Bottomward

More and more often you hear men of Science declare that, as animal life crawled out of the water world in the beginning, so shall man, highest animal, some day return to the sea, prayerful, hungry, seeking food, fuel, riches. Gone is "Mother" Earth with other myths. Ocean they say, is the mother element.

Dr, Hans Hartman of Manhattan is a man who goes to the bottom of things. He has cogitated the fact that more than seven tenths of the earth's surface is submarine territory, on the average only three or four miles submerged but in some places far, far deeper. All this territory is unexplored, save here and there by blind plummets and groping dragnets. So for years Dr. Hartman, financially independent, has experimented--aided by that bathysophical enthusiast, the late Prince of Monaco ; by colleagues in the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences ; and by the U. S. Navy-- with a battleship-steel, plate-glass-windowed chamber in which he would cause himself to be lowered to ocean depths far more profound than any living man had previously attained.

While the record of the divers in rubber and steel suits halted at about 200 ft., Dr. Hartman descended 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 ft. in his "diving bell."

Last week despatches from London announced that Dr. Hartman had a perfected "diving bell," was off with seven fellow-scientists and a secretary, for test drops to the bottom of the Mediterranean. The Krupp works at Essen had built him a steel cylinder guaranteed to resist sea-pressure at 15,000 ft., equipped with magnifying submarine telescopes instead of windows ; with revolving saddles, one above the other, for observers; with a periscope, radio, telephone, ozone generator, carbon-dioxide filter, temperature and pressure instruments, powerful actinic illuminators, a deep-sea cinema camera and two and a half miles of steel cable for lowering them all. Lest this cable break or tangle, an electric switch in the "bell" would disengage its prodigiously weighty lower shell, allowing the upper half and its occupants to bob upwards in safety. Three electrically driven propellers would maintain the "bell's" vertical suspension in this emergency.

At first Dr. Hartman's explorations will be archaeological--in the watery streets of Paleopolis, earliest Greek colony in Italy; now on the deep bottom of the Bay of Naples; and at Jerba, long-drowned port of Punic Carthage.

Thereafter, who knows ? If he reaches 15,000 ft. in his present depth vehicle, Dr. Hartman proposes an even stronger, more complicated one to reach Ocean's nethermost pit. There is known to be oil beneath parts of the seafloor. There must also be rarer minerals, unimagined fishes, unguessable vestiges of the planet's youth. And even should nothing of "practical" value be found, the divers may experience the exaltation of explorers as intrepid as any that ever served Science--silent, in an abyss off Darien.