DRAGGING THE TOW-NET TO CATCH MINUTE SURFACE ANIMALS
Note sailors with small nets
BEAM-TRAWL AND TOW-NET EMPLOYED IN DEEP-SEA RESEARCH
Face page 188
Immense supplies have been thus dredged and hauled up from the bottom of the sea. Muds and oozes, sands and pebbles, stones and rocks, shelly deposits, volcanic deposits, remains innumerable of dead plants, remains still more abundant of animals, including earbones of whales and teeth of sharks, and more rarely other parts of animal-skeletons—large, small, microscopic, these all have been, with infinite care, with infinite patience, sorted and examined and classified.
Teeth and earbones! But where are the great shark-skeletons? Where are the mighty bone frameworks of whales?
If a whale’s earbones lie here, surely here also must have sunk the enormous carcase. Yet all the rest has vanished. All has been dissolved—disintegrated—eaten up, as it were, by the black and silent waste of water. Sea-water has an extraordinary dissolving power, much intensified by added pressure at great depths, and few substances can long withstand that power. Not even the massive skeletons of sharks and whales, with the exception of the teeth and earbones, which are formed of peculiarly hard material.