Abilene weekly reflector. [volume] (Abilene, Kan.) 1888-1935, 1890-05-15
IN THE DEEP SEA.
Curiosities of Animal Life at the Bottom
of the Ocean.

CuriOsities of Animal Life at the Bottom
| of the Ocean.
Animal life is ultimately dependent
upon the vegetable kingdom, and that
| kingdom in turn is dependent upon the
| light of the sun. Miles below the ocean
surface the sunlight can not penetrate,
or in all events, vegetation, with all its
powers of bottling up the solar rays,
can not there, so far as at present
known, maintain an existence. The
water at very great depths is in most
| parts of the world near the freezing
point. Further, the pressure upon every
square inch of the surface of body
under three miles of sea water, instead
of being about fifteen pounds as in at
mospheric air, is three tons, or in other
words, six thousand seven hundred and
| twenty pounds. 1t was not perhaps ir-
rational to suppose that a sponge or a
delicate fish would be crushed into
nothingness if each square inch of it's
surface were subjected to such weight
as score of the strongest coal beavers
in the world would stagger under. 1t
rather humbles ones pride in the prowess
of human reason to see how sometimes
its apparently most cogent and most
readily-accepted arguments suddenly
lose all their force when Unexpectedly
confronted with facts.
The killed ornithologist, after point
ing out that the owl in the BARRIERS
shop was SO badly stuffed that it could
not be taken to represent either an owl
or any possible member of the bird crea-
ton, might we'll be disconnected when
the impossibility stepped down from its
perch and proved to be not a stuffed
owl, but live one Even lawyers and
law-givers, theolOgians and political
economists have occasionally made mis-
takes, and the votaries of natural sci
ence are also human. Now that we
know that animal life can be and is sup
ported under enormous pressure in the
cold, dark depths, where even kelp and
sea moss take no foothold, reason is
equal to the task of explaining how the
difficulties of the position may be en-
countered. Though plants can not grow
without sunlight, yet, when their life
in the upper regions of the sea is over,
they may sink, as diatoms undoubtedly
do, through all depths to the bottom.
Even if the deepest-living animals had
no access to vegetation they might de-
rive the benefit of it through a chain of
consumers, ending with themselves, but
beginning with vegetable feeders.
Many of the jewellers in the deep sea
have no eyes, and are therefore compar-
atively unaffected by the absence of
light; for others that have eyes the
gloom is relieved by the luminous or
gans which they or their neighbors
possess. The temperature, we may be
assured, is we'll suited to the permanent
inhabitants of each region, so that those
surrounded by water nearly at the
freezing point would not thank US for
warming it for them, any more than the
Esquimau is pleased when a rise of
temperature sets every thing adrip in
his pavilion of ice. The pressure, too,
however stupendous to our imagination,
is evidently borne without concern by
creatures which are themselves perme-
ated by fluids of the same density as the
surrounding Medium. Though also to
our taste the chemistry of sea water is
unpalatable, we know that most marine
animals can not live without it, and
while terrestrial life is limited in
its distribution, and often put to sore
straits by the scanty supply of fresh
water, to the denizens of the sea the re-
sources for the quenching of thirst are
always at hand, never-failing and prac-
tically infnite.-Edinburgh Review.