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OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE DEEP SEA.
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visit to the place on the 11th of April, 1890. We had all the opportunity to question and cross-question that could be desired.

In conclusion, it is proper to say that the sweeping character and the suddenness of these attacks of Mr. Holmes and his associates upon the evidence of glacial man in America have been somewhat bewildering. It has come like thunder from a clear sky. One has but to go back to Mr. McGee's article in The Popular Science Monthly for November, 1888, to find an unquestioning and enthusiastic indorsement of nearly all the facts concerning glacial man which I have incorporated in my recent volume upon Man and the Glacial Period, together with a number which I have omitted, except the discovery at Newcomerstown, which had not then been made. Had I been aware of the preparations which these investigators were making to discredit all past observers on the matter, I should have introduced more detailed evidence in my summary in the volume referred to. Still, it is probably as well that the statements were left as they are, for they are all capable of ample proof; and it is perhaps better for the public to be referred for details to such fuller reports as are made in this article and in the other publications here indicated.

I submit that this evidence is neither "chaotic" nor "unsatisfactory," but is as specific and definite and as worthy to be believed as almost anything any expert in this country, or any other country, can be expected to produce.

GROWTH OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE DEEP SEA.

By G. W. LITTLEHALES,

CHIEF OF THE DIVISION OF CHART CONSTRUCTION, UNITED STATES HYDROGRAPHIC OFFICE.

BEFORE the time of the project for the Atlantic telegraph cable in 1854, there seemed to be no practical value attached to a knowledge of the depths of the sea, and, beyond a few doubtful results obtained for purely scientific purposes, nothing was clearly known of bathymetry, or of the geology of the sea bottom. The advent of submarine cables gave rise to the necessity for an accurate knowledge of the bed of the ocean where they were laid, and lent a stimulus to all forms of deep-sea investigation. But although our extensive and accurate knowledge of the deep sea is of so late an origin, the beginnings of deep-sea research date far back into antiquity. The ancients can not be said to have had any definite conceptions of the deep sea. Experienced mariners, like the Phœnicians and Carthaginians, must necessarily have possessed some knowledge of the depths of the waters with which they were familiar, but this knowledge, whatever its extent, has