On the next day, the 9th, there came a further message in which Clinton reported the bringing up of several other notable variations from classified forms, this time of the dibranchiate and tetrabranchiate cephalopods. He stressed, in this report, the difficulty experienced in using the trawls at the great depths over which the submarine was forging, and added that they had been further hampered by the loss, on the preceding day, of one of their trawls, which, as he said, "was lost in a rather puzzling manner which none of us is able to explain." With this rather ambiguous phrase the message of the 9th concluded, and on the next day no word whatever from the _K-16_ was received by the university station. Then, late on the morning of the 11th, there came that short and enigmatic message which was to make Clinton and his expedition the center of a sudden storm of speculation and discussion. The message itself, received just before noon on the 11th, was a quite coherent one, yet seemed at the same time a quite crazy one. It read: Either we are all mad, or we have made the greatest discovery ever made. One of our trawls has brought up a thing so incredible, so unbelievable, that our minds refuse to credit it though it lies before our eyes. I will not expose this expedition to the derision of the world by telling what we have found until we learn more, and for that reason we are making a descent within the next half-hour which will tell us all. When you hear from us again we shall either have made the greatest discovery ever made by men, or shall know ourselves the victims of some incomprehensible delusion. CLINTON. Considering that message, it is hardly surprizing that the world found it interesting, and that within the next few hours the newspaper-reading public developed a sudden interest in the scientific expedition of whose existence it had hardly been aware until then. Through the afternoon of the 11th, in a hundred radio stations on both sides of the Atlantic, press-writers and scientists alike crowded into the little receiving-rooms to wait for the first news from Clinton and his expedition. And in the university station at London, Stevens and Clinton's other friends and associates waited tensely for that news.