Daniel McIntyre Collegiate Institute - Breezes Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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D. M. C. I. BREEZES 50 great blue depths. The explorers have also devised many instruments which would record the conditions of life in the abysses of the ocean— instruments which would measure the coldness of the deep-sea water and wonderful little bottles that will open when they touch bottom and fill themselves with the water there, then close up so tightly that the water at higher levels cannot enter. The nets are made in somewhat the same fashion, opening as they touch the bottom and closing as soon as they are raised a foot or two from the floor of the sea. By such means as these many years have been spent in exploring the new kingdom of the sea and the life there and in studying the mar¬ vellous creatures that are discovered. As a result, in the last few years they have obtained a clear idea of the weird and marvellous country which, though it lies quite close to us, is shut off from our eyes by the gates of death. Eternal darkness covers it and it is very cold, yet full of beautiful life. In some places the deep-sea floor is covered with a tall growth of branching stems often eighteen feet high, of a pale lilac color and a fairy radiance. It is not a plant, but a grouping of animals that grow together, called polyp. It resembles a living wheat field in a slow, chilled, tidal current, glowing with a soft, suffused light, and sparkling and flashing at the slightest touch; now and then, breaking into a vivid brightness showing the path that some fish has taken through this region of enchanted loveliness. Blind, red, crab-like forms crawd in and out of the strange under¬ growth. Many of the creatures living in this sunless world of water not only have eyes, but shine with an inner radiance. There are living stars with a green, scintillating light; sea-snakes with a white flame; lobsters,, pouring from their feelers a cloud of blue splendor; and creatures like miniature lighthouses flashing out red, yellow and green lights. There are indeed myriads of little forms which carry small, natural lights about with them as they wander in the awful darkness of the deep sea. Only twelve hundred yards beneath the level of our shores lies this land of life, in which many things emit a soft and lovely radiance. The fishes there are often quite different from the ones that the fishermen catch in shallower waters. There is, for instance, a kind of sea-salmon with a line of natural lamps extending down the length of its body. Another dark fish which has two rows of red lamps running from its head to its tail, and one hundred and fifty little lights elsewhere on its back; this fish surely must be able to see its way clearly through the inky darkness of an ocean abyss. Some fishes carry their lamps on the end of dangling fibres; in others the centres of light are placed behind the eyes or elsewhere on the head. One of the most beautiful of all these strange creatures of light is a kind of brittle star, called the “Glory of the Seas,” one of which was caught on iron hooks sent down into three thousand feet of water. It is a star-shaped creature with long arms and has a brilliant green rad¬ iance—now sparkling at the centre of its body in a dazzling blaze, and then shooting along first one arm and then another. Sometimes the whole outline of this fish is lighted up with strange, wild, and beautiful green flames. There are also gigantic cuttle-fish, with suckers of enor¬ mous lengths, moving about like huge animated fireworks; and other

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58 D. M. C. T. BREEZES THE EXPLORERS OF THE OCEAN BED QAN you imagine a creature not as large as a man, easily supporting on its body a weight equal to the weight of twenty railroad trains loaded with steel bars ' ? It seems impossible that such could exist, but, as a matter of fact there are millions of such creatures. Few persons know that the wide, blue surface of water conceals a weird and wonderful country of life, the realities of which surpass our wildest dreams—or nightmares. We know, of course, that there are fishes and other creatures swimming about in the underworld of water, but what we can see of the ocean as we look over the side of a boat or stand along the sea shore, does not tell us anything of the real kingdom of the sea. Slowiy, men are exploring the depths, but even the diver cannot catch a glimpse of this country of mystery, that lies beneath the waves. No diver ever has been able to explore more than two hundred and eighty-eight feet below the surface of the sea, yet in some places the ocean is over six miles deep. Man has scaled the skies, and mined for miles into the earth, but the sea has not permitted him to fathom its depths. The first man to go down to a great depth was a gunnery instruc¬ tor, of the British navy, named Catto. At the end of a series of diving experiments made in 1906, he dived two hundred and ten feet, and was the first man who saw the sea at such a depth and lived to tell the tale. In 1915 an American submarine met with an accident off Honolulu while under water, and did not come up to the surface. Divers were sent down to find it. One of these divers, Frank Crilly, reached the wreck in five minutes, but it took two hundred and five men to draw him safely to the surface. Later one of his fellow divers, Laughlin, dived, but his life-line became entangled at two hundred feet, and f rilly had to dive to bring him to the surface again. “Where there is no sunlight there can be no animal life and where there is no plant life there can be no animal life,” says the general pub¬ lic ; so beyond the depth of six hundred yards the sea must be utterly uninhabited. However, a strange thing came to the aid of explorers of the ocean bed. During the year 1860 a telegraph cable in the Mediterranean Sea broke at the depth of seventy-two hundred feet, and when the broken cable was raised it was found to be over-grown with sea animals in an astonishing variety of forms. At seventy-two hundred feet, the floor of the sea is as black as night and freezing cold; yet it was seen that animals were able to live, with tons of water crushing them down and not a ray of sunlight, to grow plants for them to feed upon. Of course no diver could descend to the ocean floor, for he would be crushed to death by the awful pressure of water, long before he reached the bottom. The only way to explore the deep sea is to let down iron hooks and nets and try to drag up some of the things living in the

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60 D. M. C. I. BREEZES weird and terrible shapes of life haunt the black icy waters of this com¬ paratively unknown world. It is possible that the floor of the ocean is as bright as the surface of a lake on a cloudless summer night, and in places the great abysses of the sea are like a city street with all its lights ablaze. The phosphorescent light of the deep-sea creatures, like the light of the glow-worm, is made without any waste whatever in heat. It is a pure light, and a huge fortune awaits the man who discovers the secret of how to make light in this way. These creatures of the sea have a sec¬ ret which would be worth millions of dollars to us who live on land. The great problem that perplexes the explorers of the deep-sea is the question of how light is maintained so far below the surface of the water. What do the creatures of the depths feed upon? It is clear that they cannot keep up life merely by feeding upon each other, for the largest one would eventually swallow all the rest and then die of starva¬ tion, because there was nothing more for it to feed upon. All animal life must have plant life upon which to feed; this is as true of wild, strange animals of the deep, as it is of the cattle of our pastures. How¬ ever, we have seen that no ordinary plants grow in the sunless under¬ world of water. How then is animal life maintained there? Man will never stand in the ocean abysses as far below the sea level as Mt. Everest is above it. Of this we are almost sure, for it would need a submarine or some other such device with a window strong enough to resist the weight of Mt. Everest. Man will go on inventing and the explorer will go on discovering, and we shall know more and more of the regions of the depths of the sea; but never, perhaps, will man fling open the gates of death and darkness which hide from our •eyes the wonderful life in the depths of the ocean. —Sergius Fraser, Room 21. VEZELAY, LA BASILIGNE, FRANCE The souvenir chosen by the Graduating Classes to present to the school is a famous picture by Robert Fulton Logan, a Manitoba boy, born at Lauder and educated in the Mulvey School. The picture is of historic interest. The Basilica was built by St. Bernard and the monks of the monastrv at Vezelay in the early part of the 12th century. St. Bernard’s father, a knight, perished in the first Crusade. St. Bernard was the most powerful preacher of the age and was called upon by the Pope to preach a Crusade. Later, Richard Couer de Lion, with his Crusaders, stopped at this Basilica for consecration on his way to the Holy Land. This etching was the outstanding one of a group of three by which Mr. Logan won his place in the Paris salon of 1926 and is at present in a permanent collection in the British Museum, Luxembourg Galleries and Congressional Library, Washington, and a copy now hangs in the Daniel McIntyre Collegiate Institute.