EDITOR'S TABLE. 



497 



Prof. Huxley's words are neither " ex- 

 pressly quoted " nor quoted at all, and in 

 which the substance is not to be found 

 in the article cited. 



The second paragraph of the book 

 opens thus : " To this amazingly strateg- 

 ic and haughtily-trumpeted substance 

 found at the lowest bottoms of the 

 oceans, Huxley gave the scientific name 

 Bathybius, from two Greek words 

 meaning deep and sea, and assumed 

 that it was in the past, and would be 

 in the future, the progenitor of all the 

 life on the planet." It is not true that, 

 in the article cited by Mr. Cook, Prof. 

 Huxley made any such assumption as is 

 alleged, any more than it is true that 

 the word Bathybius has the derivation 

 here assigned to it. This characteriza- 

 tion of the announcement of Bathybius 

 is simply a slanderous misrepresenta- 

 tion. That Mr. Cook intended it to 

 apply to Huxley is obvious from the 

 connection, and is proved by the fact 

 that on page 69 he again refers to 

 it as "the haughty claim of Huxley." 

 Nothing could be more false, as we shall 

 presently show, than the impression con- 

 veyed by this language. 



On the third page we are told that 

 "Dr. Carpenter rejected Huxley's tes- 

 timony on this matter of fact," but 

 where, or in what form, he has done 

 so is not mentioned. The statement is 

 entirely improbable, as Dr. Carpenter 

 had himself observed the living Bathy- 

 bius dredged up on the expedition of 

 the Porcupine, samples of which he 

 furnished to Huxley ; while so late as 

 1875 he speaks in his work on the mi- 

 croscope "of these indefinite expan- 

 sions of protoplasmic substance, which 

 there is much reason to regard as gen- 

 erally spread over the deep-sea bed." 



Having introduced Bathybius to the 

 attention of his auditors, in the manner 

 here indicated, Mr. Cook announced to 

 them, with due rhetorical flourish, that 

 it is now nothing but an exploded myth. 

 We shall be better able to judge of the 

 truthfulness, both of his former state- 

 vol. xii. 32 



ments and of this assertion, by briefly 

 glancing at the history of the substance. 

 The paper of 1868 here referred to 

 is entitled "On some Organisms liv- 

 ing at Great Depths in the North At- 

 lantic Ocean." In the first part of this 

 article he referred to a report, which he 

 had himself drawn up, concerning the 

 sticky mud obtained by Captain Day- 

 man in sounding the North Atlantic in 

 1857; the report of Prof. Huxley being 

 published in 1858. In his observations 

 upon this mud he discovered some cu- 

 rious little microscopic bodies, which 

 at first suggested an organic origin, but 

 which Prof. Huxley concluded were not 

 of this character. The language in the 

 original report is as follows: "I find 

 in almost all these deposits a multitude 

 of very curious rounded bodies, to all 

 appearance consisting of several con- 

 centric layers surrounding a minute, 

 clear centre, and looking, at first sight, 

 somewhat like single cells of the plant 

 ])rotococcu8 ; as these bodies, however, 

 are rapidly and completely dissolved 

 by dilute acids, they cannot be organic, 

 and I will, for convenience' sake, simply 

 call them coccoliths." 



Some observations made by Dr. 

 Wallich and Mr. Sorby led them to 

 think that Prof. Huxley had been mis- 

 taken in the conclusion here given, and 

 that the objects which he supposed to 

 be of a mineral nature were really of 

 organic origin. Prof. Huxley was then 

 led to reconsider the subject, of which 

 he made a prolonged study with higher 

 microscopic powers, and the result was 

 that he came to the same conclusion as 

 the observers referred to, that the mi- 

 nute microscopic objects belonged to 

 the lowest forms of the living world. 

 Certain minute albuminous or proto- 

 plasmic bodies of the very lowest type 

 had been discovered by Prof. Haeckel, 

 and named moners, and it was Prof. 

 Huxley's opinion that the minute ob- 

 jects he had been studying from the 

 sea-slime belong to this class. We 

 quote the passages from the article in 



