Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/667

Rh others took the form of irregular reticulations of sarcode, like those of the Myxomycetæ.

Whether the little calcareous frustules—coccoliths and cocco-spheres—which occur so abundantly in Bathybius-ooze, both within and between the protoplasm-masses, actually belong to it or not, I was unable to determine, especially as I had already observed the very same kinds of calcareous frustules in the bodies of sundry pelagic Radiolaria which live at the surface of the ocean off the Canaries ("Myxobrachia of Lanzarote"). These strange calcareous bodies, occurring now in the form of a simple concentrically stratified disk, again resembling a shirt-button, anon assuming the shape of a sphere made up of several disks, and so on, were as likely to be secretions of the Bathybius sarcode as foreign bodies accidentally (or in the process of taking up food) introduced into the protoplasm. Of late the second hypothesis has come to appear the more probable, and biologists now hold that all these corpuscles are microscopic calcareous algæ—calcareate unicellular plants.

These investigations, confirmed as they have been by sundry other observers, seemed to show that at the bottom of the Atlantic, between the depths of 5,000 and 25,000 feet, there exists a sort of ooze which, with its other characteristics, contains a great quantity of a peculiar and as yet hardly individualized species of Moneres. The error into which we now fell consisted in over-hastily generalizing the results of these deep-sea soundings in the North Atlantic, and supposing the bed of the deep sea to be everywhere covered with similar Moneres. This inference was flatly negatived by later research. During the cruise of the Challenger, which extended over three and a half years, though careful search was made for Bathybius in the depths of various seas, it was nowhere found. We have no ground for calling in question the diligence and accuracy of the eminent naturalists attached to the famous Challenger Expedition; and all the less because its director, Sir Wyville Thomson, had been himself the first to observe the movements of the living Bathybius. Hence we must suppose that, in the portions of the deep-sea bottom explored by the Challenger, there were no Bathybius Moneres. But does it hence follow that all previous observations and inferences were incorrect?

As is very usual in such cases, exaggerated and one-sided views were at once given up, and no less exaggerated and one-sided contrary views adopted. Once it was supposed that Bathybius occurred in masses at the bottom of every sea; now its existence anywhere was denied. The Bathybius-ooze preserved in alcohol, which had been the subject of prior investigations, was now held to be nothing but a gypsum precipitate, such as is found wherever sea-water is mixed with spirits of wine. This hypothesis was first put forward by certain naturalists of the Challenger Expedition, and therefore Prof. Huxley recanted—prematurely, as I believe—his earlier views concerning