“When once we have begun to look with curiosity on the strange things that ordinary people pass over without notice, our wonder is continually excited by the variety of phase, and often by the uncouthness of form, under which some of the meaner creatures are presented to us. And this is very specially the case with the inhabitants of the sea. We can scarcely poke or pry for an hour among the rocks, at low-water mark, or walk, with an observant downcast eye, along the beach after a gale, without finding some oddly-fashioned, suspicious-looking being, unlike any form of life that we have seen before. The dark concealed interior of the sea becomes thus invested with a fresh mystery; its vast recesses appear to be stored with all imaginable forms; and we are tempted to think there must be multitudes of living creatures whose very figure and structure have never yet been suspected. “‘O sea! old sea! who yet knows half Of thy wonders or thy pride!’” GOSSE’S _Aquarium_, pp. 226, 227. These words have more than fulfilled themselves since they were written. Those Deep-Sea dredgings, of which a detailed account will be found in Dr. Wyville Thomson’s new and most beautiful book, “The Depths of the Sea,” have disclosed, of late years, wonders of the deep even more strange and more multitudinous than the wonders of the shore. The time is past when we thought ourselves bound to believe, with Professor Edward Forbes, that only some hundred fathoms down, the inhabitants of the sea-bottom “become more and more modified, and fewer and fewer, indicating our approach towards an abyss where life is either extinguished, or exhibits but a few sparks to mark it’s lingering presence.” Neither now need we indulge in another theory which had a certain grandeur in it, and was not so absurd as it looks at first sight,—namely, that, as Dr. Wyville Thomson puts it, picturesquely enough, “in going down the sea water became, under the pressure, gradually heavier and heavier, and that all the loose things floated at different levels, according to their specific weight,—skeletons of men, anchors and shot and cannon, and last of all the broad gold pieces lost in the wreck of many a galleon off the Spanish Main; the whole forming a kind of ‘false bottom’ to the ocean, beneath which there lay all the depth of clear still water, which was heavier than molten gold.”