The facts are; first that water, being all but incompressible, is
hardly any heavier, and just as liquid, at the greatest depth, than
at the surface; and that therefore animals can move as freely in it
in deep as in shallow water; and next, that as the fluids inside
the body of a sea animal must be at the same pressure as that of
the water outside it, the two pressures must balance each other;
and the body, instead of being crushed in, may be unconscious that
it is living under a weight of two or three miles of water. But so
it is; as we gather our curiosities at low-tide mark, or haul the
dredge a mile or two out at sea, we may allow our fancy to range
freely out to the westward, and down over the subaqueous cliffs of
the hundred-fathom line, which mark the old shore of the British
Isles, or rather of a time when Britain and Ireland were part of
the continent, through water a mile, and two, and three miles deep,
into total darkness, and icy cold, and a pressure which, in the
open air, would crush any known living creature to a jelly; and be
certain that we shall find the ocean-floor teeming everywhere with
multitudinous life, some of it strangely like, some strangely
unlike, the creatures which we see along the shore.

Some strangely like. You may find, for instance, among the sea-
weed, here and there, a little black sea-spider, a Nymphon, who has
this peculiarity, that possessing no body at all to speak of, he
carries his needful stomach in long branches, packed inside his
legs. The specimens which you will find will probably be half an
inch across the legs. An almost exactly similar Nymphon has been
dredged from the depths of the Arctic and Antarctic oceans, nearly
two feet across.

You may find also a quaint little shrimp, CAPRELLA, clinging by its