Page:The Depths of the Sea - Wyville - 1873.djvu/36

4 Still the thing is possible, and it must be done again and again, as the years pass on, by naturalists of all nations, working with improving machinery, and with ever-increasing knowledge. For the bed of the deep sea, the 140,000,000 of square miles which we have now added to the legitimate field of Natural History research, is not a barren waste. It is inhabited by a fauna more rich and varied on account of the enormous extent of the area, and with the organisms in many cases apparently even more elaborately and delicately formed, and more exquisitely beautiful in their soft shades of colouring and in the rainbow-tints of their wonderful phosphorescence, than the fauna of the well-known belt of shallow water teeming with innumerable invertebrate forms which fringes the land. And the forms of these hitherto unknown living beings, and their mode of life, and their relations to other organisms whether living or extinct, and the phenomena and laws of their geographical distribution, must be worked out.

The late Professor Edward Forbes appears to have been the first who undertook the systematic study of Marine Zoology with special reference to the distribution of marine animals in space and in time. After making himself well acquainted with the fauna of the British seas to the depth of about 200 fathoms by dredging, and by enlisting the active co-operation of his friends—among whom we find MacAndrew, Barlee, Gwyn Jeffreys, William Thompson, Robert Ball, and many others, entering enthusiastically into the new field of Natural History inquiry—in the year 1841 Forbes joined Capt. Graves, who was at that time in command of the Mediterranean Survey, as naturalist.