56 
DEEP-SEA LAMPS 
times greater than that which drives a railway train. 
Yet it is now certain that where the fancy painted a 
survival of the sterile and lifeless plains of an unformed 
world, or at most the rude survivals of primitive 
fossils, the bed of the deep sea teems with animal 
life, and the clinging darkness of its waters is peopled 
by myriads of fragile and fantastic forms, and lighted 
into a blaze by the effulgence from their bodies. 
Hard as it is to conceive the bare existence of life 
under the conditions of the ocean abyss, the mind 
pauses in astonishment at the completeness of the 
triumph by which creatures apparently doomed to live 
in eternal night are supplied not with mere slimy 
secretions of luminosity, but with rows of bright and 
ever-burning lamps, in organs fitted with lenses and 
reflectors, which shoot their beams sidelong through 
the circumfluent ocean, or project shafts of light 
before their eyes to illuminate their path. 
The results of recent deep-sea exploration have 
been summarized by Mr. Sydney J. Hickson, Fellow 
of Downing College, Cambridge, in a short work on 
The Fauna of the Deep Sea , published in the “ Modern 
Science Series.” 1 Though the bulk and specialized 
character of the reports of separate expeditions organ- 
ized by the English, French, German, Italian, and 
Norwegian governments, makes such a task one of 
no ordinary difficulty, Mr. Hickson has succeeded 
in his wish to “ give in a small compass the more 
1 The Fauna of the Deep Sea , by Sydney J. Hickson, M.A., 
D.Sc. London : Kegan Paul and Co. 
