U. S. Navy, and coadjutor of Lieutenant Maury’s, named Brooke, devised a simple method by which the need of raising the sunken shot was done away with. Through a hole drilled right through the ball he passed a small wire, allowing it to project some few inches at both ends; one extremity of the wire he fashioned into a little cup, and to the other he attached the sounding line; the sinker thus prepared was hove, and upon the projecting cup coming in contact with the ground an ingenious disengaging apparatus detached the 32-pounder altogether from the wire, and the lightened line came merrily up again from the deep, leaving its bulky companion buried in the Atlantic ooze, but itself returning freighted with the long desired riches from below. It was not much evidence to all appearance which the witness brought; a thimble full of white clay, more or less “stiff,” was the only product of every cast. Notwithstanding that countless soundings in “blue water” have now been taken, the result has been the same in every case, and the whole sea-floor of the North Atlantic, with the exception of the shallower waters nearer shore, is proved to consist exclusively of this whitish-coloured clay or “ooze.” In some places it is of considerable stiffness, while in others it “has covered the depths of the ocean with a mantle delicate as the macled frost and light as the undrifted snow flake on the mountain.” Is there, then, no life, no trace of living thing nourished in the great sea’s bosom? Does vitality cease altogether at certain depths, and is this mighty water world but a barren desert after all? Such, doubtless, were among the questions first asked by expectant and, to say truth, somewhat disappointed men, as they examined and reexamined that little cup of clay, and such are the questions which may still be asked without a really reliable answer. The microscope has indeed taught us, as we have seen to-night, that the “ooze” has once held life; but evidence is wanting still to determine whether the great basin of the Atlantic should be considered as a teeming hive of active vitality, or but as a gigantic graveyard. For ourselves we believe the first. True, life lessens and organisations grow few and low in very deep water; but so abundant is it everywhere, that we find it less difficult to believe these delicate creatures have died and made no sign in the long passage from their dark home to the stage of the microscope, than that there should be one absolutely life-forsaken spot within the limits of our world; the singular uniformity of the deposits also forbids the idea that they were laid down by drifts and currents from distant sources; had currents only been at work, the results of their labours would exhibit a much more miscellaneous character; but instead of this, every new cast brings up the same organisms, and that, too, without the slightest admixture of any foreign matter whatsoever; not a visible fragment of shell, no sand, not a pebble even has the sounding line brought up, plainly proving to our thinking that our minute friends have been truly found “at home.” These morsels of clay, then, which seem at first but poor waking realities after the dreams men have dreamed of the wonders that were perhaps to be revealed, are no common mould, not a particle of them but was once a living organism.
And now think of this: if it were at first disappointing to find no visible evidence of busy life, strange forms of unknown plants and animals, surely there is something grandly startling in the consideration of what the Atlantic floor really is. Picture if you can the thousands of square miles over which this living snow-white carpet of unknown thickness is spread, and standing in imagination upon the precipitous edges of the hills which rise to form our island, look down thence into the boundless abyss some 1700 feet below, in which, hidden from all human eyes, in darkness and perfect stillness, slowly—oh! how slowly—these little Foraminiferæ and Polycystinæ are building up a new chalk world, perhaps the white cliffs of another possible Albion. For we cannot but think that in Midshipman Brooke’s “cup” lies the true solution of the great geological chalk difficulty; long have we suspected that the little chambered shells (of similar family to these), so abundant in this formation, were themselves (they and their fragments) the producers of the material in which they appear as fossils. Year after year have geologists advanced in the belief that the cretaceous period, about whose origin there have been so many uncertainties, must have owed its existence to long-continued accumulations of the remains of primæ val Foraminiferæ; and here surely is a proof there is no gainsaying, that the guess was right.
Turning from this wide and general view of our subject, we set ourselves to look a little more closely at these new comers from a mysterious home, not without an idea that some among them may at least turn out to be hitherto unknown forms of life. One glance of the practised microscopist, however, detects a well-known character in each; these dwellers in the deep sea are no new creations, we recognise them all as old familiar friends.
We have already said that the chalk furnishes us with countless examples of the Foraminiferæ in a fossil condition, but their living congeners are also to be found flourishing on every shore. Let us say a word or two on their nature and peculiarities.
Far down among the lowest forms of animal life with which we are acquainted, is the strange organism known as the Proteus (Amœ ba diffluens); it is nothing more than a small lump of jelly without integument, but endowed with the capability of moving and eating, if eating it may be called. Special organs for this or any other function it has none, but the whole of the gelatinous body covers and encloses within itself any atom capable of affording nutrition, and becomes mouth and stomach both, when occasion requires. Closely allied to the Proteus is another genus, which we cannot describe better than as an Amœba invested with a calcareous covering. If we imagine a delicate discoid spiral shell of elegant form, marked with curved and diverging grooves, and inhabited by a tiny piece of clear jelly without organs, but capable of projecting the substance of its body (called “sarcode”) in the finest possible filaments through perforations in the surface of its shell, this