82 THE DEPOSITS OF THE SEA-BOTTOM. 



Section V. 

 The Coccoliths. 



We have now to regard the peculiar beings, found in almost all the specimens, and in some 

 of them in quite an overwhelming multitude, that is to say, the Coccoliths and the Coccospheres. 

 They play a very important part in the composition of the bottom-specimens, but it is still very 

 doubtful, to which of the three kingdoms they are to be referred. From the year 1836, when they 

 were discovered by Ehrenberg, and down to the present day, they have been made the subject of 

 many different interpretations. By Ehrenberg himself they were called Morpholiths, as he has set 

 forth in detail in his Microgeologie, 1854, and later 1872 '), and he took them to be a purely inorganic 

 formation; he only knew them from the older geological formations, and supposed them to be trans- 

 formed from Foraminifera. Many other investigators, as Huxley and Haeckel classed those beings 

 with the organic nature, and took them to be parts of the mysterious being, the Bathybius, which 

 was said to be the most primitive of all organisms, but which is now regarded as a purely inorganic 

 formation. Huxley distinguishes between two forms, the Discoliths and the Cyatholiths, the former 

 being one single disk, the latter composed of two such almost of the form of a shirt-stud with two 

 flat disks. Haeckel figures the Coccoliths in a way often repeated in later text-books, and therefore 

 needing a more detailed mentioning; he divides the Coccoliths into 5 parts arranged concentrically 

 round each other; farthest in a central grain, round this a marrow sphere, next a marrow ring, then 

 a grain ring, and finally an outer ring. Of these five divisions the first and the last are only optical 

 phenomena; they ar.e, at all events, not found in the Coccoliths I have examined, the structure of 

 which will be described later. C.W. G umbel 2 ) (1870) decidedly maintains the organic nature of Bathybius 

 and the Coccoliths, but he adds that it is doubtful whether Bathybius is to be regarded as an inde- 

 pendent being; he describes peculiar phenomena of colours shown by the Coccoliths by varioiis ad- 

 justments of the objective; these phenomena I have not been able to find. Wyville Thomson (1874) 

 pointed out that the Coccoliths belonged to the same class as the Coccospheres, which latter will be 

 mentioned more in detail hereafter, and which were by him referred to the one-celled Algse. Contrary 

 to this opinion Giimbel, in his Geologie von Bayern, 1888, maintains that the Coccoliths are purely 

 inorganic formations, which he classes with the disk-shaped grains found in the urine of horses; he 

 describes and draws the Coccoliths as common spherulites with a regular, vertical cross in polarised 

 light, which phenomenon is also mentioned in later works and essays where the Coccoliths are men- 



') Abh. d. Akad. d. Wissens. zu Berlin, 1872, p. 361. 



=) Vorl. Mitth. ueber Tiefseeschlamm ; Neues Jahrb. f. Min. 1870, p. 753. 



