Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/665

Rh Thomas Huxley, described, in the Journal of Microscopical Science (vol. viii., new series, p. 1, Plate IV.), a new and quite peculiar species of Moneres, giving it the name of Bathybius Haeckelii. Unlike the rest of the Moneres, this Bathybius had included in it certain peculiarly-formed microscopic, calcareous corpuscles—coccospheres and coccoliths; but its formless masses of protoplasm, of very different sizes, were said to cover in enormous quantities the profoundest abysses of the sea, from 5,000 to 25,000 feet depth. With this formless primordial organism of the simplest kind, which, occurring in thousands of millions, covers the sea-bottom with a living layer of slime, a new light seemed to be thrown upon one of the most difficult and most obscure problems of the history of creation—namely, the question of the origin of life upon the earth. With Bathybius, the ill-famed "Urschleim" (primordial slime) appeared to have been found, of which it had been prophetically affirmed, fifty years before, by Oken, that from it was sprung the whole world of organisms, and that this "Urschleim" itself had sprung from inorganic matter at the sea-bottom in the course of planetary development.

The deep-sea ooze containing the masses of Bathybius was first discovered during the deep-sea soundings made in 1857 for the Atlantic cable. The Atlantic Telegraph Plateau, which stretches from Ireland to Newfoundland at a mean depth of 12,000 feet, was found to be covered everywhere with a peculiar gray, very finely-pulverized ooze. This ooze was remarkable for its tough, sticky nature, and under the microscope showed masses of little calcareous-shelled Rhizopods, particularly Globigerinæ, and also, as one of its main constituents, those minute corpuscles known as coccoliths. But it was not till eleven years later, in 1868, that Huxley, with the aid of a very powerful microscope, made a new and thorough investigation of this ooze, calling in also the aid of chemical analysis. He discovered the naked, free, formless protoplasm-masses, which, together with the Globigerinæ and the coccoliths, make up the great bulk of the ooze. "These masses are of different sizes, some being visible to the naked eye, others extremely minute. Subjected to microscopical analysis, they showed, imbedded in a transparent, colorless, structureless matrix, nuclei, coccoliths, and occasionally foreign bodies."

Living Bathybius was first observed in 1868, by Sir Wyville Thomson and Prof William Carpenter, two practised and sagacious zoölogists, during a deep-sea exploring expedition to the North Atlantic, in the war-ship Porcupine. Of the living deep-sea ooze they write: "This ooze was actually living; it collected in lumps as though albumen had been mixed with it; and under the microscope the sticky mass was seen to be living sarcode" (Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 1869, vol. iv., p. 151); and Sir Wyville Thomson, in his very interesting work, "The Depths of the Sea," second edition, 1874, p. 410, adds: