sago soup. Sometimes they came across such masses of 

 Salpae, Cytaeis, or Cybulia as to make a thick broth of 

 the water. In other places the surface fairly swarmed 

 with Globigerinse, radiolarians, and diatoms. Indeed, 

 one characteristic of the Humboldt Current seems to be 

 that it contains within the three hundred fathom line 

 nearly every variation of Radiolaria and diatoms. Nor 

 was the trawl less prolific in the material it scraped 

 from the sea bottom, which included quantities of deep- 

 sea fishes, Crustacea and holothurians, many of them 

 old friends collected in the Expedition of 1891. Some 

 interesting genera of worms were brought up and a 

 few mollusks ; compared with 1891, however, but few 

 star-fishes and brittle stars were obtained, and fewer 

 sea-urchins. 



One interesting result of the hauls of the tow nets 

 from three hundred fathoms to the surface was the great 

 number of fishes caught, many of which had previously 

 been considered true deep-sea fishes, caught only by 

 dredging from one thousand to fifteen hundred fathoms 

 or more. On one occasion the tow net brought up no 

 less than twelve species of fishes in a total of nearly 

 one hundred and fifty specimens, and on other occa- 

 sions it was not uncommon to find eight or ten species 

 and from fifty to one hundred specimens. 



Whenever the plunder from a tow or trawl reached 

 the laboratory, Agassiz's remarkable knowledge of 

 marine fauna was a fresh source of astonishment to 

 his assistants. He would begin a rapid enumeration of 



