Discourses: Biological & Geological Part 2

II

THE PROBLEMS OF THE DEEP SEA

[1873]

On the 21st of December, 1872, H.M.S. _Challenger_, an eighteen gun corvette, of 2,000 tons burden, sailed from Portsmouth harbour 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 war-like gear, and fitted up with physical, chemical, and biological laboratories; Photography had its dark cabin; while apparatus for dredging, trawling, and sounding; for photometers and for thermometers, filled the s.p.a.ce formerly occupied by guns and gun-tackle, pistols and cutla.s.ses.

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 s.h.i.+p, 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 acc.u.mulate, before the s.h.i.+p returns to England, such additions to natural knowledge as shall justify the labour and cost involved in the fitting out and maintenance of the expedition.

Under the able and zealous superintendence of the Hydrographer, Admiral Richards, every precaution which experience and forethought could devise has been taken to provide the expedition with the material conditions of success; and it would seem as if nothing short of wreck or pestilence, both most improbable contingencies, could prevent the _Challenger_ from doing splendid work, and opening up a new era in the history of scientific voyages.

The dispatch of this expedition is the culmination of a series of such enterprises, gradually increasing in magnitude and importance, which the Admiralty, greatly to its credit, has carried out for some years past; and the history of which is given by Dr. Wyville Thomson in the beautifully ill.u.s.trated volume ent.i.tled "The Depths of the Sea,"

published since his departure.

"In the spring of the year 1868, my friend Dr. W.B. Carpenter, at that time one of the Vice-Presidents of the Royal Society, was with me in Ireland, where we were working out together the structure and development of the Crinoids. I had long previously had a profound conviction that the land of promise for the naturalist, the only remaining region where there were endless novelties of extraordinary interest ready to the hand which had the means of gathering them, was the bottom of the deep sea. I had even had a glimpse of some of these treasures, for I had seen, the year before, with Prof. Sars, the forms which I have already mentioned dredged by his son at a depth of 300 to 400 fathoms off the Loffoten Islands. I propounded my views to my fellow-labourer, and we discussed the subject many times over our microscopes. I strongly urged Dr. Carpenter to use his influence at head-quarters to induce the Admiralty, probably through the Council of the Royal Society, to give us the use of a vessel properly fitted with dredging gear and all necessary scientific apparatus, that many heavy questions as to the state of things in the depths of the ocean, which were still in a state of uncertainty, might be definitely settled. After full consideration, Dr. Carpenter promised his hearty co- operation, and we agreed that I should write to him on his return to London, indicating generally the results which I antic.i.p.ated, and sketching out what I conceived to be a promising line of inquiry. The Council of the Royal Society warmly supported the proposal; and I give here in chronological order the short and eminently satisfactory correspondence which led to the Admiralty placing at the disposal of Dr.

Carpenter and myself the gunboat _Lightninq_, under the command of Staff- Commander May, R.N., in the summer of 1868, for a trial cruise to the North of Scotland, and afterwards to the much wider surveys in H.M.S.

_Porcupine_, Captain Calver, R.N., which were made with the additional a.s.sociation of Mr. Gwyn Jeffreys, in the summers of the years 1869 and 1870."[1]

[Footnote 1: The Depths of the Sea, pp. 49-50.]

Plain men may be puzzled to understand why Dr. Wyville Thomson, not being a cynic, should relegate the "Land of Promise" to the bottom of the deep sea, they may still more wonder what manner of "milk and honey" the _Challenger_ expects to find; and their perplexity may well rise to its maximum, when they seek to divine the manner in which that milk and honey are to be got out of so inaccessible a Canaan. I will, therefore, endeavour to give some answer to these questions in an order the reverse of that in which I have stated them.

Apart from hooks, and lines, and ordinary nets, fishermen have, from time immemorial, made use of two kinds of implements for getting at sea- creatures which live beyond tide-marks--these are the "dredge" and the "trawl." The dredge is used by oyster-fishermen. Imagine a large bag, the mouth of which has the shape of an elongated parallelogram, and is fastened to an iron frame of the same shape, the two long sides of this rim being fas.h.i.+oned into sc.r.a.pers. Chains attach the ends of the frame to a stout rope, so that when the bag is dragged along by the rope the edge of one of the sc.r.a.pers rests on the ground, and sc.r.a.pes whatever it touches into the bag. The oyster-dredger takes one of these machines in his boat, and when he has reached the oyster-bed the dredge is tossed overboard; as soon as it has sunk to the bottom the rope is paid out sufficiently to prevent it from pulling the dredge directly upwards, and is then made fast while the boat goes ahead. The dredge is thus dragged along and sc.r.a.pes oysters and other sea-animals and plants, stones, and mud into the bag. When the dredger judges it to be full he hauls it up, picks out the oysters, throws the rest overboard, and begins again.

Dredging in shallow water, say ten to twenty fathoms, is an easy operation enough; but the deeper the dredger goes, the heavier must be his vessel, and the stouter his tackle, while the operation of hauling up becomes more and more laborious. Dredging in 150 fathoms is very hard work, if it has to be carried on by manual labour; but by the use of the donkey-engine to supply power,[2] and of the contrivances known as "acc.u.mulators," 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 7-1/4 hours, and a journey of upwards of eight statute miles," with a hundred weight and a half of solid contents.

[Footnote 2: 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 surpa.s.ses the owner of the watch in his loving-kindness 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 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 pa.s.s into its mouth and acc.u.mulate 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 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 invertebrate, 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, coa.r.s.e, hempen yarns. These dragged along after the dredge over the surface of the mud, and entangled the creatures living there--mult.i.tudes 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 quant.i.ties 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 lat.i.tude. 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 Faunae of the old and new world. But the first attempt to gather facts of this order into a whole, and to coordinate them into a series of generalizations, or laws of Geographical Distribution, is not a century old, and is contained in the "Specimen Zoologiae Geographicae Quadrupedum Domicilia et Migrationes sistens,"

published, in 1777, by the learned Brunswick Professor, Eberhard Zimmermann, who ill.u.s.trates 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 terrestrial 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 ma.s.s 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 wra.s.ses, 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, M.M. Audouin and Milne Edwards carried out the principle of distinguis.h.i.+ng the Faunae of different zones of depth much more minutely, in their "Recherches pour servir a 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 distinguish 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.[3]

[Footnote 3: "Enfin plus has encore, c'est-a-dire alors loin des cotes, le fond des eaux ne parait plus etre habite, du moms dans nos mers, par aucun de ces animaux" (1. c. tom. i. p. 237). The "ces animaux" leaves the meaning of the authors doubtful.]

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 sh.o.r.e of an ancient sea, and even to determine whether it was deposited in shallower or deeper water on that sh.o.r.e; the a.s.sociation of sh.e.l.ls of animals which live in different zones of depth will prove that the sh.e.l.ls have been transported into the position in which they are found; while, on the other hand, the absence of sh.e.l.ls 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,[4] and by Oersted, 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 Aegean 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.

[Footnote 4: In the paper in the _Memoirs of the Survey_ cited further on, Forbes writes:--

"In an essay 'On the a.s.sociation of Mollusca on the British Coasts, considered with reference to Pleistocene Geology,' printed in [the _Edinburgh Academic Annual_ for] 1840, I described the mollusca, as distributed on our sh.o.r.es and seas, in four great zones or regions, usually denominated 'The Littoral zone,' 'The region of Laminariae,' 'The region of Coral-lines,' and 'The region of Corals.' An extensive series of researches, chiefly conducted by the members of the committee appointed by the British a.s.sociation to investigate the marine geology of Britain by means of the dredge, have not invalidated this cla.s.sification, and the researches of Professor Loven, in the Norwegian and Lapland seas, have borne out their correctness The first two of the regions above mentioned had been previously noticed by Lamoureux, 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 Jagttayelser_."]

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 Aegean Sea, between the sh.o.r.e 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 cla.s.sification of the facts of distribution in depth as they are to be observed in the Aegean; 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 Aegean 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 justified in building upon it. Nevertheless, so far as the limit of the range of life in depth goes, Forbes' conclusion has been completely negatived, and the greatest depths yet attained show not even an approach to a "zero of life":--

"During the several cruises of H.M. s.h.i.+ps _Lightning_ and _Porcupine_ in the years 1868, 1869, and 1870," says Dr. Wyville Thomson, "fifty-seven hauls of the dredge were taken in the Atlantic at depths beyond 500 fathoms, and sixteen at depths beyond 1,000 fathoms, and, in all cases, life was abundant. In 1869, we took two casts in depths greater than 2,000 fathoms. In both of these life was abundant; and with the deepest cast, 2,435 fathoms, off the month of the Bay of Biscay, we took living, well-marked and characteristic examples of all the five invertebrate sub- kingdoms. And thus the question of the existence of abundant animal life at the bottom of the sea has been finally settled and for all depths, for there is no reason to suppose that the depth anywhere exceeds between three and four thousand fathoms; and if there be nothing in the conditions of a depth of 2,500 fathoms to prevent the full development of a varied Fauna, it is impossible to suppose that even an additional thousand fathoms would make any great difference."[5]

[Footnote 5: _The Depths of the Sea_, p. 30. Results of a similar kind, obtained by previous observers, are stated at length in the sixth chapter, pp. 267-280. The dredgings carried out by Count Pourtales, under the authority of Professor Peirce, the Superintendent of the United States Coast Survey, in the years 1867, 1868, and 1869, are particularly noteworthy, and it is probably not too much to say, in the words of Professor Aga.s.siz, "that we owe to the coast survey the first broad and comprehensive basis for an exploration of the sea bottom on a large scale, opening a new era in zoological and geological research."]

As Dr. Wyville Thomson's recent letter, cited above, shows, the use of the trawl, at great depths, has brought to light a still greater diversity of life. Fishes came up from a depth of 600 to more than 1,000 fathoms, all in a peculiar condition from the expansion of the air contained in their bodies. On their relief from the extreme pressure, their eyes, especially, had a singular appearance, protruding like great globes from their heads. Bivalve and univalve mollusca seem to be rare at the greatest depths; but starfishes, sea urchins and other echinoderms, zoophytes, sponges, and protozoa abound.

It is obvious that the _Challenger_ has the privilege of opening a new chapter in the history of the living world. She cannot send down her dredges and her trawls into these virgin depths of the great ocean without bringing up a discovery. Even though the thing itself may be neither "rich nor rare," the fact that it came from that depth, in that particular lat.i.tude and longitude, will be a new fact in distribution, and, as such, have a certain importance.

But it may be confidently a.s.sumed that the things brought up will very frequently be zoological novelties; or, better still, zoological antiquities, which, in the tranquil and little-changed depths of the ocean, have escaped the causes of destruction at work in the shallows, and represent the predominant population of a past age.

It has been seen that Audouin and Milne Edwards foresaw the general influence of the study of distribution in depth upon the interpretation of geological phenomena. Forbes connected the two orders of inquiry still more closely; and in the thoughtful essay "On the connection between the distribution of the existing Fauna and Flora of the British Isles, and the geological changes which have affected their area, especially during the epoch of the Northern drift," to which reference has already been made, he put forth a most pregnant suggestion.

In certain parts of the sea bottom in the immediate vicinity of the British Islands, as in the Clyde district, among the Hebrides, in the Moray Firth, and in the German Ocean, there are depressed areas, forming a kind of submarine valleys, the centres of which are from 80 to 100 fathoms, or more, deep. These depressions are inhabited by a.s.semblages of marine animals, which differ from those found over the adjacent and shallower region, and resemble those which are met with much farther north, on the Norwegian coast. Forbes called these Scandinavian detachments "Northern outliers."

How did these isolated patches of a northern population get into these deep places? To explain the mystery, Forbes called to mind the fact that, in the epoch which immediately preceded the present, the climate was much colder (whence the name of "glacial epoch" applied to it); and that the sh.e.l.ls which are found fossil, or sub-fossil, in deposits of that age are precisely such as are now to be met with only in the Scandinavian, or still more Arctic, regions. Undoubtedly, during the glacial epoch, the general population of our seas had, universally, the northern aspect which is now presented only by the "northern outliers"; just as the vegetation of the land, down to the sea-level, had the northern character which is, at present, exhibited only by the plants which live on the tops of our mountains. But, as the glacial epoch pa.s.sed away, and the present climatal conditions were developed, the northern plants were able to maintain themselves only on the bleak heights, on which southern forms could not compete with them. And, in like manner, Forbes suggested that, after the glacial epoch, the northern animals then inhabiting the sea became restricted to the deeps in which they could hold their own against invaders from the south, better fitted than they to flourish in the warmer waters of the shallows. Thus depth in the sea corresponded in its effect upon distribution to height on the land.

The same idea is applied to the explanation of a similar anomaly in the Fauna of the Aegean:--

"In the deepest of the regions of depth of the Aegean, the representation of a Northern Fauna is maintained, partly by identical and partly by representative forms.... The presence of the latter is essentially due to the law (of representation of parallels of lat.i.tude by zones of depth), whilst that of the former species depended on their transmission from their parent seas during a former epoch, and subsequent isolation. That epoch was doubtless the newer Pliocene or Glacial Era, when the _Mya truncata_ and other northern forms now extinct in the Mediterranean, and found fossil in the Sicilian tertiaries, ranged into that sea. The changes which there destroyed the _shallow water_ glacial forms, did not affect those living in the depths, and which still survive."[6]

[Footnote 6: _Memoirs of the Geological Survey of Great Britain_, Vol. i.

p. 390.]