most pleasant to dredge with a close-reefed sail before a light wind, with weights, against a very slight tide or current; but these are conditions which cannot be commanded. The dredge may remain down from a quarter of an hour to twenty minutes, by which time, if things go well, it ought to be fairly filled. In dredging from a small boat the simplest plan is for two or three men to haul in, hand over hand, and coil in the bottom of the boat. For a large yawl or yacht, and for depths over 50 fathoms, a winch is a great assistance. The rope takes a couple of turns round the winch, which is worked by two men, while a third hand takes it from the winch and coils it down.
It is easier to operate a dredge from a steam vessel than a sailing boat, but if the steamer is of any size great care should be taken that the dredge does not move too rapidly.
Two ingenious cases of dredging under unusual conditions are worthy of mention, one case from shore, one from ice. In the Trondligem Fjord, Canon A. M. Norman in 1890 worked by hauling the dredge up the precipitous shores of the fjord. The dredge was shot from a boat close to the shore, to which after paying out some hundreds of fathoms of line it returned. The dredge was then hauled from the top of the cliffs up whose side it scraped. Hitches against projecting rocks were frequent and were overcome by suddenly paying out line for a time. The dredge was lifted into a boat when it reached the surface of the sea. The other case occurred during the Antarctic expedition of the “Discovery.” Hodgson dropped loops of line along cracks which occasionally formed in the ice. The ice always joined up again, but with the line below it; and a hole being cleared at each place at which the end of the line emerged, the dredge could be worked between them.
The dredge comes up variously freighted according to the locality, and the next step is to examine its contents and to store the objects of search for future use. In a regularly organized dredging expedition a frame or platform is often erected with a ledge round it to receive the contents of the dredge, but it does well enough to capsize it on an old piece of tarpaulin. There are two ways of emptying the dredge; we may either turn it up and pour out its contents by the mouth, or we may have a contrivance by which the bottom of the bag is made to unlace. The first plan is the simpler and the one more usually adopted; the second has the advantage of letting the mass slide out more smoothly and easily, but the lacing introduces rather a damaging complication, as it is apt to loosen or give way. Any objects visible on the surface of the heap are now carefully removed, and placed for identification in jars or tubs of sea-water, of which there should be a number secured in some form of bottle basket, standing ready. The heap should not be much disturbed, for the delicate objects contained in it have already been unavoidably subjected to a good deal of rough usage, and the less friction among the stones the better.
Examination of the Catch. Sifting.—The sorting of the catch is facilitated by sifting. The sieves used in early English expeditions were of various sizes and meshes, each sieve having a finer mesh than the sieve smaller than itself. In use the whole were put together in the form of a nest, the smallest one with the coarsest mesh being on top. A little of the dredge’s contents were then put in the top sieve, and the whole set moved gently up and down in a tub of sea water by handles attached to the bottom one. Objects of different sizes are thus left in different sieves. A simple but effective plan is to let the sieves of various sized mesh fit accurately on each other like lids, the coarsest on top, and to pour water upon material placed on the top one. In the United States Bureau of Fisheries ship “Albatross” these sieves are raised to form a table and the water is led on them from a hose: the very finest objects or sediments are retained by the waste water escaping from a catchment tub by muslin bags let into its sides. Any of these methods are preferable to sifting by the agitation of a sieve hung over the side, as in the last anything passing through the sieve is gone past recall.
Preservation of Specimens.—The preservation of specimens will of course depend on the purpose for which they are intended. For microscopic observation formaldehyde has some advantages. It can be stored in 40% solution and used in 2%, thus saving space, and it preserves many animals in their colours for a time: formalin preparations do not, however, last as well as do those in spirit. The suitable fluids for various histological inquiries are beyond the scope of the present article; but for general marine histology Bles’ fluid is useful, being simple to prepare and not necessitating the removal of the specimen to another fluid. It is composed of 70% alcohol 90 parts, glacial acetic acid 7 parts, 4% formaldehyde 7 parts.
The scientific value of a dredging depends mainly upon two things, the care with which the objects procured are preserved and labelled for future identification and reference, and the accuracy with which all the circumstances of the dredging—the position, the depth, the nature of the ground, the date, the bottom-temperature, &c.—are recorded. In the British Marine Biological Association’s work in the North Sea, a separate sheet of a printed book with carbon paper and duplicate sheets (which remain always on the ship) is used for the record of the particulars of each haul; depth, gear, &c., being filled into spaces indicated in the form. This use of previously prepared forms has been found to be a great saving of time and avoids risk of omission. Whether labelled externally or not, all bottles should contain parchment or good paper labels written with a soft pencil. These cannot be lost. The more fully details of reference number of station, gear, date, &c., are given the better, as should a mistake be made in one particular it can frequently be traced and rectified by means of the rest.
Growth of Scope of Operations.—At the Birmingham meeting of the British Association in 1839 an important committee was appointed “for researches with the dredge with a view to the investigation of the marine zoology of Great Britain, the illustration of the geographical distribution of marine animals, and the more accurate determination of the fossils of the Pliocene period.” Of this committee Edward Forbes was the ruling spirit, and under the genial influence of his contagious enthusiasm great progress was made during the next decade in the knowledge of the fauna of the British seas, and many wonderfully pleasant days were spent by the original committee and by many others who from year to year were “added to their number.” Every annual report of the British Association contains communications from the English, the Scottish, or the Irish branches of the committee; and in 1850 Edward Forbes submitted its first general report on British marine zoology. This report, as might have been anticipated from the eminent qualifications of the reporter, was of the highest value; and, taken along with his remarkable memoirs previously published, “On the Distribution of the Mollusca and Radiata of the Aegean Sea,” and “On the Zoological Relations of the existing Fauna and Flora of the British Isles,” may be said to mark an era in the progress of human thought.
The dredging operations of the British Association committee were carried on generally under the idea that at the 100-fathom line, by which amateur work in small boats was practically limited, the zero of animal life was approached—a notion which was destined to be gradually undermined, and finally overthrown. From time to time, however, there were not wanting men of great skill and experience to maintain, with Sir James Clark Ross, that “from however great a depth we may be enabled to bring up mud and stones of the bed of the ocean we shall find them teeming with animal life.” Samples of the sea-bottom procured with great difficulty and in small quantity from the first deep soundings in the Atlantic, chiefly by the use of Brooke’s sounding machine, an instrument which by a neat contrivance disengaged its weights when it reached the bottom, and thus allowed a tube, so arranged as to get filled with a sample of the bottom, to be recovered by the sounding line, were eagerly examined by microscopists; and the singular fact was established that these samples consisted over a large part of the bed of the Atlantic of the entire or broken shells of certain foraminifera. Dr Wallich, the naturalist to the “Bulldog” sounding expedition under Sir Leopold M‘Clintock, reported that star-fishes, with their stomachs full of the deep-sea foraminifera, had come
