Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/744

724 Bessels assigns to these the name of Protobathyhius, but they are apparently indistinguishable from the Bathybius of the Porcupine. Further arguments against the reality of Bathybius will therefore be needed before a doctrine founded on observations so carefully conducted shall be relegated to the region of confuted hypotheses.

Assuming, then, that Bathybius, however much its supposed wide distribution may have been limited by more recent researches, has a real existence, it presents us with a condition of living matter the most rudimental it is possible to conceive. No law of morphology has as yet exerted itself in this formless slime. Even the simplest individualization is absent. We have a living mass, but we. know not where to draw its boundary-lines; it is living matter, but we can scarcely call it a living being.

We are not, however, confined to Bathybius for examples of protoplasm in a condition of extreme simplicity. Haeckel has found, inhabiting the fresh waters in the neighborhood of Jena, minute lumps of protoplasm which, when placed under the microscope, were seen to have no constant shape, their outline being in a state of perpetual change, caused by the protrusion from various parts of their surface of broad lobes and thick, finger-like projections, which, after remaining visible for a time, would be withdrawn, to make their appearance again on some other part of the surface.

These changeable protrusions of its substance, without fixed position or definite form, are eminently characteristic of protoplasm in some of its simplest conditions. They have been termed "Pseudopodia," and will frequently come before you in what I have yet to say.

To the little protoplasmic lumps thus constituted Haeckel bas given the name of Protamœba primitiva. They may be compared to minute detached pieces of Bathybius. He has seen them multiplying themselves by spontaneous division into two pieces, which, on becoming independent, increase in size, and acquire all the characters of the parent.

Several other beings as simple as Protamœba have been described by various observers, and especially by Haeckel, who brings the whole together into a group to which he gives the name of suggested by the extreme simplicity of the beings included in it.

But we must now pass to a stage a little higher in the development of protoplasmic beings. Widely distributed in the fresh and salt waters of Britain, and probably of almost all parts of the world, are small particles of protoplasm closely resembling the Protamœba just described. Like it, they have no definite shape, and are perpetually changing their form, throwing out and drawing in thick lobes and finger-like pseudopodia, in which their body seems to flow away over the field of the microscope. They are no longer, however, the homogeneous particle of protoplasm which forms the body of Protamœba. Toward the center a small globular mass of firmer protoplasm has