204 THE AMERICAN MONTHLY [July, 



seem to range in the lowest orders of life, where the 

 animal and vegetable come together, in fact in the Pro- 

 tista. 



They were first discovered by Ehrenberg in 1836, in 

 chalk, and described as inorganic bodies. According to 

 him, they were flat bodies having concentric rings on 

 their surface, and in 1854, in the Mikrogeologie, he de- 

 scribed them as " chalk morpholiths." So that morpho- 

 lith is the first name they go by. Huxley and Wallick 

 showed these bodies occurring in the chalk to exist now 

 in the sea, and the former called them " for convenience " 

 coccoliths. He also distinguished two forms, one simple 

 the other double, and called them discoliths and cyatto- 

 liths. Haeckel, in 1870, called them monodiscs and am- 

 phidiscs. These two observers consider them to be 

 crystalloids of a giant Amoeba — Bathylius. Murray and 

 Bachanan proved Bathylius to be gelatinous calcium sul- 

 phate precipitated by the alcohol in which the soundings 

 were preserved. They had hitherto not been considered 

 organisms themselves, but now they were supposed to 

 be so. Barrois and others stoutly contested the idea 

 and Harting considered them to be mere mineral concre- 

 tions. Gumbell and Carter supposed them to be con- 

 nected with the reproduction of calcareous algse. Wallick 

 first noticed coccospheres and considered them to be 

 nothing else than embryonic foramenifera; the coccoliths 

 were calcareous spicules. Sir Wyville Thompson noticed 

 that threads hung in sea water over night were full of 

 coccoliths in the morning. So that these organisms 

 were found at the surface and in the depths of the 

 ocean. Bathylius, as its name signifies, was found in 

 deep water, so it can be seen that their place in a king- 

 dom, if such can be established, cannot be called certain; 

 but, if the Protista come in between the animal and the 

 vegetable, they will be placed there. 



