THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 263 



animals and not animals from rocks (" sic lapides ab animalibus, 

 nee vice versa "). 



.After discussing the character of the various deposits which 

 form the floor of the ocean, Prof. Huxley remarks : " If the 

 Challenger hypothesis, that the red clay is the residue left by 

 dissolved Foraminiferous skeletons, is correct, then all these 

 deposits alike would be directly, or indirectly, the product of 

 living organisms. But just as a siliceous deposit may be 

 metamorphosed into opal or quartzite, and chalk into marble, 

 so known metamorphic agencies may metamorphose clay into 

 schist, clay-slate, slate, gneiss, or even granite. And thus, 

 by the agency of the lowest and simplest of organisms, our 

 imaginary globe might be covered with strata, of all the chief 

 kinds of rock of which the known crust of the earth is composed, 

 of indefinite thickness and extent. . . . 



" Accepting it provisionally, we arrive at the remarkable result 

 that all the chief known constituents of the crust of the earth 

 may have formed part of living bodies ; that they may be the 

 ; ash' of protoplasm/' 



The view that the red clay which forms the floor of the ocean 

 at very great depths, and extends over an area of about fifty 

 million square miles, is derived from the decay of the skeletons 

 of Foraminifera from which the lime has been dissolved out, 

 has not been substantiated by later investigations. According 

 to Sir John Murray, the greatest authority on the subject, 

 it has been formed chiefly by the disintegration of pumice and 

 other volcanic ejecta. 



It thus appears that the " ash of protoplasm '' does not play 

 nearly such an important part in the formation of the earth's 

 crust as that suggested conditionally by Huxley. 



My indefatigable friend, Mr. Kirkpatrick, however, has for 

 some time been raking in all sorts of ashes for evidence of their 

 origin, and has come to the conclusion that even in the most 

 unlikely situations traces of simple organisms may still be 

 found.* He has, I fear, as yet met with but little success in 

 convincing his scientific colleagues of the correctness of his 

 observations, but his results are certainly in close agreement 

 with the conclusions arrived at by Linnaeus and, provisionally, 

 by Huxley. If these conclusions were correct we should have 

 -* Vide The Niimmulosphere, by K. Kirkpatrick. London, 1913. 



