346 SIEGE OF THE SOUTH POLE 
water were hauled up for repairs and found to be crusted 
with living shells. Then the authorities concerned with 
the study of marine life remembered a number of con- 
firmatory instances, how old Sir John Ross had got up 
sundry curious creatures from the mud at a great depth 
in the Arctic regions in 1818, and his nephew Sir James 
Clark Ross using the same “ deep-sea clamms ” had se- 
cured very similar creatures in the equally deep water of 
the Antarctic seas more than twenty years later; and it 
was recognised that after all there might be no zero of life. 
Indeed so far did the pendulum swing that while the 
researches were still in their infancy learned biologists 
thought and even spoke of the whole floor of the ocean, 
down to the depths of the profoundest abysses, being 
clothed with a sheet of living protoplasm. No grander 
idea ever entered the human mind; it was the girdler 
snake of the Northern Mythology revived and extended 
into an all-embracing, pulsating being, without beginning 
or end. One could picture the edges of this living 
sheet as it approached the shore-line breaking up into 
protozoa which as the ages ran on developed into every 
organism, so that the whole range of organic evolution 
could be traced by descending into the depths of the sea. 
Bathybius haeckelii was the name of this hypothetical 
primordial being which figured but for a little while 
upon the stage of the microscope, and was relegated by 
later research to the limbo of the kraken and the roc. 
Dr. W. B. Carpenter from the time when he wrote his 
thesis for the degree of M. D. on the Nervous System of 
Invertebrate Animals in 1839 took the keenest interest 
in the life of the sea. Not content with shallow water 
dredging, and convinced of the value of deep-sea research 
in its bearings on the science of life, he induced the 
