Page:Polar Exploration - Bruce - 1911.djvu/169

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ANIMAL LIFE
165

latitude, knowing that the ship's keel and planking had been ripped off on the rocks of the west coast of Graham Land (Le Pourquoi-pas? dans l'antarctique, by Dr. Jean Charcot: Paris, 1910).

The biology of Antarctic seas is perhaps more interesting and important than that of Arctic seas for reasons which will be afterwards considered. Although a great deal of zoological research has been carried out in the Arctic seas from time to time, that research had been much less systematic than in the Antarctic Regions, because in the Arctic Regions it began before zoology was organised as it is now. At a period when practically no research was being carried out in Antarctic seas, many of the earliest writers have given descriptions of northern invertebrates. Martens, for instance, gave excellent descriptions of the animals he saw in Spitsbergen, both on the land and in the sea, during his voyage in 1671. Not only his text, but his excellent drawings show what an accurate and close observer he was: he has fair pictures of seals and walruses, remarkably good drawings of the Greenland whale, and a number of interesting ones of invertebrates such as Gorgonocephalus, two other ophiuroids, a Caprella, two medusoids, also the well-known pteropod (Clio borealis), all of which can easily be identified. After Martens, there are no very accurate descriptions of Arctic marine