Page:Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology.djvu/354

328 but when placed dead in the water and allowed freely to sink, the force of gravity always, and for obvious reasons, causes all such forms to sink with the convex side down. Brooke's lead will bring up these shells exactly as they lie on the bottom, and so he proposed to observe with regard to their manner of lying. Of course, if they lived at the bottom, they would die as they lived, and lie as they died, for (§ 590) there is nothing to turn them over after death at the bottom of the deep sea, consequently their skeletons would be brought' up in the quills of the sounding machine flat side down, convex side up; but if they lived near the surface, and reached the bottom after death, they would be found flat side up.

614. An unexpected solution afforded.—But, before there was an opportunity of trying this plan, Ehrenberg himself afforded the solution in a most unexpected way:—in examining soundings from a great depth in the Mediterranean, he found many fresh-water shells with their fleshy parts still in them, though the specimens were taken from the middle of that sea. That savant, with his practised eye, detected among them Swiss forms, which must have come down the Danube, and so out into the Mediterranean hundreds of miles, and on journeys which would require months, if not years, for these slowly-drifting creatures to accomplish. And so the anti-biotics maintain (§ 603) that their doctrine is established.