Science: New and Strange

Last week, inhabitants of the piscatorial world swimming to and from their affairs near Cocos Island, northeast of the Galapagos Group (Pacific Ocean), beheld with interest two creatures new and strange. They were black, forked objects about the size of young sea cows, with globular heads, baggy, wrinkled trunks and clublike arms, plodding with ponderous feet over the ocean floor. They had no apparent purpose and blew endless streams of bubbles as they went. Each monster stared about him through one enormous glassy eye. To their heads were attached trailing rubbery tubes like skeins of attenuated umbilical cords, stretching down to them through the sea from an unknowable parent whose broad bulk rocked gently. For long periods, the monsters would sit motionless on brilliant mushrooms of coral, letting light-obscuring shoals of fish swim over and about them. If an inquisitive shark or surly moray sidled up, the monsters shuffled silently over to a cage near by, entered, fastened the gate behind them, dumbly gave back stare for stare through the wire mesh. From time to time, the monsters exchanged signs and left the bottom, risingly slowly and erect like dead fish on hooks. At the surface, they clambered to the bosom of their parent—the S.S. Arcturus—shed the globes from their heads, burst out talking—Explorer William Beebe to his associate Prof. W. K. Gregory—about the submarine scene they had been observing. Also last week, inhabitants of the human world attending” a tea-party at the New York Zoological Park (the Bronx) beheld two creatures new and strange—two fabulous white-breasted birds, from whose relatively small bodies grew sweeping scythes of wings seven inches in width, eight feet in spread. They were Galapagos albatrosses sent—together with marine iguanas—by Explorer Beebe to the New York Zoological Society.