No. XI. 
EXPERIMENTS BY SINKING BOTTLES IN THE OCEAN. 
DURING my former voyage to South Africa, we 
sunk wine-bottles fifty fathoms into the sea, after they 
had been secured from the admission of water, in the 
best manner we could devise, by covering the corks with 
rosin ; on that occasion they were brought up full of 
water, but without any visible alteration in the cork or 
rosin, which led some to imagine that part of the fluid 
had entered by the pores of the glass, and some persons 
even supposed the water might thereby have been di- 
vested of its saline particles. 
To settle those points, a friend had presented me with 
two crytsal globular bottles, hermetically sealed, and 
made on purpose by Messrs. Pellat and Green, St. Paul's 
Church Yard. 
In lat. 14. 27. N. to the westward of the Cape de Verd 
Islands, these and some other bottles were sunk by per- 
mission of Captain Creery of the Westmoreland, bound 
for Bombay, two hundred perpendicular fathoms, by 
means of two leads, the one weighing twenty-two, and 
the other twenty-eight lbs. To pull up this great length 
of rope and weight of lead, required the exertion of ten 
men for a quarter of an hour. 
On the two globular bottles being brought on deck, 
they were found empty; but a wine-bottle sent down at 
