_Growth of Scope of Operations._--At the Birmingham meeting of the British Association in 1839 an important committee was appointed "for researches with the dredge with a view to the investigation of the marine zoology of Great Britain, the illustration of the geographical distribution of marine animals, and the more accurate determination of the fossils of the Pliocene period." Of this committee Edward Forbes was the ruling spirit, and under the genial influence of his contagious enthusiasm great progress was made during the next decade in the knowledge of the fauna of the British seas, and many wonderfully pleasant days were spent by the original committee and by many others who from year to year were "added to their number." Every annual report of the British Association contains communications from the English, the Scottish, or the Irish branches of the committee; and in 1850 Edward Forbes submitted its first general report on British marine zoology. This report, as might have been anticipated from the eminent qualifications of the reporter, was of the highest value; and, taken along with his remarkable memoirs previously published, "On the Distribution of the Mollusca and Radiata of the Aegean Sea," and "On the Zoological Relations of the existing Fauna and Flora of the British Isles," may be said to mark an era in the progress of human thought. The dredging operations of the British Association committee were carried on generally under the idea that at the 100-fathom line, by which amateur work in small boats was practically limited, the zero of animal life was approached--a notion which was destined to be gradually undermined, and finally overthrown. From time to time, however, there were not wanting men of great skill and experience to maintain, with Sir James Clark Ross, that "from however great a depth we may be enabled to bring up mud and stones of the bed of the ocean we shall find them teeming with animal life." Samples of the sea-bottom procured with great difficulty and in small quantity from the first deep soundings in the Atlantic, chiefly by the use of Brooke's sounding machine, an instrument which by a neat contrivance disengaged its weights when it reached the bottom, and thus allowed a tube, so arranged as to get filled with a sample of the bottom, to be recovered by the sounding line, were eagerly examined by microscopists; and the singular fact was established that these samples consisted over a large part of the bed of the Atlantic of the entire or broken shells of certain foraminifera. Dr Wallich, the naturalist to the "Bulldog" sounding expedition under Sir Leopold M'Clintock, reported that star-fishes, with their stomachs full of the deep-sea foraminifera, had come up from a depth of 1200 fathoms on a sounding line; and doubts began to be entertained whether the bottom of the sea was in truth a desert, or whether it might not present a new zoological region open to investigation and discovery, and peopled by a