44 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



specimens of deep-sea soundings are as pure and as free from the 

 sand of the sea as the snowfiake that falls when it is calm upon 

 the lea is from the dust of the earth. Indeed, these soundings 

 suggest the idea that the sea, like the snow cloud with its flakes in 

 a calm, is always letting fall upon its bed showers of these micro- 

 scopic shells; and we may readily imagine that the ' sunless 

 wrecks ' which strew its bottom are, in the process of ages, hid 

 under this fleecy covering, presenting the rounded appearance 

 which is seen over the body of a traveler who has perished in the 

 snowstorm. The ocean, especially within and near the tropics, 

 swarms with life. The remains of its myriads of moving things 

 are conveyed by currents, and scattered and lodged in the course 

 of time all over its bottom. The process, continued for ages, has 

 covered the depths of the ocean as with a mantle, consisting of 

 organisms as delicate as the macled frost and as light as the un- 

 drifted snowflake of the mountain." 



Maury was right in respect to the covering of the bed of the 

 deep sea, for, as a result of all our researches, it is found that in 

 waters removed from the land and more than fourteen hundred 

 fathoms in depth there is an almost unbroken layer of pteropod, 

 globigerina, diatom, and radiolarian oozes, and red clay which 

 occupies nearly 115,000,000 of the 143,000,000 square miles of the 

 water surface of the globe. But he was wrong in asserting that 

 low temperature, pressure, and the absence of light preclude the 

 possibility of life in very deep water. 



Ehrenberg held the opposite opinion with regard to the condi- 

 tions of life at the bottom of the sea, as may be seen from the fol- 

 lowing extract from a letter which he wrote to Maury in 1857 : 

 " The other argument for life in the deep which I have established 

 is the surprising quantity of new forms which are wanting in 

 other parts of the sea. If the bottom were nothing but the sedi- 

 ment of the troubled sea, like the fall of snow in the air, and if 

 the biolithic curves of the bottom were nothing else than the prod- 

 uct of the currents of the sea which heap up the flakes, similarly 

 to the glaciers, there would necessarily be much less of unknown 

 and peculiar forms in the depths. The surface and the borders of 

 the sea are much more productive and much more extended than 

 the depths ; hence the forms peculiar to the depths should not be 

 perceived. The great quantity of peculiar forms and of soft bodies 

 existing in the innumerable carapaces, accompanied by the obser- 

 vation of the number of unknowns, increasing with the depth — 

 these are the arguments which seem to me to hold firmly to the 

 opinion of stationary life at the bottom of the deep sea." 



It would appear to have been definitely established by the re- 

 searches of the last fifty years that life in some of its many forms 

 is universally distributed throughout the ocean. Not only in the 



