ootnote 2: The emotional side of the scientific nature has its
singularities. Many persons will call to mind a certain philosopher's
tenderness over his watch--"the little creature"--which was so singularly
lost and found again. But Dr. Wyville Thomson surpasses the owner of the
watch in his loving-kindness towards a donkey-engine. "This little engine
was the comfort of our lives. Once or twice it was overstrained, and then
we pitied the willing little thing, panting like an overtaxed horse."]

The trawl is a sort of net for catching those fish which habitually live
at the bottom of the sea, such as soles, plaice, turbot, and gurnett. The
mouth of the net may be thirty or forty feet wide, and one edge of its
mouth is fastened to a beam of wood of the same length. The two ends of
the beam are supported by curved pieces of iron, which raise the beam and
the edge of the net which is fastened to it, for a short distance, while
the other edge of the mouth of the net trails upon the ground. The closed
end of the net has the form of a great pouch; and, as the beam is dragged
along, the fish, roused from the bottom by the sweeping of the net,
readily pass into its mouth and accumulate in the pouch at its end. After
drifting with the tide for six or seven hours the trawl is hauled up, the
marketable fish are picked out, the others thrown away, and the trawl
sent overboard for another operation.

More than a thousand sail of well-found trawlers are constantly engaged
in sweeping the seas around our coast in this way, and it is to them that
we owe a very large proportion of our supply of fish. The difficulty of
trawling, like that of dredging, rapidly increases with the depth at
which the operation is performed; and, until the other day, it is
probable that trawling at so great a depth as 100 fathoms was something
unheard of. But the first news from the _Challenger_ opens up new
possibilities for the trawl.

Dr. Wyville Thomson writes ("Nature," March 20, 1873):--

"For the first two or three hauls in very deep water off the coast of
Portugal, the dredge came up filled with the usual 'Atlantic ooze,'
tenacious and uniform throughout, and the work of hours, in sifting, gave
the very smallest possible result. We were extremely anxious to get some
idea of the general character of the Fauna, and particularly of the
distribution of the higher groups; and after various suggestions for
modification of the dredge, it was proposed to try