290 Life in the Beep Sea. 



truths less singular and instructive. From a priori reasoning 

 it might have been imagined that if, through long ages, a littoral 

 species of an animal so highly organized as a starfish had 

 become acclimated to totally different conditions of depth, 

 pressure, darkness, and aeration, it would also have under- 

 gone constitutional changes that would have been reflected 

 in its structure, but no such alteration seems to have taken 

 place in the subjects of Dr. Wallich's investigation. We 

 inquire whether the deep sea ophiocomse which belong to a 

 littoral species were themselves in earlier life the occupants of 

 shallower waters, and made a voluntary or involuntary migra- 

 tion to the depths below ; or whether they were the born 

 children of the abyss, the lineal descendants of some pilgrim 

 fathers of their race whose wanderings date back to the period 

 when changes of level and in the distribution of land and water 

 necessitated an alteration of their abode. The Ophiocoma 

 granulata appears to be a creature of determined adhesion to a 

 particular type. It ranges from the confines of the Arctic 

 circle to the British shores, able to make itself at home from 

 ten fathoms to 1260, and in either of these extreme conditions, 

 or in any of their intermediaries, to rear a family for the per- 

 petuation of its name. 



No' similar adaptability seems to belong to any member of 

 the vegetable world. Dr. Wallich met with no proper Algse 

 below two hundred fathoms, and his deep sea dredging only 

 yielded Diatoms whose frustules "indicated a molecular condi- 

 tion of the protoplasmic matter, differing so materially from 

 that observable in similar organisms taken in a living condition 

 in shallow water as to render it certain that the vegetable life 

 ceases at a limit far short of that to which animal life has ever 

 been shown to extend." This assertion may be too dogmatic 

 to suit the actual condition of our knowledge ; but if it should 

 be found that there are regions in which, so to speak, every 

 animal is his own vegetable, it will reveal to us fresh secrets 

 pertaining to the great mysteries of organization and life. 



A book like Dr. WaHich's would naturally command a large 

 circle of readers, and we regret that its mode of publication will 

 restrict it to a very few. Science is not so profitable that many of 

 its votaries can afford fifteen shillings for a stout quarto pamphlet, 

 offered as an instalment of the entire work. We can hardly 

 imagine that the profundity of his researches appeared to so able 

 an observer to necessitate a corresponding elevation of the price 

 of the narrative in which they were enshrined, and we should like 

 to know whether he has been a victim of the "Lords Commis- 

 sioners of the Admiralty," under whose sanction, the title-page 

 informs us, the North Atlantic Sea Bed has been brought 

 out, or whether his worthy publisher, who has done so much 



