PUZZLES IN PALEONTOLOGY. 2l7 



nifer, to which he gave the name of Carpenteria raphidodendron. 

 He was struck by its resemblance to the description of Eozoon 

 Cauadcuse, and he was animated with the desire to estabhsh, once 

 and for ever, the ''aniniahtat" of Eozoon. As the greatest of 

 h'ving authorities upon the Protozoa, the believers in Eozoon wel- 

 comed Moebius as a Daniel come to judgment. The choicest 

 specimens poured in u[)on him from every side. Carpenter sent 

 treasures which had never before left his cabinet ; Leydig of Bonn, 

 Dawson of Montreal, gave their eager help. But, alas ! he who 

 had come to bless pronounced definitely against the animal nature 

 of Eozoon. It sank from its proud position as the first animal — ■ 

 and, moreover, as an animal which could flourish in seas presum- 

 ably at nearly boiling point — into " bands of serpentine, inter- 

 lamellated with calcite." For a most clear and interesting account 

 of this controversy, I would refer my readers to the papers on 

 Eozoon Canadensc in Science Gossip for April and May of the 

 current year (1887). Heilprinn, Professor of Invertebrate Palaeon- 

 tology at Philadelphia, says that he has himself "examined masses 

 of Eozoon rock, in which the network of green mineral supposed 

 to fill the chamber cavities of the giant foraminifer coalesce and 

 merge info a broad band of serpentine. Now, either here we have a 

 true Eozoon structure or we have not. If yes, then how can the 

 gradual convergence of the infiltrating mineral and its final 

 coalescence in a broad band of serpentine be explained? If the 

 contrary, what is the necessity for evoking the aid of organic 

 forms in the explanation of a structure, 7uhen one fully as intricate, 

 and practically indistinguishable from it, can be shojvn to be of 

 purely mineral formation ? " 



The puzzle is almost equally great whether we admit or deny 

 the animal nature of Eozoon, since above and below the band of 

 Eozoon serpentine lie thick masses of rock without a trace of 

 animal life. The geological break would still be stupendous. A 

 protozoon — a mass of undifferentiated protoplasm — appears in a 

 thin band amongst rocks some forty miles thick. There is then 

 no further trace of life for some millions of years, when suddenly, 

 in the Cambrian rocks, we meet with abundant remains of organic 

 life — not in its simpler forms alone, but replete with fossils belong- 

 ing to all the great zoological sub-kingdoms, with the exception of 



