PREFACE 



This little story of the deep, compiled from the records 

 of the Royal Indian Marine Survey Ship Investigator, 

 is, like a certain ancient territory of Lower School 

 memories, divided into three parts. 



The first part, the substance of most of which 

 was written some years ago for the Times of Indian 

 is meant — now that I have hung up my uvida vesta- 

 menta — to be a sort of votive tablet of my own to 

 those powerful deities of the sea who shipwrecked my 

 prospects as a surgeon in order to make of me a 

 naturalist, and to use me in their own affairs. In this 

 part I have endeavoured to be as little technical as 

 possible, so as to accommodate myself — if I may 

 maintain good Master Corporate Bardolph's good and 

 commendable phrase — to the general reader. 



The second part is intended, at the approach of 

 the twenty-first anniversary of her existence, to be a 

 brief recital of the Investigator s maiden efforts in the 

 field of natural history since she first drew water in the 

 year of Our Lord 1881. In it I have still tried to 

 make myself intelligible to readers who are not professed 

 zoologists. 



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