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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2009
The researches in which the Author has been personally engaged during the last four years into the Temperature and other Physical conditions of the Deep Sea, combined with the information he has obtained from other sources, have led him to the knowledge of certain remarkable differences in regard to these conditions, which prevail between Inland Seas and the open Ocean. As these differences have a most direct and important bearing upon the distribution of Animal life, and as it would seem highly probable that similar differences have existed in all Geological periods, he thinks it important that Geologists, by being made aware of them, should be in possession of a key that seems likely to open the way to a rational interpretation of many Palæontological phenomena which are at present obscure.
Extracted from The English Mechanic and World of Science, for September 20–27, 1872, with additions and corrections by the Author.
page 547 note 1 So in the case of the Black Sea, it was maintained by the Author that the excess of Specific Gravity of the Ægean water must produce an inward under-current through the Dardanelles and the Bosptaorus; and this prediction, which was affirmed by Captain Spratt to have been disproved by his own previous researches, has recently been verified by the “Shearwater” investigations.
page 548 note 1 “On Corals and Coral Formations,” p. 108.
page 548 note 2 It is a very significant fact that the cold current which comes up from the south on the eastern coast of South America, and which the Author regards as the indraught of the Pacific Equatorial current (as the similar current on the eastern coast of South Africa is of the Atlantic Equatorial current), pushes the southern isocheimal of 68°, the Coral Sea boundary, to the north of the Equator, between the South American coast and the Galapagos, which, though under the Equator, lie outside of that boundary.
page 548 note 3 The Temperatures here given are those of the bottom at different depths in the line of the telegraph cable between Singapore and Hong-Kong. Why the fall of temperature from 51° to 37° should seem, to take place in the China Sea at so much smaller a depth than it does in the Atlantic, cannot be positively affirmed until we have serial soundings which shall give the Temperatures of successive strata in the deepest part of that sea. But as the temperatures given above are those of the bottom at various depths, on the sides of a valley, and as the careful researches of the United States Coast Survey have placed it beyond all doubt that the colder and heavier stratum underlying the Gulf Stream comes nearer the surface with every rise of the bottom over which it flows, I think it may fairly be presumed that the Same cause is in operation here also; as it seems to be likewise in the “lightning Channel” between the north of Scotland and the Faroe Islands.
page 549 note 1 Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. xix. pp. 199–202.
page 549 note 2 His results on this point have been confirmed by the results of Oscar Schmidt's dredgings in the Adriatic.
page 550 note 1 It is by no means improbable that such sluggish, animals as Mollusks and Ecbinodenns may be able to bear a much larger proportion ot Carbonic acid in the water they breathe, than Fishes and Crustacea. Experimental inquiries upon this point, which might be readily carried out in connexion with any large Aquarium, would give results of great Physiological interest.