Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/562

546 such depths! Hence the careful treatment it receives when brought on deck. Fig. 11 shows the sieves used. The whole nest of four is used at once. Some of the mud is put into the top one, which has large meshes, these meshes decreasing in size, so that the smallest are in the sieve at the bottom. The whole are set in a deep tub of sea-water. There is to be no turning round of the sieves, as that would break or bruise some of the frail organisms. Taking hold of the handles of the bottom sieve, the whole nest is lifted up and down with a gentle churning motion; and, when the mud is all passed through, the objects are tenderly removed to jars of sea-water. A bone forceps is used for this purpose.



What a wonderful, yea, fascinating thing, then, is this lovely glass-sponge! It is amazing that a creature so simple, that it has been called structureless, should surpass all other organisms in its capacity of rearing exquisite fabrics. And, now that we have had time to sober down a little in our raptures over its structural beauty, and, so to speak––like one that has passed from the pleasant contemplations of art to the graver meditations of philosophy––to listen with composure to its deeper teaching, we find it casting new light upon the inquiries of Science––even lifting a corner of the veil of the covered past. So little, until lately, did we know about the glass-sponge, that we were like the purblind prehistoric man working patiently at his flint nodule to fashion it into an implement for use, little dreaming that some glass-sponge had been the ancient eliminator and conservator of the solvent silex of the sea, and had, through subsequent geologic action, preserved its skeleton for the service of that ruder artisan. What a freight of precious knowledge will that be, when the good ship Challenger shall have returned from her four years' dredging around the world, among that newly-opened "Abyssal Fauna," whose province covers 140,000,000 square miles beneath the blue mantle of "the myriad smiling sea!"