but when placed dead in the water and allowed freely to sink, the force of gravity always, and for obvious reasons, causes all such forms to sink with the convex side down. Brooke's lead will bring up these shells exactly as they lie on the bottom, and so he proposed to observe with regard to their manner of lying. Of course, if they lived at the bottom, they would die as they lived, and lie as they died, for (§ 590) there is nothing to turn them over after death at the bottom of the deep sea, consequently their skeletons would be brought' up in the quills of the sounding machine flat side down, convex side up; but if they lived near the surface, and reached the bottom after death, they would be found flat side up.
614. An unexpected solution afforded.—But, before there was an opportunity of trying this plan, Ehrenberg himself afforded the solution in a most unexpected way:—in examining soundings from a great depth in the Mediterranean, he found many fresh-water shells with their fleshy parts still in them, though the specimens were taken from the middle of that sea. That savant, with his practised eye, detected among them Swiss forms, which must have come down the Danube, and so out into the Mediterranean hundreds of miles, and on journeys which would require months, if not years, for these slowly-drifting creatures to accomplish. And so the anti-biotics maintain (§ 603) that their doctrine is established.[1]
- ↑ In a paper upon the organic life-forms from unexpected great depths of the Mediterranean, obtained by Captain Spratt from deep-sea soundings between Malta and Crete, in 1857, and read before the Berlin Academy, November 27, 1857, Ehrenberg said, "Especially striking among all the forms of the deep are the Phytolitharia, of which fifty-two in number are found. It would not be strange if these fifty-two forms were spongoliths, since we expect to find sponge in the sea. But a large number, not less than twenty kinds of Phytolitharia, are fresh-water and land forms. Hence the question arises, How came these forms into those depths in the middle of the sea? "Naturally one looks at first to the Nile and the coasts; but the sea current carries the turbid Nile water eastward; for the current, according to Captain Smyth, especially in the middle of the sea, not only in the Levant, but also in the southern edge, is clearly a constant castwardly one. Besides, there are among the forms some northern ones—e. g., Eunotia triodon, Campylodiscus clypeus, and many gallionella. This peculiarity may, perhaps, indicate a lower return current, hitherto observed only at Gibraltar, which probably brings into this basin the forms from the Northern European rocks. Thus, for instance, the Danube may bring the Swiss forms in that circulation. But, on the other hand, a highly striking agreement with the forms of the 'trade-wind dust' is not to be overlooked.
