"Oh yes," responded Lady Olivia, "I remember having heard Sir Reginald speak of his `diving-armour'; what a very handsome suit it is,"--as she touched and thoughtfully opened the folds of a surcoat of scale armour that looked as though made of silver; "but it seems a queer idea to don armour for the purpose of walking about at the bottom of the sea. Yet, what a man of foresight you must be, Professor! My husband has often told Ida the story of your terrible fight with the conger eels, the first time that the party ever sallied forth from the _Flying Fish_. You appear to have foreseen and provided against every possible danger." "No, no!" exclaimed von Schalckenberg, laughingly disclaiming any such prescience; "I am not nearly as clever as that. For instance: the armour was not provided as a protection against the attacks of savage animals or fish, but for quite a different purpose." "Indeed!" exclaimed her ladyship; "for what purpose, then, was it provided?" "For the purpose of protecting the wearer against the enormous pressure of the water to which he would be subjected when moving about on the bed of the ocean at a great depth below the surface," answered the professor. "You must understand," he continued, "that water exerts a pressure upon everything immersed in it; and the deeper the water, the greater is the pressure upon the immersed body. So rapidly does this pressure increase, that divers attired in an ordinary diving-dress are only able to descend to a depth of about fifteen fathoms, or ninety feet; there are a few cases where this depth has been exceeded, but they are few and far between. Now I have always held the opinion that to descend into the sea to merely such a trifling depth as this, for the purpose of scientific investigation, is scarcely worth the trouble; so when Sir Reginald was good enough to furnish me with the means to materialise, as it were, in this ship, the fancies and longings that had haunted me, day and night, for years, I determined that it should not be my fault if we did not, all of us, completely eclipse all previous achievements in diving. The great difficulty that I had to contend with was the enormous water-pressure of which I had spoken. Could I but contrive to encase our bodies in some garment that would receive and successfully resist this terrible pressure, and yet be flexible enough to permit of free movement to the wearer, the problem would be solved. And these diving-suits are the outcome of my efforts; they sustain and resist to perfection, without permitting them to be transmitted to the body, the most severe pressures to which we have ever exposed them, while at the same time they afford complete protection in other respects to the wearers--as when, for example, we were attacked by the conger eels."