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In his marvellously penetrative way, Kipling has touched this theme while singing the “Song of the English”:—

“The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar—

Down to the dark, the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.

There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,

On the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.

Here in the womb of the world—here on the tie-ribs of earth,

Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat—

Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth—

For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.”

Surely the imagination must be dead indeed that does not throb responsive to the thought of that latter-day workmanship of wire and rubber descending at the will of man into the vast void, and running its direct course over mountain ranges, across sudden abysses of lower depth, through the turbulence of up-bursting submarine torrents where long-pent-up rivers compel the superincumbent ocean to admit their saltless waters; until from continent to continent the connection is made, and man holds converse with man at his ease as though distance were not. Recent investigations go to prove that chief among the causes that make for destruction of those communicating cables are the upheavals of lost rivers. In spite of the protection that scientific invention has provided for the central core of conducting wire, these irresistible outbursts of undersea torrents rend and destroy it, causing endless labour of replacement by the never-resting cable-ships. But this is only one of the many deeply interesting features of oceanography, a science of comparatively recent growth, but full of gigantic possibilities for the future knowledge of this planet. The researches of the Challenger expedition, embodied in fifty portly volumes, afford a vast mass of material for discussion, and yet it is evident that what they reveal is but the merest tentative dipping into the great mysterious land that lies hidden far below the level surface of the inscrutable sea.