Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NOTES ON THE PRESENCE OF ANIMAL LIFE AT VAST DEPTHS IN THE SEA. Our first clear glance at the floor of the ocean may be said to bear date from the period at which telegraphic communication between the various countries of the globe was first undertaken. Our previous knowledge of its characters was both limited and imperfect in kind. For, although the depth of the sea had been approximately ascertained over widely extended areas, no attempt had as yet been made to investigate the material of which its bed is composed. It was only during the last few years that the possibility of perfecting our information became recognized,?numerous important facts having revealed themselves, in the course of the sounding surveys conducted under the auspices of the British and United States’ Governments, all of which tend to prove that the same wondrous agencies, whereby some of the sedimentary strata of the earth’s crust were accumulated in ages gone by, are still in operation, and that the recesses of the deep,hidden although they be from man’s direct vision, may nevertheless be rendered subservient, in due time, to his enterprise and skill. But whilst the history of the material obtained during the soundings referred to shed much highly interesting light on the formation of submarine deposits, it likewise showed how much still remained to be explored and accounted for. Thus, evidence was wanting to enable us to determine whether the minute shell-covered creatures, whose remains are sometimes brought up by the sounding- machine in such profusion as to constitute a very large per-centage of the various deeper oceanic deposits, lived and died where they were discovered, or whether, having passed their existence in the superincumbent waters, their calcareous skeletons had gradually subside…
