DEEP-SEA SOUNDING.
On the Results of a Deep-Bea Sounding Expedition in the North Atlantic during the Summer of 1899. By R. E. Peake. With Notes by Sir John Murray. (J. Murray. 5s.)—Our knowledge of ocean-beds is chiefly due, as Sir John Murray points out, to Lord Kelvin and the submarine telegraph companies. Lord Kelvin made the work of sounding the ocean comparatively swift and easy by his happy thought of replacing the old-fashioned rope by lighter and stronger steel wire, of the kind that is used for pianos. This new process has so much facilitated the work of sounding at great depths that a measurement can now be taken in less than half the time that was formerly necessary, and there is far less likelihood of an accident. Of recent years, a know- ledge of the shape and substance of the ocean-beds has become of the first importance to the companies that have to lay and maintain telegraph lines along them. The deep-sea cables go through the plains and valleys, the hills and passes, of the great submarine tracts that we shall never see. As Mr. Kipling sings for them :— "The wrecks dissolve above us ; their dust drops down from afar— Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are. There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep, Or the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep."
In the monograph now before us, published by the Geographical Society, Sir John Murray—than whom there is no higher authority on any question of oceanography—describes the results of a recent summer spent by Mr. Peake in sounding the North Atlantic for a telegraphic company. If wireless telegraphy does succeed in making the cables useless, they will at least leave a worthy record in the charts of the ocean-beds that they have enabled us to make, to which Mr. Peake's careful labour adds something of importance.
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