he said to me, 'that I could get some one to propose me as a candidate.' "That is not the practice,' I said. 'The candidate presents himself.'

"I am shy,' he answered. If my Cæsar, or even the first volume of it, had appeared, I should feel that I had some claims; but I am not vain enough to think that what I have published as yet, entitles me to the honor of being a member of the first literary society in the world. I want somebody to say so for me. You may think that I ought to delay my candidature till the Cæsar has appeared. But I know now whom I should succeed, and whose éloge I should have to pronounce. If I delay I may have to make a speech in praise of Feuillet or of Victor Hugo.'

"You," I said to Maury, "have read his Cæsar as far as it has gone. Will it give him a claim to the Academy ?"

"I think," said Maury, "that it will. It is a work of great and sagacious research, and contains passages admirably written. It is a wonderful improvement on the Idées Napoléoniennes."

lect is that of Dr. Johnson, whose best work, the Lives of the Poets, was written after he was seventy."

"That may be the case," answered Maury, "in England, where you enjoy a language much purer from arbitrary restraints and idioms than ours is, and where you prefer the substance to the form. La forme is our idol. It resembles cookery. The best meat ill cooked is uneatable. Inferior meat well cooked may be delicious.

"We have been at work refining our style, introducing into it des malices et des délicatesses, until to write perfect French is the acquisition of only a long life. Our best writers, Voltaire, for instance, have gone on improving till they died. We spend much of what you would call useless labor on it, we omit ideas worth preserving because we cannot express them with perfect elegance; we are somewhat in the state of a man speaking a foreign language, qui ne dit pas ce qu'il veut, mais ce qu'il peut; but we have created a literature which will live, for it is the style, not the matter, which preserves the book. Good matter ill expressed is taken possession of by a master of style, and reproduced in a readable form, and then the first writer is forgotten."

On the 21st of December, 1872, H.M.S. Challenger, an eighteen gun corvette, of 2000 tons burden, sailed from Portsmouth harbor for a three, or perhaps four, years' cruise. No man-of-war ever left that famous port before with so singular an equipment. Two of the eighteen sixty-eight pounders of the Challenger's armament remained to enable her to speak with effect to sea-rovers, haply devoid of any respect for science, in the remote seas for which she is bound; but the main-deck was, for the most part, stripped of its warlike gear, and fitted up with physical, chemical, and biological laboratories; photography had its dark cabin; while apparatus for dredging, trawling, and sounding; for photo

meters and for thermometers, filled the space formerly occupied by guns and guntackle, pistols and cutlasses.

The crew of the Challenger match her fittings. Captain Nares, his officers and men, are ready to look after the interests of hydrography, work the ship, and, if need be, fight her as seamen should; while there is a staff of scientific civilians, under the general direction of Dr. Wyville Thomson, F.R.S., (Professor of Natural History in Edinburgh University by rights, but at present detached for duty in partibus) whose business it is to turn all the wonderfully packed stores of appliances to account, and to accumulate, before the ship returns to England, such additions to na

donkey engine to supply power, and of the contrivances known as "accumulators," to diminish the risk of snapping the dredge rope by the rolling and pitching of the vessel, the dredge has been worked deeper and deeper, until at last, on the 22nd of July, 1869, H.M.S. Porcupine being in the Bay of Biscay, Captain Calver, her commander, performed the unprecedented feat of dredging in 2,435 fathoms, or 14,610 feet, a depth nearly equal to the height of Mont Blanc. The dredge was rapidly hauled on deck at one o'clock in the morning of the 23rd, after an absence of 7 hours, and a journey of upwards of eight statute miles," with a hundred weight and a half of solid con

tents.

66

The trawl is a sort of net for catching those fish which habitually live at the bottom of the sea, such as soles, plaice, turbot, and gurnett. The mouth of the net may be thirty or forty feet wide, and one edge of its mouth is fastened to a beam of wood of the same length. The two ends of the beam are supported by curved pieces of iron, which raise the beam and the edge of the net which is fastened to it, for a short distance, while the other edge of the mouth of the net trails upon the ground. The closed end of the net has the form of a great pouch; and, as the beam is dragged along, the fish, roused from the bottom by the sweeping of the net, readily pass into its mouth and accumulate in the pouch at its end. After drifting with the tide for six or seven hours the trawl is hauled up, the marketable fish are picked out, the others thrown away, and the trawl sent overboard for another operation.

More than a thousand sail of well-found trawlers are constantly engaged in sweeping the seas around our coast in this way, and it is to them that we owe a very large proportion of our supply of fish. The difficulty of trawling, like that of dredging, rapidly increases with the depth at which

The emotional side of the scientific nature has its singularities. Many persons will call to mind a certain philosopher's tenderness over his watch "the little creature"-which was so singularly lost and found again. But Dr. Wyville Thomson surpasses the owner of the watch in his lovingkindness towards a donkey-engine. "This little engine was the comfort of our lives. Once or twice it was overstrained, and then we pitied the willing little thing, panting like an overtaxed horse."

the operation is performed; and, until the other day, it is probable that trawling at so great a depth as 100 fathoms was something unheard of. But the first news from the Challenger opens up new possibilities for the trawl.

Dr. Wyville Thomson writes (Nature, March 20, 1873)::

"For the first two or three hauls in very deep water off the coast of Portugal, the dredge came up filled with the usual Atlantic ooze,' tenacious and uniform throughout, and the work of hours, in sifting, gave the very smallest possible result. We were extremely anxious to get some idea of the general character of the Fauna, and particularly of the distribution of the higher groups; and after various suggestions for modification of the dredge, it was proposed to try the ordinary trawl. We had a compact trawl, with a 15 feet beam, on board, and we sent it down off Cape St. Vincent at a depth of 600 fathoms. The experiment looked hazardous, but, to our great satisfaction, the trawl came up all right and contained, with many of the larger invertebrata, several fishes.

After the first attempt we tried the trawl several times at depths of 1090, 1525, and finally 2125 fathoms, and always with success.'

To the coral-fishers of the Mediterranean, who seek the precious red coral, which grows firmly fixed to rocks at a depth of sixty to eighty fathoms, both the dredge and the trawl would be useless. They, therefore, have recourse to a sort of frame, to which are fastened long bundles of loosely netted hempen cord, and which is lowered by a rope to the depth at which the hempen cords can sweep over the surface of the rocks and break off the coral, which is brought up entangled in the cords. A similar contrivance has arisen out of the necessities of deep-sea exploration.

In the course of the dredging of the Porcupine, it was frequently found that, while few objects of interest were brought up within the dredge, many living creatures came up sticking to the outside of the dredge-bag, and even to the first few fathoms of the dredge-rope. The mouth of the dredge doubtless rapidly filled with mud, and thus the things it should have brought up were shut out. To remedy this inconvenience Captain Calver devised an arrangement not unlike that employed by

the coral-fishers. He fastened half a dozen swabs, such as are used for drying decks, to the dredge. A swab is something like what a birch-broom would be if its twigs were made of long, coarse, hempen yarns. These dragged along after the dredge over

the surface of the mud, and entangled the creatures living there-multitudes of which, twisted up in the strands of the swabs, were brought to the surface with the dredge. A further improvement was made by attaching a long iron bar to the bottom of the dredge bag, and fastening large bunches of teased-out hemp to the end of this bar. These "tangles" bring up immense quantities of such animals as have long arms, or spines, or prominences which readily become caught in the hemp, but they are very destructive to the fragile organisms which they imprison; and, now that the trawl can be successfully worked at the greatest depths, it may be expected to supersede them; at least, wherever the ground is soft enough to permit of trawling.

It is obvious that between the dredge, the trawl, and the tangles, there is little chance for any organism, except such as are able to burrow rapidly, to remain safely at the bottom of any part of the sea which the Challenger undertakes to explore. And, for the first time in the history of scientific exploration, we have a fair chance of learning what the population of the depths of the sea is like in the most widely different parts of the world.

And now arises the next question. The means of exploration being fairly adequate, what forms of life may be looked for at these vast depths?

The systematic study of the Distribution of living beings is the most modern branch of Biological Science, and came into existence long after Morphology and Physiology had attained a considerable development. This naturally does not imply that, from the time men began to observe natural phenomena, they were ignorant of the fact that the animals and plants of one part of the world are different from those in other regions; or that those of the hills are different from those of the plains in the same region; or finally that some marine creatures are found only in the shallows, while others inhabit the deeps. Nevertheless, it was only after the discovery of America that the attention of naturalists was powerfully drawn to the wonderful differences between the animal population of the central and southern parts of the new world and that of those parts of the old world which lie under the same parallels of latitude. So far back as 1667 Abraham Mylius, in his treatise "De Animalium

origine et migratione populorum," argues that since there are innumerable species of animals in America which do not exist elsewhere, they must have been made and placed there by the Deity: Buffon no less forcibly insists upon the difference between the Fauna of the old and new world. But the first attempt to gather facts of this order into a whole, and to co-ordinate them into a series of generalizations, or laws of Geographical Distribution, is not a century old, and is contained in the "Specimen Zoologia Geographicæ Quadrupedum Domicilia et Migrationes sistens," published, in 1777, by the learned Brunswick Professor, Eberhard Zimmermann, who illustrates his work by what he calls a "Tabula Zoographica," which is the oldest distributional map known to me.

In regard to matters of fact, Zimmermann's chief aim is to show that among terrestral mammals, some occur all over the world, while others are restricted to particular areas of greater or smaller extent; and that the abundance of species follows temperature, being greatest in warm and least in cold climates. But marine animals, he thinks, obey no such law. The Arctic and Atlantic Seas, he says, are as full of fishes and other animals as those of the tropics. It is, therefore, clear that cold does not affect the dwellers in the sea as it does land animals, and that this must be the case follows from the fact that sea water, "propter varias quas continet bituminis spiritusque particulas," freezes with much more difficulty than fresh water. On the other hand, the heat of the Equatorial sun penetrates but a short distance below the surface of the ocean. Moreover, according to Zimmermann, the incessant disturbance of the mass of the sea by winds and tides, so mixes up the warm and the cold that life is evenly diffused and abundant throughout the ocean.

In 1810, Risso, in his work on the Ichthyology of Nice, laid the foundation of what has since been termed "bathymetrical" distribution, or distribution in depth, by showing that regions of the sea bottom of different depths could be distinguished by the fishes which inhabit them. There was the littoral region between tide marks with its sand-eels, pipe fishes, and blennies: the seaweed region, extending from low water-mark to a depth of 450 feet, with its wrasses, rays, and flat fish; and the

deep-sea region, from 450 feet to 1500 feet or more, with its file-fish, sharks, gurnards, cod, and sword-fish.

More than twenty years later, MM. Audouin and Milne Edwards carried out the principle of distinguishing the Fauna of different zones of depth much more minutely, in their "Recherches pour servir à l'Histoire Naturelle du Littoral de la France," published in 1832.

They divide the area included between highwater-mark and lowwater-mark of spring tides (which is very extensive, on account of the great rise and fall of the tide on the Normandy coast about St. Malo, where their observations were made) into four zones, each characterized by its peculiar invertebrate inhabitants. Beyond the fourth region they distinguished a fifth, which is never uncovered, and is inhabited by oysters, scallops, and large starfishes and other animals. Beyond this they seem to think that animal life is absent.*

Audouin and Milne Edwards were the first to see the importance of the bearing of a knowledge of the manner in which marine animals are distributed in depth, on geology. They suggest that, by this means, it will be possible to judge whether a fossiliferous stratum was formed upon the shore of an ancient sea, and even to determine whether it was deposited in shallower or deeper water on that shore; the association of shells of animals which live in different zones of depth will prove that the shells have been transported into the position in which they are found; while, on the other hand, the absence of shells in a deposit will not justify the conclusion that the waters in which it was formed were devoid of animal inhabitants, inasmuch as they might have been only too deep for habitation.

The new line of investigation thus opened by the French naturalists was followed up by the Norwegian, Sars, in 1835, by Edward Forbes, in our own country, in 1840,† and

"Enfin plus bas encore, c'est-à-dire alors loin des côtes, le fond des eaux ne paraît plus être habité, du moins dans nos mers, par aucun de ces animaux" (1. c. tom. i. p. 237). The "ces animaux" leaves the meaning of the authors doubtful.

In the paper in the "Memoirs of the Survey' cited further on, Forbes writes:

by Ersted, in Denmark, a few years later. The genius of Forbes, combined with his extensive knowledge of botany, invertebrate zoology, and geology, enabled him to do more than any of his compeers in bringing the importance of distribution in depth into notice; and his researches in the Ægean Sea, and still more his remarkable paper "On the Geological Relations of the existing Fauna and Flora of the British Isles," published in 1846, in the first volume of the "Memoirs of the Geological Survey of Great Britain," attracted universal attention.

On the coasts of the British Islands, Forbes distinguishes four zones or regions, the Littoral. (between tide marks), the Laminarian (between lowwater-mark and 15 fathoms), the Coralline (from 15 to 50 fathoms), and the Deep sea or Coral region (from 50 fathoms to beyond 100 fathoms). But, in the deeper waters of the Ægean Sea, between the shore and a depth of 300 fathoms, Forbes was able to make out no fewer than eight zones of life, in the course of which the number and variety of forms gradually diminished; until, beyond 300 fathoms, life disappeared altogether. Hence it appeared as if descent in the sea had much the same effect on life, as ascent on land. Recent investigations appear to show that Forbes was right enough in his classification of the facts of distribution in depth as they are to be observed in the Ægean; and though, at the time he wrote, one or two observations were extant which might have warned him not to generalize too extensively from his Ægean experience, his own dredging work was so much more extensive and systematic than that of any other naturalist, that it is not wonderful he should have felt

mollusca, as distributed on our shores and seas, in four great zones or regions, usually denominated The Littoral Zone, The region of Laminariæ,' The region of Corallines,' and 'The region of Corals.' An extensive series of researches, chiefly conducted by the members of the committee appointed by the British Association to investigate the marine geology of Britain by means of the dredge, have not invalidated this classification, and the researches of Professor Lovén, in the Norwegian and Lapland seas, have borne out their correctness. The first two of the region above mentioned had been previously noticed by Lamouroux, in his account of the distribution (vertically) of sea-weeds, by Audouin and Milne Edwards in their Observations on the Natural History of the coast of France,' and by Sars in the preface to his Beskrivelser og Jagttagelser.'"