Abstract
II. THE plan adopted in the narrative of the cruise gives the reader a good idea of the course of the voyage, the nature of the researches carried on, and the manner in which these researches have been followed up by the more detailed studies of the experts into whose hands the collections were afterwards placed. But it is necessarily desultory. We are led from station to station, from chemical to biological work, from physics to ethnology, from deep-sea temperatures to the anatomy of sea-slugs, with a rapidity and suddenness that are a little bewildering. Still, the general impression of the far-reaching aims of the expedition, of the skill and completeness with which the work was done, and of the enormous mass of new material obtained, is no doubt deepened by the difficulty or impossibility which the narrators have obviously experienced in giving within the brief compass of their chapters anything like a comprehensive digest of what the Challenger voyage accomplished in regard to the problems of the great deep. The reader must resign himself to be carried along as the naturalists of the expedition themselves were, and to listen to their story of what they saw and found.
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The Voyage of the “Challenger” 2 . Nature 32, 249–252 (1885). https://doi.org/10.1038/032249a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/032249a0