Lemuria?

When the late famed Geographer-Naturalist Sir John Murray (1841-1914) was 69 years old he sailed off to investigate the deep-water life and sea-floor topography of the North Atlantic Ocean. During a long and active life he commanded or accompanied dozens of oceanographic expeditions but he never satisfied his curiosity about the Indian Ocean. At his death it was discovered he had left $100,000 to finance an investigation of the water between Arabia and India.

Year ago the Murray trustees completed plans for the John Murray Expedition. Last August the Mabahiss, 140-ft. trawler lent by the Egyptian Government, nosed out of an Alexandria dock, slipped through the Suez Canal, down the length of the Red Sea, finally emerged into the Indian Ocean. An echo-recording apparatus in the chartroom measured the time required for the sound to bounce back from the sea floor. With echo-sounding gear Expedition Leader R. B. Seymour Sewell and his staff systematically charted the ocean floor. In the Gulf of Aden they found ten ranges of theretofore unknown submarine hills. On the bottom of the Indian Ocean they discovered two great mountain chains, with a deep valley between, and in one place a lofty plateau. Lieut.-Colonel Sewell had no doubt that the drowned mountains once topped large exposed land masses which might well be the hypothetical continent "Lemuria," proposed by Germany's late Naturalist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel to explain the fact that lemurs, lowest of primates, swarm in Madagascar and the Malay Islands, are scarce elsewhere. Last week as the Mabahiss prepared to wind up its cruise, the expedition's secretary in Cambridge received another report, accompanied by samples of water and ooze from depths down to five miles. Beneath a wide patch of the Indian Ocean, Leader Sewell had found a sort of Dead Sea, beginning at a depth of 50 to 100 ft. and extending down indefinitely. The water above it teemed with life; below, no evidence of life whatever could be found. This condition was ascribed to the presence of petroleum, seeping into the ocean through long ages from adjacent lands.*

*Palestine's Dead Sea, lowest sheet of water on the earth's surface, contains some asphalt. But its inability to support life is generally attributed to its intense salinity (25%).

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