WORK OF THE ^INVESTIGATOR.’ 
91 
as had formerly been believed, a barren wilderness, chiefly 
remarkable for 
... its solitude, 
wherein no living creature did intrude. 
Their results for the most part had been either dis¬ 
credited or disregarded, but it was becoming more and more 
widely felt that some effort should be made to decide the 
question once and for all. In England, Wyville Thompson 
and Carpenter were endeavouring to persuade the British 
Government to undertake a systematic expedition to investi¬ 
gate the conditions of life and matter in the great oceans: 
efforts that eventually resulted in the famous voyage of 
H.M.S. ^Challenger’ ; and in 1871 the Council of the Asiatic 
Society of Bengal wrote to the Government of India, urging 
them to undertake similar investigations in Indian waters. 
Prior to this date the matter had already attracted the atten¬ 
tion of the Society, and a committee had already been ap¬ 
pointed to draft a report on the subject; the list of members 
of the committee contains the names, now so famous in the 
annals of Indian biology, of F. Stoliczka, W. T. Blanford, J. 
Anderson, J. Wood-Mason and T. Oldham. 
It is interesting to note that one of the chief arguments 
put forward in this committee’s report to the Society is the 
hope that such deep-sea investigations would discover many 
forms hitherto known to science only in a fossil state and that 
many missing links ” in the scheme of evolution would be 
brought to light. This view, indeed, was very strongly urged 
by Agassiz in America, when supporting the scheme for the 
‘Challenger’ Expedition; but such hopes were, with a few 
minor exceptions, doomed to disappointment. The Society’s 
proposition received the active support of the Royal Society 
of London and many of the leading zoologists, and the 
Government of India gave the scheme their approval but 
unfortunately, owing to a variety of circumstances but 
chiefly because there was no ship available, nothing at that 
time could be done. The honour of being the first to carry 
out deep-sea biological investigations in the Indian Ocean 
belongs, not to the Marine Survey of India, but to an officer 
of the Indian Museum, the late Mr. James Wood-Mason, who 
