where space is, there may be organic life. Unable as we are to affix a 
limit to that tenuity of form which may be 'compatible with animalcular 
existence, neither are we qualified to assign boundaries to size in the 
opposite direction. Some of the ancient philosophers held that the 
earth itself was the first of animated beings, not only having life in itself, 
but the higher attributes of consciousness and soul. It is needless to 
discuss the merits of that belief, but there is no violation of philosophical 
probability in imagining some form of animal life, whose magnitude should 
exceed that of a whale by only a thousandth part of the proportion which 
the whale bears to one of the beings brought within the scope of our vision 
by the instrumentality of the solar microscope. Could we calculate the 
immensity of such a creature, we should find it one to which the most 
exaggerated kraken were a babe. True, the minuter forms of matter 
whether organic or inorganic are withdrawn from our notice by the im¬ 
perfection of our senses, which reason does not apply to objects of bulk. 
If any such mighty monsters therefore do exist within our planet, their 
habitation can only be beneath the surface of either the earth or sea. 
What might be found within the 7000 miles constituting the earth’s diame¬ 
ter, we shall probably never know. As far as man has travelled on that line 
no indication of any living being has been met with. The objects of our 
inquiry are to be sought for beneath the waters. 
Here we have “ample room and verge enough” for the expansion of 
animal life. Unexplored and unexplorable in its depths, as probably it 
must] ever be, we know this to be the primeval element, in which the 
creative energies were first developed in animal organization,* we know 
that it brought forth abundantly, and we speak of it still as one of the types 
of prolificness. Are we then to rest satisfied with the belief that the tribes 
which inhabit the shallows of the ocean, or occupy its upper strata, are 
the sole tenants of the boundless deep ? As well may the naturalist, after 
a transient search along the edge of an American forest, undertake to 
enumerate its inhabitants—or the botanist presume to publish the Florae 
of the great western prairie without penetrating beyond its border—as 
the inquirer into the wonders of the deep, satisfy himself with the dis¬ 
coveries that he is enabled to make on the outskirts. of the oceanic 
world. 
* “And God said, let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving [or creeping, in the 
margin] creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firma¬ 
ment of Heaven. 
“And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the 
waters brought forth abundantly.”— Genesis i. 20, 21. 
