Читать книгу The fauna of the deep sea онлайн

16 страница из 19

The expenditure of the large sum of money upon this expedition and the publication of its reports has been abundantly justified. The information obtained by the ‘Challenger’ will be for many years to come the nucleus of our knowledge of the deep-sea fauna, the centre around which all new facts will cluster, and the guide for further investigations.

To say that the ‘Challenger’ accomplished all that was expected or required would be to over-estimate the value of this great expedition, but nevertheless it is difficult for us, even now, thoroughly to grasp the importance of the results obtained or to analyse and classify the numerous and very remarkable facts that were gained during her four years’ cruise.

It is, of course, impossible, in a few lines, to give a summary of the more important of the Natural History results of the ‘Challenger’ expedition. Besides proving the existence of a fauna in the sea at all depths and in all regions, the expedition further proved that the abysmal fauna, taken as a whole, does not possess characters similar to those of the fauna of any of the secondary or even tertiary rocks. A few forms, it is true, known to us up to that time only as fossils, were found to be still living in the great depths, but a large majority of the animals of these regions were found to be new and specially modified forms of the families and genera inhabiting shallow waters of modern times. No Trilobites, no Blastoids, no Cystoids, no new Ganoids, and scarcely any deep-sea Elasmobranchs were brought to light, but the fauna was found to consist mainly of Teleosteans, Crustacea, Cœlentera, and other creatures unlike anything known to have existed in Palæozoic times, specially modified in structure for their life in the great depths of the ocean.