Professor Piccard's recent exploit recalls to me that last year two American biologists, Beebe and Barton, reached the greatest depth beneath the surface of the sea ever attained by a human being. In a submersible steel globe, containing supplies of oxygen, and connected by steel cables and telephone wires with the surface, they descended to a depth of fourteen hundred feet off the coast of the Bermudas.
After eight hundred feet fish began to appear, equipped with lights which shone out against the deep blue-black of their surroundings. Many of these were seen alive for the first time; for, although they had often been caught in nets, they were always dead when brought to the surface. Silver hatchet fish, lantern fish, and swivel-toothed dragon fish were numerous, but the most remarkable luminescent creature that the explorers saw was an animal which they called an orange-lighted finger-squid. This fearsome beast had a long body, culminating in a pair of huge eyes with white luminous spots on the iris, and two orange bull's-eye lights at the tips of the two largest arms.
Other great shapes moved about them in the blue darkness, too far off to be examined, and the explorers returned to the surface with the feeling that they could no more form an idea of this vast unknown world of life from what they had seen than a man who had a small collection of mice and guineapigs could visualise a modern zoological gardens.
The Irish Times, June 12th, 1931.