60 Walt he r — Origin and Peopling of the Beep Sea. 



I have busied myself much with recent deep sea sediments, 

 have studied those of the Challenger expedition, and in my 

 geologic studies have considered again and again whether any- 

 where a fossil rock possesses abyssal characteristics, and can 

 state that nowhere have I met with a rock either from Paleo- 

 zoic or Mesozoic deposits that by its structure and nature of 

 deposition corresponds to the present sediments of the deep 

 sea. Even the radiolarian rocks made known through Dr. 

 lihsfs careful studies contain no likeness to the radiolarian 

 ooze of the present deep sea. Their coal wealth, the mass of 

 terrigenous material, and their stratigraphie connection with 

 undoubted littoral sediments make it impossible to see in them 

 the deposits of the deep sea. We are much more reminded 

 of the tripoli of Sicily and the oceanographic conditions in the 

 straits of Messina. Here rushes upward a mighty stream of cold 

 deep sea water, bringing deep sea fishes, crabs and radiolarians 

 to the surface of the sea where they, mingled with the dwellers 

 of the upper water strata, give rise to the richness of the 

 sea fauna here so well known to all zoologists. John Murray 

 attained the same result after he had applied to a number of 



Geologists with the request to send him fossil " deep sea rocks." 

 'he microscopic examination showed that only on a few small 

 islands like Malta, Barbados, and Christmas island occurs true 

 Tertiary deep sea ooze, and the local distribution of these 

 unmistakably indicates that local upheavals of former deep 

 sea bottom formed the nuclei of these islands. Although 

 almost the entire areas of the continents of to-day have been 

 wholly or partly and repeatedly overflowed by the ocean since 

 the Cambrian, yet we know here only such deposits as are now 

 forming in the shallow seas or in depths not below 1000 to 

 2000 meters. 



Herewith we confirm by geologic proof a view which has 

 long been asserted on the ground of theoretical speculations 

 and which centers in the statement: the deep sea of to-day has 

 been deep sea for a long period and it has not essentially shifted 

 its place on the earth's sphere since its origin. The deep sea 

 basins appear to us as the original regions of ocean origin, 

 from which the sea periodically transgresses upon the con- 

 tinents, only to flow back again into the gigantic gathering- 

 reservoir. 



Geologically it can be shown with certainty that former 

 continents have been sea bottom. Thus, we find in Devonian 

 time on both sides of the Atlantic ocean, in North America 

 and Spitzbergen as well as in Scotland and Russia, deposits of 

 great fresh-water basins with a very characteristic fish fauna. 

 In the Carboniferous as well as in the Jurassic and Cretaceous 

 the same land and plant animals lived in North America as in 



