Discourses: Biological & Geological Part 3

The conception that the inhabitants of local depressions of the sea bottom might be a remnant of the ancient population of the area, which had held their own in these deep fastnesses against an invading Fauna, as Britons and Gaels have held out in Wales and in Scotland against encroaching Teutons, thus broached by Forbes, received a wider application than Forbes had dreamed of when the sounding machine first brought up specimens of the mud of the deep sea. As I have pointed out elsewhere,[7] it at once became obvious that the calcareous sticky mud of the Atlantic was made up, in the main, of sh.e.l.ls of _Globigerina_ and other _Foraminifera_, identical with those of which the true chalk is composed, and the ident.i.ty extended even to the presence of those singular bodies, the Coccoliths and Coccospheres, the true nature of which is not yet made out. Here then were organisms, as old as the cretaceous epoch, still alive, and doing their work of rock-making at the bottom of existing seas. What if _Globigerina_ and the Coccoliths should not be the only survivors of a world pa.s.sed away, which are hidden beneath three miles of salt water? The letter which Dr. Wyville Thomson wrote to Dr. Carpenter in May, 1868, out of which all these expeditions have grown, shows that this query had become a practical problem in Dr.

Thomson's mind at that time; and the desirableness of solving the problem is put in the foreground of his reasons for urging the Government to undertake the work of exploration:--

[Footnote 7: See above, "On a Piece of Chalk," p. 13.]

"Two years ago, M. Sars, Swedish Government Inspector of Fisheries, had an opportunity, in his official capacity, of dredging off the Loffoten Islands at a depth of 300 fathoms. I visited Norway shortly after his return, and had an opportunity of studying with his father, Professor Sars, some of his results. Animal forms were _abundant_; many of them were new to science; and among them was one of surpa.s.sing interest, the small crinoid, of which you have a specimen, and which we at once recognised as a degraded type of the _Apiocrinidoe_, an order hitherto regarded as extinct, which attained its maximum in the Pear Encrinites of the Jura.s.sic period, and whose latest representative hitherto known was the _Bourguettocrinus_ of the chalk. Some years previously, Mr.

Absjornsen, dredging in 200 fathoms in the Hardangerfjord, procured several examples of a Starfish (_Brisinga_), which seems to find its nearest ally in the fossil genus _Protaster_. These observations place it beyond a doubt that animal life is abundant in the ocean at depths varying from 200 to 300 fathoms, that the forms at these great depths differ greatly from those met with in ordinary dredgings, and that, at all events in some cases, these animals are closely allied to, and would seem to be directly descended from, the Fauna of the early tertiaries.

"I think the latter result might almost have been antic.i.p.ated; and, probably, further investigation will largely add to this cla.s.s of data, and will give us an opportunity of testing our determinations of the zoological position of some fossil types by an examination of the soft parts of their recent representatives. The main cause of the destruction, the migration, and the extreme modification of animal types, appear to be change of climate, chiefly depending upon oscillations of the earth's crust. These oscillations do not appear to have ranged, in the Northern portion of the Northern Hemisphere, much beyond 1,000 feet since the commencement of the Tertiary Epoch. The temperature of deep waters seems to be constant for all lat.i.tudes at 39; so that an immense area of the North Atlantic must have had its conditions unaffected by tertiary or post-tertiary oscillations."[8]

[Footnote 8: The Depths of the Sea, pp. 51-52.]

As we shall see, the a.s.sumption that the temperature of the deep sea is everywhere 39 F. (4 Cent.) is an error, which Dr. Wyville Thomson adopted from eminent physical writers; but the general justice of the reasoning is not affected by this circ.u.mstance, and Dr. Thomson's expectation has been, to some extent, already verified.

Thus besides _Globigerina_, there are eighteen species of deep-sea _Foraminifera_ identical with species found in the chalk. Imbedded in the chalky mud of the deep sea, in many localities, are innumerable cup- shaped sponges, provided with six-rayed silicious spicula, so disposed that the wall of the cup is formed of a lacework of flinty thread. Not less abundant, in some parts of the chalk formation, are the fossils known as _Ventriculites_, well described by Dr. Thomson as "elegant vases or cups, with branching root-like bases, or groups of regularly or irregularly spreading tubes delicately fretted on the surface with an impressed network like the finest lace"; and he adds, "When we compare such recent forms as _Aphrocallistes, Iphiteon, Holtenia_, and _Askonema_, with certain series of the chalk _Ventriculites_, there cannot be the slightest doubt that they belong to the same family--in some cases to very nearly allied genera."[9]

[Footnote 9: _The Depths of the Sea_, p. 484.]

Professor Duncan finds "several corals from the coast of Portugal more nearly allied to chalk forms than to any others."

The Stalked Crinoids or Feather Stars, so abundant in ancient times, are now exclusively confined to the deep sea, and the late explorations have yielded forms of old affinity, the existence of which has. .h.i.therto been unsuspected. The general character of the group of star fishes imbedded in the white chalk is almost the same as in the modern Fauna of the deep Atlantic. The sea urchins of the deep sea, while none of them are specifically identical with any chalk form, belong to the same general groups, and some closely approach extinct cretaceous genera.

Taking these facts in conjunction with the positive evidence of the existence, during the Cretaceous epoch, of a deep ocean where now lies the dry land of central and southern Europe, northern Africa, and western and southern Asia; and of the gradual diminution of this ocean during the older tertiary epoch, until it is represented at the present day by such teacupfuls as the Caspian, the Black Sea, and the Mediterranean; the supposition of Dr. Thomson and Dr. Carpenter that what is now the deep Atlantic, was the deep Atlantic (though merged in a vast easterly extension) in the Cretaceous epoch, and that the _Globigerina_ mud has been acc.u.mulating there from that time to this, seems to me to have a great degree of probability. And I agree with Dr. Wyville Thomson against Sir Charles Lyell (it takes two of us to have any chance against his authority) in demurring to the a.s.sertion that "to talk of chalk having been uninterruptedly formed in the Atlantic is as inadmissible in a geographical as in a geological sense."

If the word "chalk" is to be used as a stratigraphical term and restricted to _Globigerina_ mud deposited during the Cretaceous epoch, of course it is improper to call the precisely similar mud of more recent date, chalk. If, on the other hand, it is to be used as a mineralogical term, I do not see how the modern and the ancient chalks are to be separated--and, looking at the matter geographically, I see no reason to doubt that a boring rod driven from the surface of the mud which forms the floor of the mid-Atlantic would pa.s.s through one continuous ma.s.s of _Globigerina_ mud, first of modern, then of tertiary, and then of mesozoic date; the "chalks" of different depths and ages being distinguished merely by the different forms of other organisms a.s.sociated with the _Globigerinoe_.

On the other hand, I think it must be admitted that a belief in the continuity of the modern with the ancient chalk has nothing to do with the proposition that we can, in any sense whatever, be said to be still living in the Cretaceous epoch. When the _Challenger's_ trawl brings up an _Ichthyosaurus_, along with a few living specimens of _Belemnites_ and _Turrilites_, it may be admitted that she has come upon a cretaceous "outlier." A geological period is characterized not only by the presence of those creatures which lived in it, but by the absence of those which have only come into existence later; and, however large a proportion of true cretaceous forms may be discovered in the deep sea, the modern types a.s.sociated with them must be abolished before the Fauna, as a whole, could, with any propriety, be termed Cretaceous.

I have now indicated some of the chief lines of Biological inquiry, in which the _Challenger_ has special opportunities for doing good service, and in following which she will be carrying out the work already commenced by the _Lightning_ and _Porcupine_ in their cruises of 1868 and subsequent years.

But biology, in the long run, rests upon physics, and the first condition for arriving at a sound theory of distribution in the deep sea, is the precise ascertainment of the conditions of life; or, in other words, a full knowledge of all those phenomena which are embraced under the head of the Physical Geography of the Ocean.

Excellent work has already been done in this direction, chiefly under the superintendence of Dr. Carpenter, by the _Lightning_ and the _Porcupine_,[10] and some data of fundamental importance to the physical geography of the sea have been fixed beyond a doubt.

[Footnote 10: _Proceedings of the Royal Society_, 1870 and 1872]

Thus, though it is true that sea-water steadily contracts as it cools down to its freezing point, instead of expanding before it reaches its freezing point as fresh water does, the truth has been steadily ignored by even the highest authorities in physical geography, and the erroneous conclusions deduced from their erroneous premises have been widely accepted as if they were ascertained facts. Of course, if sea-water, like fresh water, were heaviest at a temperature of 39 F. and got lighter as it approached 32 F., the water of the bottom of the deep sea could not be colder than 39. But one of the first results of the careful ascertainment of the temperature at different depths, by means of thermometers specially contrived for the avoidance of the errors produced by pressure, was the proof that, below 1000 fathoms in the Atlantic, down to the greatest depths yet sounded, the water has a temperature always lower than 38 Fahr., whatever be the temperature of the water at the surface. And that this low temperature of the deepest water is probably the universal rule for the depths of the open ocean is shown, among others, by Captain Chimmo's recent observations in the Indian ocean, between Ceylon and Sumatra, where, the surface water ranging from 85-81 Fahr., the temperature at the bottom, at a depth of 2270 to 2656 fathoms, was only from 34 to 32 Fahr.

As the mean temperature of the superficial layer of the crust of the earth may be taken at about 50 Fahr., it follows that the bottom layer of the deep sea in temperate and hot lat.i.tudes, is, on the average, much colder than either of the bodies with which it is in contact; for the temperature of the earth is constant, while that of the air rarely falls so low as that of the bottom water in the lat.i.tudes in question; and even when it does, has time to affect only a comparatively thin stratum of the surface water before the return of warm weather.

How does this apparently anomalous state of things come about? If we suppose the globe to be covered with a universal ocean, it can hardly be doubted that the cold of the regions towards the poles must tend to cause the superficial water of those regions to contract and become specifically heavier. Under these circ.u.mstances, it would have no alternative but to descend and spread over the sea bottom, while its place would be taken by warmer water drawn from the adjacent regions.

Thus, deep, cold, polar-equatorial currents, and superficial, warmer, equatorial-polar currents, would be set up; and as the former would have a less velocity of rotation from west to east than the regions towards which they travel, they would not be due southerly or northerly currents, but south-westerly in the northern hemisphere, and north-westerly in the southern; while, by a parity of reasoning, the equatorial-polar warm currents would be north-easterly in the northern hemisphere, and south- easterly in the southern. Hence, as a north-easterly current has the same direction as a south-westerly wind, the direction of the northern equatorial-polar current in the extra-tropical part of its course would pretty nearly coincide with that of the anti-trade winds. The freezing of the surface of the polar sea would not interfere with the movement thus set up. For, however bad a conductor of heat ice may be, the unfrozen sea-water immediately in contact with the undersurface of the ice must needs be colder than that further off; and hence will constantly tend to descend through the subjacent warmer water.

In this way, it would seem inevitable that the surface waters of the northern and southern frigid zones must, sooner or later, find their way to the bottom of the rest of the ocean; and there acc.u.mulate to a thickness dependent on the rate at which they absorb heat from the crust of the earth below, and from the surface water above.

If this hypothesis be correct, it follows that, if any part of the ocean in warm lat.i.tudes is shut off from the influence of the cold polar underflow, the temperature of its deeps should be less cold than the temperature of corresponding depths in the open sea. Now, in the Mediterranean, Nature offers a remarkable experimental proof of just the kind needed. It is a landlocked sea which runs nearly east and west, between the twenty-ninth and forty-fifth parallels of north lat.i.tude.

Roughly speaking, the average temperature of the air over it is 75 Fahr.

in July and 48 in January.

This great expanse of water is divided by the peninsula of Italy (including Sicily), continuous with which is a submarine elevation carrying less than 1,200 feet of water, which extends from Sicily to Cape Bon in Africa, into two great pools--an eastern and a western. The eastern pool rapidly deepens to more than 12,000 feet, and sends off to the north its comparatively shallow branches, the Adriatic and the Aegean Seas. The western pool is less deep, though it reaches some 10,000 feet.

And, just as the western end of the eastern pool communicates by a shallow pa.s.sage, not a sixth of its greatest depth, with the western pool, so the western pool is separated from the Atlantic by a ridge which runs between Capes Trafalgar and Spartel, on which there is hardly 1,000 feet of water. All the water of the Mediterranean which lies deeper than about 150 fathoms, therefore, is shut off from that of the Atlantic, and there is no communication between the cold layer of the Atlantic (below 1,000 fathoms) and the Mediterranean. Under these circ.u.mstances, what is the temperature of the Mediterranean? Everywhere below 600 feet it is about 55 Fahr.; and consequently, at its greatest depths, it is some 20 warmer than the corresponding depths of the Atlantic.

It seems extremely difficult to account for this difference in any other way, than by adopting the views so strongly and ably advocated by Dr.

Carpenter, that, in the existing distribution of land and water, such a circulation of the water of the ocean does actually occur, as theoretically must occur, in the universal ocean, with which we started.

It is quite another question, however, whether this theoretic circulation, true cause as it may be, is competent to give rise to such movements of sea-water, in ma.s.s, as those currents, which have commonly been regarded as northern extensions of the Gulf-stream. I shall not venture to touch upon this complicated problem; but I may take occasion to remark that the cause of a much simpler phenomenon--the stream of Atlantic water which sets through the Straits of Gibraltar, eastward, at the rate of two or three miles an hour or more, does not seem to be so clearly made out as is desirable.

The facts appear to be that the water of the Mediterranean is very slightly denser than that of the Atlantic (1.0278 to 1.0265), and that the deep water of the Mediterranean is slightly denser than that of the surface; while the deep water of the Atlantic is, if anything, lighter than that of the surface. Moreover, while a rapid superficial current is setting in (always, save in exceptionally violent easterly winds) through the Straits of Gibraltar, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, a deep undercurrent (together with variable side currents) is setting out through the Straits, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.

Dr. Carpenter adopts, without hesitation, the view that the cause of this indraught of Atlantic water is to be sought in the much more rapid evaporation which takes place from the surface of the Mediterranean than from that of the Atlantic; and thus, by lowering the level of the former, gives rise to an indraught from the latter.

But is there any sound foundation for the three a.s.sumptions involved here? Firstly, that the evaporation from the Mediterranean, as a whole, is much greater than that from the Atlantic under corresponding parallels; secondly, that the rainfall over the Mediterranean makes up for evaporation less than it does over the Atlantic; and thirdly, supposing these two questions answered affirmatively: Are not these sources of loss in the Mediterranean fully covered by the prodigious quant.i.ty of fresh water which is poured into it by great rivers and submarine springs? Consider that the water of the Ebro, the Rhine, the Po, the Danube, the Don, the Dnieper, and the Nile, all flow directly or indirectly into the Mediterranean; that the volume of fresh water which they pour into it is so enormous that fresh water may sometimes be baled up from the surface of the sea off the Delta of the Nile, while the land is not yet in sight; that the water of the Black Sea is half fresh, and that a current of three or four miles an hour constantly streams from it Mediterraneanwards through the Bosphorus;--consider, in addition, that no fewer than ten submarine springs of fresh water are known to burst up in the Mediterranean, some of them so large that Admiral Smyth calls them "subterranean rivers of amazing volume and force"; and it would seem, on the face of the matter, that the sun must have enough to do to keep the level of the Mediterranean down; and that, possibly, we may have to seek for the cause of the small superiority in saline contents of the Mediterranean water in some condition other than solar evaporation.

Again, if the Gibraltar indraught is the effect of evaporation, why does it go on in winter as well as in summer?

All these are questions more easily asked than answered; but they must be answered before we can accept the Gibraltar stream as an example of a current produced by indraught with any comfort.

The Mediterranean is not included in the _Challenger's_ route, but she will visit one of the most promising and little explored of hydrographical regions--the North Pacific, between Polynesia and the Asiatic and American sh.o.r.es; and doubtless the store of observations upon the currents of this region, which she will acc.u.mulate, when compared with what we know of the North Atlantic, will throw a powerful light upon the present obscurity of the Gulf-stream problem.

III

ON SOME OF THE RESULTS OF THE EXPEDITION OF H.M.S. _CHALLLENGER_

[1875]

In May, 1873, I drew attention[1] to the important problems connected with the physics and natural history of the sea, to the solution of which there was every reason to hope the cruise of H.M.S. _Challenger_ would furnish important contributions. The expectation then expressed has not been disappointed. Reports to the Admiralty, papers communicated to the Royal Society, and large collections which have already been sent home, have shown that the _Challenger's_ staff have made admirable use of their great opportunities; and that, on the return of the expedition in 1874, their performance will be fully up to the level of their promise. Indeed, I am disposed to go so far as to say, that if nothing more came of the _Challengers_ expedition than has. .h.i.therto been yielded by her exploration of the nature of the sea bottom at great depths, a full scientific equivalent of the trouble and expense of her equipment would have been obtained.

[Footnote 1: See the preceding Essay.]

In order to justify this a.s.sertion, and yet, at the same time, not to claim more for Professor Wyville Thomson and his colleagues than is their due, I must give a brief history of the observations which have preceded their exploration of this recondite field of research, and endeavour to make clear what was the state of knowledge in December, 1872, and what new facts have been added by the scientific staff of the _Challenger_. So far as I have been able to discover, the first successful attempt to bring up from great depths more of the sea bottom than would adhere to a sounding-lead, was made by Sir John Ross, in the voyage to the Arctic regions which he undertook in 1818. In the Appendix to the narrative of that voyage, there will be found an account of a very ingenious apparatus called "clams"--a sort of double scoop--of his own contrivance, which Sir John Ross had made by the s.h.i.+p's armourer; and by which, being in Baffin's Bay, in 72 30' N. and 77 15' W., he succeeded in bringing up from 1,050 fathoms (or 6,300 feet), "several pounds" of a "fine green mud," which formed the bottom of the sea in this region. Captain (now Sir Edward) Sabine, who accompanied Sir John Ross on this cruise, says of this mud that it was "soft and greenish, and that the lead sunk several feet into it." A similar "fine green mud" was found to compose the sea bottom in Davis Straits by Goodsir in 1845. Nothing is certainly known of the exact nature of the mud thus obtained, but we shall see that the mud of the bottom of the Antarctic seas is described in curiously similar terms by Dr. Hooker, and there is no doubt as to the composition of this deposit.

In 1850, Captain Penny collected in a.s.sistance Bay, in Kingston Bay, and in Melville Bay, which lie between 73 45' and 74 40' N., specimens of the residuum left by melted surface ice, and of the sea bottom in these localities. Dr. d.i.c.kie, of Aberdeen, sent these materials to Ehrenberg, who made out[2] that the residuum of the melted ice consisted for the most part of the silicious cases of diatomaceous plants, and of the silicious spicula of sponges; while, mixed with these, were a certain number of the equally silicious skeletons of those low animal organisms, which were termed _Polycistineoe_ by Ehrenberg, but are now known as _Radiolaria_.

[Footnote 2: _Ueber neue Anschauungen des kleinsten nordlichen Polarlebens_.--Monatsberichte d. K. Akad. Berlin, 1853.]

In 1856, a very remarkable addition to our knowledge of the nature of the sea bottom in high northern lat.i.tudes was made by Professor Bailey of West Point. Lieutenant Brooke, of the United States Navy, who was employed in surveying the Sea of Kamschatka, had succeeded in obtaining specimens of the sea bottom from greater depths than any hitherto reached, namely from 2,700 fathoms (16,200 feet) in 56 46' N., and 168 18' E.; and from 1,700 fathoms (10,200 feet) in 60 15' N. and 170 53'

E. On examining these microscopically, Professor Bailey found, as Ehrenberg had done in the case of mud obtained on the opposite side of the Arctic region, that the fine mud was made up of sh.e.l.ls of _Diatomacoe_, of spicula of sponges, and of _Radiolaria_, with a small admixture of mineral matters, but without a trace of any calcareous organisms.

Still more complete information has been obtained concerning the nature of the sea bottom in the cold zone around the south pole. Between the years 1839 and 1843, Sir James Clark Ross executed his famous Antarctic expedition, in the course of which he penetrated, at two widely distant points of the Antarctic zone, into the high lat.i.tudes of the sh.o.r.es of Victoria Land and of Graham's Land, and reached the parallel of 80 S.

Sir James Ross was himself a naturalist of no mean acquirements, and Dr.

Hooker,[3] the present President of the Royal Society, accompanied him as naturalist to the expedition, so that the observations upon the fauna and flora of the Antarctic regions made during this cruise were sure to have a peculiar value and importance, even had not the attention of the voyagers been particularly directed to the importance of noting the occurrence of the minutest forms of animal and vegetable life in the ocean.

[Footnote 3: Now Sir Joseph Hooker. 1894.]

Among the scientific instructions for the voyage drawn up by a committee of the Royal Society, however, there is a remarkable letter from Von Humboldt to Lord Minto, then First Lord of the Admiralty, in which, among other things, he dwells upon the significance of the researches into the microscopic composition of rocks, and the discovery of the great share which microscopic organisms take in the formation of the crust of the earth at the present day, made by Ehrenberg in the years 1836-39.

Ehrenberg, in fact, had shown that the extensive beds of "rotten-stone"