650 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ginning of things, turned out to be an artificial product of gypsum precipi- 

 tated by alcohol from sea-water, in which it is held in the state of solution. 

 "Wherever fresh specimens of the ooze have been examined on shipboard, no 

 traces of 'Batliybius' have been found. The audience were fairly startled when 

 Prof. Mobius, by simply mixing alcohol with a glass of sea-water, caused Ba- 

 thybius to appear before their eyes." 



Verily, this is a remarkable kind of logic. Because spirits of wine 

 mixed with sea-water precipitates gyj^sum, therefore Bathybius-ooze 

 kept in spirits of wine is precipitated gypsum ! And this demonstra- 

 tion " fairly startled " the members of a German Association of 

 Naturalists ! That strong spirits of wine mixed with sea-water pro- 

 duces a light, flocculent gypsum precipitate is known to every one 

 that has preserved marine animals in spirits of wine. But so, too, is 

 it known to every man who, like Huxley and myself, has closely ex- 

 amined the Bathybius-ooze collected by the Porcupine Expedition, that 

 the Moneres-like, albuminous bodies found therein consist actually of 

 alhuminous substance and not of gypsum. Carmine stains them red, 

 nitric acid and iodine yellow ; sulphuric acid decomposes them, and 

 they give all the other reactions of protoplasm^ which is not the case 

 with gypsum, as every one knows. 



If we finely pulverize certain kinds of chalk, or chalky marl, we 

 obtain a fine white flour, that might easily be mistaken for the re- 

 markable Radiolarian ooze found by the Challenger Expedition in a 

 limited area of the Pacific (and there only), at a depths ranging from 

 12,000 to 26,000 feet. This Radiolarian ooze, which I am at present 

 engaged in studying, consists almost exclusively of the most beautiful 

 and varied forms of siliceous Radiolarian shells. But with the naked 

 eye we cannot distinguish this dried ooze a wonderful microscopic 

 museum of Radiolaria from pulverized chalk-marl containing not a 

 single Radiolarian shell. I now propose that at their meeting in Mu- 

 nich next September (187*7) the Naturalists' Association exjierimental- 

 ly demonstrate that these enormous Radiolarian dejiosits, discovered 

 by the Challenger Expedition at the bottom of the Pacific, have no 

 real existence. "The experiment is a very simple one." Let the 

 lecturer bray in a mortar, in sight of the assembled naturalists, a bit 

 of chalk-marl containing no Radiolaria. The white powder so ob- 

 tained does not contain a single Radiolarian ; therefore the Pacific 

 ooze (consisting exclusively of Radiolarians) does not exist, since these 

 two substances cannot be distinguished from each other by the naked 

 eye quod erat demonstrandum. We are confident that this striking 

 experiment will "fairly startle" the beholders, and make an end of 

 Radiolarian ooze. 



IV. A Critique of the Moneres. From the foregoing, we think 

 it clearly appears that the non-existence of Bathyhixis is not proved. 

 Nay, it is highly probable that the observations of Wyville Thom- 

 son and Carpenter and Bessels on the movements of living Bathybius 



