i8 95 . NOTES AND COMMENTS. 75 



Thick round me, in the teeming mud, 



Briar and fern strove to the blood. 



The hooked liana in his gin 



Noosed his reluctant neighbours in ; 



There the green murderer throve and spread, 



Upon his smothering victims fed, 



And wantoned on his climbing coil. 



Contending roots fought for the soil 



Like frighted demons; with despair 



Competing branches pushed for air. 



Green conquerors from overhead 



Bestrode the bodies of their dead ; 



The Caesars of the sylvan field, 



Unused to fail, foredoomed to yield ; 



For in the groins of branches, lo ! 



The cancers of the orchid grow. 



Eozoon : Requiescat in Pace. 



The fierce battle which raged between zoologists and petrologists 

 over the nature of that curious structure called Eozoon is too well- 

 known to need recapitulation here ; but it may be mentioned that 

 Professors King and Rowney, of Queen's College, Galway, in 1865-66, 

 were the first to question its supposed organic origin. Extreme 

 obstinacy, for we may so call it, on both sides prevented an exact 

 examination of the divided collections, and infused into the dispute 

 an acrimony as unpleasant as damaging to all parties concerned. 

 Dr. Moebius was the first zoologist seriously to dispute the organic 

 nature of Eozoon, and his book, " Der Bau des Eozoon," appeared in 

 1878. No satisfactory result was obtained, however, until March, 

 1891, when, at the instance of Dr. P. Herbert Carpenter, the original 

 Tudor specimen of Eozoon, said to be preserved in limestone, and to 

 which the supporters of the organic nature of the structure had 

 pinned their faith, was sent to England by Dr. A. C. Selwyn. At a 

 meeting of the Geological Society in that month, Mr. J. W. Gregory 

 showed that the so-called Tudor specimen of Eozoon was nothing 

 more than a series of calcite bands of secondary origin in a rock of 

 Huronian age. 



It has fallen to Dr. Johnston Lavis, by reason of his intimate 

 acquaintance with the formation of the Somma-Vesuvian area, and 

 to Dr. J. W. Gregory, intimate with zoological as well as petrological 

 structures, finally to work out and demonstrate, in the most conclusive 

 manner, that the structure known as Eozoon is completely paralleled 

 by some structures seen in the ejected blocks of Monte Somma. It 

 is not a little singular that this parallelism has remained unobserved 

 so long, for a specimen of ejected block from this volcano, which has 

 been accepted without hesitation by some of those who have con- 

 tended for the organic nature of Eozoon as true Eozoon, has been in 

 the collections of the British Museum more than half a century, and 



formed part of the series brought by Sir W. J. Hamilton. This 



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