No one knew anything, I believe, about them, save that two or three kinds
of them were found in chalk, till a famous Frenchman, called D'Orbigny,
just thirty years ago, told the world how he had found many beautiful
fresh kinds; and, more strange still, that some of these kinds were still
alive at the bottom of the Adriatic, and of the harbour of Alexandria, in
Egypt.
Then in 1841 a gentleman named Edward Forbes,--now with God--whose name
will be for ever dear to all who love science, and honour genius and
virtue,--found in the AEgean Sea "a bed of chalk," he said, "full of
Foraminifera, and shells of Pteropods," forming at the bottom of the sea.
And what are Pteropods?
What you might call sea-moths (though they are not really moths), which
swim about on the surface of the water, while the right-whales suck them
in tens of thousands into the great whalebone net which fringes their
jaws. Here are drawings of them. 1. Limacina (on which the whales
feed); and 2. Hyalea, a lovely little thing in a glass shell, which lives
in the Mediterranean.
But since then strange discoveries have been made, especially by the
naval officers who surveyed the bottom of the great Atlantic Ocean before
laying down the electric cable between Ireland and America. And this is
what they found:
That at the bottom of the Atlantic were vast plains of soft mud, in some
places 2500 fathoms (15,000 feet) deep; that is, as deep as the Alps are
high.
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