THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



241 



ranged in rows from nose to tail, on port 

 and starboard sides, a fantastic minia- 

 ture of an ocean liner, alight from stem 

 to stern, gliding noiselessly through the 

 perpetual night. There is another, with 

 a well-defined searchlight with which to 

 explore the blackness around. Here is 

 a breathing caricature of a mermaid with 

 binoculars, and there a creature whose 

 eyes are upon the ends of long stalks 

 reaching out from the head like sun- 

 flowers from the ground. 



In size the inhabitants of the deep sea 

 have as wide a range in the direction of 

 microscopic minuteness as those of the 

 land. It is hardly reasonable to suppose 

 they would not range toward largeness 

 as well. Indeed, there is evidence that 

 immense creatures, with flesh of a tex- 

 ture hitherto unknown, exist in the ocean 

 depths. Some years ago a strange object 

 was washed ashore on the Florida coast. 

 Photographs of this peculiar hulk and a 

 piece of it were sent to Professor Verrill 

 for examination. It measured twenty 

 feet in length, forty feet in circumfer- 

 ence, and weighed many tons. He found 

 its flesh of a tough, fibrous nature, unlike 

 any known, and concluded that this huge 

 object was but a fragment of some mon- 

 ster of the sea, torn from it by some cata- 

 clysm of the deep. 



STUDY OF OCEAN CURRENTS 



Another phase of oceanography that 

 will demand and receive close attention 

 in the years when navies fulfill a new 

 mission — the illumination of the dark 

 places in man's knowledge of the sea — 

 will be the ocean currents. The effect 

 of these great rivers of the sea upon the 

 welfare of the human race is past imagi- 

 nation. It is said that the Gulf Stream 

 carries enough heat toward Europe every 

 24 hours to melt a mass of iron as large 

 as Mt. Washington. 



Rear Admiral Pillsbury, in his remark- 

 able article in the Geographic Maga- 

 zine describing this remarkable river of 

 the sea, says that every hour there passes 

 through the straits of Florida the enor- 

 mous total of ninety billion tons of water, 

 carrying enough salt to load many times 

 over every ship that sails the main. 

 Through these straits the stream is 40 



miles wide. It carries more water than 

 all of the streams of the world bring 

 down from the land to the sea. 



In each of the four quarters of the 

 globe there is a wonderful circulatory 

 system — the heavy, cold waters of the 

 polar seas rushing equatorward, and the 

 light, warm waters of tropic oceans 

 sweeping back, giving a huge swirl not 

 unlike the motion of water driven around 

 the bottom of a basin by the hand. 



Vessels and debris caught in these cur- 

 rents often play uncanny tricks. In 

 1905 the Stanley Dollar, an American 

 freighter, went upon the rocks at the en- 

 trance to Yokohama Bay. Her life-pre- 

 servers were washed out as she lay upon 

 the beach upon which she was run to pre- 

 vent her sinking. 



In 191 1 two of her life-preservers were 

 picked up on the shores of the Shetland 

 Islands, north of Scotland. How they 

 reached there is one of the puzzling ques- 

 tions that so often arise anent the sea. 

 Did they sweep up the Asiatic coast, 

 through Behring Strait, and then through 

 the Northwest Passage and Baffin Bay, 

 and thence by Iceland to the Shetland 

 Islands? Or did they, after floating 

 through the Northwest Passage, get into 

 the Polar Current and sweep down the 

 Atlantic to the point where that ocean 

 river dives under the Gulf Stream, to be 

 picked up there by the latter current and 

 carried to the Shetland Islands? 



It has often been urged that the Amer- 

 ican Indian came to the shores of the 

 New World an unwilling voyager on the 

 bosom of the Japan Current. Certain it 

 is that all of these vast rivers of the ocean 

 have played an incalculably important 

 role in the affairs of the human race, and 

 that a more exhaustive study of them 

 than has yet been made holds many reve- 

 lations in store. 



DOES A SINKING SHIP GO TO THE BOTTOM? 



One of the questions that is often asked 

 is whether a ship, sinking in deep water, 

 goes to the bottom, or whether she finds 

 her level in some vertical depth zone and 

 drifts on forever. This question sprang 

 into great prominence when the Titanic 

 went down and has been asked frequently 

 during the present war. The answer is, 



