FISH IN FROZEN DEPTHS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 88, 13 April 1912, Page 12

FISH IN FROZEN DEPTHS.

Cuba ends to the south in a huge hammer of mountains 8000 feet high, and steeping sheer into the eea. The wall does not end there, but continues ite precipitous descent into the 700-mile-long abyes called Bartlett'a Deep. This gigantic submarine^ valley is nearly four miles deep and eighty miles wide. At a mile and a half the pressure of the water is nearly two tons to the ' square inch ; the ooze that comes up from euch a depth, though the equator runs overhead, ia cold as hoar frost ; it ie ten times certain that no veg_Qtiitioa can grow there. As in our world, none but the vegetables are able a -to make food, it ought to follow that in the depths of the sea there should be no animal life. As a matter of fact, these glooms are inhabited by the moet grotesque and chimerical of all fishes. It would mm as though in the darkness life had taken every .imaginable license to be ugly and bizarre. Cannibalism is evidently the only method of life, and its equipment runs to eTery kind of extravagance. There are fi«h with teeth «o long that they cannot close their mouths; fish that, draw their etomuchs over prey larger than themselves; fish with no more mouth _ than a leech, and getting their living as leeches; fish with huge' myopic eyes, aod fi«h frankly blind. Probably none of them cornea from depths quite beyond the region of light, though a great rnauy of them go poking about their ghoulish business furnished with lanterns of the glow-worm type.