The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

14 THE NORTH-EAST ATLANTIC.opposing polar stream contributes fishes and other living creatures from the north.Thus it happens that in the cold zone of the Faroer Channel nearly all the echinodermsbelong to the same species as those of Scandinavia and Greenland.* Andalthough the European waters, especially on the British and Scandinavian coasts,have been by far the most carefully studied, yet every fresh exploration revealsorganisms hitherto unknown to science.Some idea of the boundless life of the North Atlantic may be derived from thegeological formations which this animal world is ceaselessly creating. BetweenNorway, the Faroer, and Iceland the bottom of the ocean at 1,000 fathoms andupwards consists everywhere of a greyish calcareous clay, formed to a very greatextent of the remains of a species of foraminifer called Binoculina by thenaturalists.This organism plays the same geological part in the Norwegian thatthe Globigerina does in the Greenland waters. These new formations, which arebeing incessantly deposited on the bed of the Atlantic, are compared to chalk byThomson and Carpenter, who have suggested that the chalk period has, so tospeak, been continued uninterruptedly, and is still being continued in the northernseas. In fact, the chalk now being formed in these waters is so like that of theEnglish cliffs that the most skilful microscopist is not always able to distinguishthem.It also contains many forms identical with the fossils of the older chalks,twhile the different species present the same type.They seem to have been slowlymodified during the course of ages. Forchhammer's chemical analyses, subsequentlyconfirmed by the English explorers, have shown that the waters richest incalcareous substances are precisely those between Ireland and Newfoundland.Here the animalculoe find in superabundance the elements which they have totransform into those rocky strata in which as many as 500,000 calcareous shellsare sometimes found in a square inch. In the inlets of the Atlantic, suchas the Kattegat and Baltic, the proportion of calcareous matter is still greater, Jthe detritus on the banks of the streams constantly furnishing materials to the seafor the formation of new rocks.During the last ten centuries the fauna of the North Atlantic may have beenslightly modified by the action of man. The Basque fishermen first of all exterminatedthe species of whale frequenting their shores, and later on the BaJtenafranca, formerly met with off the European coasts in all the northern waters, wasrelentlessly pursued by the Basques and others, so that since the beginning of theeighteenth century it has retreated farther and farther towards the Polar Sea. Atthe opening of the present century over a thousand whales were yearly taken inthe Spitzbergen waters;in 1814 as many as 1,437 were captured, but they becamerarer from year to year, and in 1840 had disappeared altogether. At present* Wyville Thomson, "Depths of the Sea," p. 43.tAccording to Rupert Jones, 19 in 110 f..raminifera.j Proportion of calcareous matter in the Atlantic (according to Forchhammer) :Average of the ocean 2'96 in 1,000.North Atlantic, between 3-07 „latitude 30' and 55' . .Kattegat 3-29 „Baltic 3-59