Immense supplies have been thus dredged and hauled up from the bottom of the sea. Muds and oozes, sands and pebbles, stones and rocks, shelly deposits, volcanic deposits, remains innumerable of dead plants, remains still more abundant of animals, including earbones of whales and teeth of sharks, and more rarely other parts of animal-skeletons--large, small, microscopic, these all have been, with infinite care, with infinite patience, sorted and examined and classified. Teeth and earbones! But where are the great shark-skeletons? Where are the mighty bone frameworks of whales? If a whale’s earbones lie here, surely here also must have sunk the enormous carcase. Yet all the rest has vanished. All has been dissolved--disintegrated--eaten up, as it were, by the black and silent waste of water. Sea-water has an extraordinary dissolving power, much intensified by added pressure at great depths, and few substances can long withstand that power. Not even the massive skeletons of sharks and whales, with the exception of the teeth and earbones, which are formed of peculiarly hard material. And never once, throughout the whole cruise, was any single bone of Man brought up from the ocean-bed. After all is this surprising? Where even whale-skeletons are mastered, small chance can remain for a human skeleton to stand out long against absorption. The marvel is how tiny foraminifer shells can last as they do. The majority no doubt disappear. Unless they reach the bottom quickly, and are there covered up and protected, they must soon be dissolved. Yet that vast numbers do thus escape we know by the masses of ooze found over the sea-bottom; by the fifty millions or more of square miles of the ocean-floor carpeted with coral muds and sands, and with oozes of foraminifera and kindred shells. Only down to a depth of about two miles. Beyond that, carbonate-of-lime shells are seldom found. It is believed that these light shells take as much as three or four days to sink one mile; and in about two miles they all succumb to the power of sea-water. But the hard little diatom cases are present in all depths, more especially in Earth’s colder regions, where they abound most freely. The ocean-bed has been described as one huge sepulchre, full of the remains of once-living creatures. And this is true; yet by itself it gives a very one-sided view. Not less is the ocean-bed to be described as a world of abounding Life. Everywhere, throughout the whole sea, in all parts, above and below and between--near the surface, on the floor, in all intermediate reaches--living creatures flourish in numbers past imagination.