OCEANOGRAPHY, BIONOMICS, AND AQUICULTURE. 441 



to the zoologist, but it is not a rich fauna. It contains some rare and 

 remarkable animals not found elsewhere, such as Calocaris macandrece, 

 PanthaUs oerstedi, LipobrancMusjeffreysi, Brissopsis lyrifera, Amphiura 

 chiajii, Isocardia cor, and Sagartia herdmani; and a few si: iking - novel- 

 ties have been described from it of late years, but we have no reason 

 to believe that the number of these is great compared with the num- 

 ber of animals obtained from shallower waters. 



Dr. Murray not only insists upon the abundance of animals on the 

 mud, and its importance as the great feeding ground and place of 

 origin of life in the ocean, but he also (p. 1432) draws conclusions as to 

 the relative numbers of animals taken by a single haul of the trawl in 

 deep and shallow waters which can scarcely be received, I think, by 

 marine zoologists without a protest. His statement runs (p. 1432) : "It 

 is interesting to compare single hauls made in the deep sea and in 

 shallow water with respect to the number of different species obtained. 

 For instance, at station 146 in the Southern Ocean, at a depth of 1,375 

 fathoms, the 200 specimens captured belonged to 59 genera and 78 

 species." That was with a 10-foot trawl dragged for at most 2 miles 

 during at most two hours. Murray then goes on to say: "In depths 

 less than 50 fathoms, on the other hand, I can not find in all my experi- 

 ments any record of such a variety of organisms in any single haul even 

 when using much larger trawls and dragging over much greater dis- 

 tances." He quotes the statistics of the Scottish fishery board's 

 trawlings in the North Sea, with a 25-foot trawl, to show that the 

 average catch is 7.3 species of iuvertebrata and 8.3 species of fish, 

 the greatest number of both together recorded in one haul being 29 

 species. Murray's own trawlings in the west of Scotland gave a nmch 

 greater number of species, sometimes as many as 50, "still not such a 

 great variety of animals as was procured in many instances by the 

 Challenger 7 s small trawl in great depths. 



Now, in the first place, it is curious that Murray's own table on page 

 1437, in which he shows that the "terrigenous" deposits lying along the 

 shore lines yield many more animals, both specimens and species, per 

 haul, tha"u do the "pelagic" deposits 1 at greater depths, such as red 

 clays and globigerina oozes, seems directly opposed to the conclusion 

 quoted above. In the second place, I am afraid that Dr. Murray has 

 misunderstood the statistics of the Scottish fishery board when he 



1 One of the earliest of the Challenger oceanographic results, the classification of the 

 submarine deposits into "terrigenous" and "pelagic," seems inadequate to repre- 

 sent fully the facts in regard to sea bottoms, so I am proposing elsewhere ("Report 

 of Irish Sea Committee") the following amended classification : (1) Terrigenous 

 (Murray), where the deposit is formed chiefly of mineral particles derived from the 

 waste of the land; (2) Neritic, where the deposit is chiefly of organic origin, and is 

 derived from the shells and other hard parts of the animals and plants living on the 

 bottom; (3) Planktonic (Murray's "pelagic"), where the greater part of the deposit 

 is formed of the remains of free-swimming animals and plants which lived in the sea 

 over the deposit. 



