From the Sea

A "homeward bound" pennant 170*ft. long, decked with 13 stars, some of which had perforce been snipped out of pink lingerie, wriggled and writhed in the breezes of New York harbor. Beneath it, no whit discomfited by the exuberant blasts of a steam whistle, there moved toward an uptown dock: Jeweled crabs, fish with eight "hands," fish with transparent panes set into their stomachs, fish with navigation lights, sex-appeal lights, food-luring lights, fish with folding films of luminous bacteria, a devilfish with a beam of 18 ft., parasite fish with suckers on their heads for clinging to the bellies of carnivorous hosts.

The finny immigrants floated idly in their pickling baths of formaldehyde while the man that brought them, Dr. William Beebe of the Museum of Natural History, expounded their names, habits and habitations to newspaper reporters, intercourse with whom Dr. Beebe never shuns.

Concerning the 20,000-mile cruise from which he, his 14 mates and the S. S. Arcturus were returning, Beebe added the following points to extensive reports he had sent off en route by radio (TIME, Mar 16, Apr. 27, May 11, July 20) :

In three searches, they had not found the "plains and meadows" of sargassum weed commonly reported as forming the Sargasso Sea (TIME, July 20) east of the West Indies. Small, shallow patches of the weed were encountered, and these teemed with marine life. "The Humboldt "Current is gone . . . is extinct.''* Nowhere had they encountered the sweep of icy water that flows up along the west coast of South America from the Antarctic. Volcanic disturbances, earthquakes, were blamed for some vast change in Pacific bathygraphy.

At San Francisco, the U. S. minesweeper Ortolan puffed through the Golden Gate bearing rare birds, plants, fishes, reptiles, fossils, insects collected by field workers of the California Academy of Sciences in the Revillagigedo Islands (400 mi. west of Mexican mainland in Lat. 19DEG N.). Dr. G. Dallao Hanna exhibited seeds of a new unnamed, unclassified fruit the size and shape of a ripe olive but sweet of pulp; related that herds of whales, chiefly mothers and their calves, sport in those waters today as they did when their numbers earned for the locality, from old-time mariners, the name of "Cow Pasture."

*A foot for every day the ship had been gone from port. *Dr. Beebe's statement was broad, unscientific. Doubtless the Arcturus did not go far enough south to find the Humboldt Current. A report of Dr. Robert Cushman Murphy of the American Museum of Natural History last spring (TIME, April 13) indicated that El Nino, a warm current from the north which encounters the Humboldt off the coast of Peru about Christmas time, appeared a trifle behind schedule last winter but in unusual volume and southward reach.