7g THE BIO'COSMOS PRELIMINARY. 



or the beginning of Life, though Pasteur ex- 

 perimentally refuted the experiments on 

 which he based his conclusion. More sugges- 

 tive still is the story of the Bathybios (or 

 Deeplife), in whose mazes both Haeckel and 

 Huxley, most eminent scientists, got entang- 

 led. Masses of animal matter had been found, 

 it was claimed, strewn on the bottom of the 

 ocean at a great depth (more than 2,000 fath- 

 oms), in beds thirty feet thick. Here then 

 was supposed to be the original protoplasmic 

 life-stuff (Protobioticon) in the warm tropi- 

 cal seas not far from the Canary Islands (so 

 reported by Haeckel, and at first accepted by 

 Huxley). Thus the missing link between the 

 Inorganic and the Organic had been actually 

 found, and the rejoicing was somewhat simi- 

 lar to that produced by the discovery of the 

 more famous missing link between man and 

 the ape in the fossil Pithecanthropes (ape- 

 man) of Java. But science now declares that 

 the Bathybios is a delusion, though the sup- 

 position lay near that the strange Sargosso 

 Sea in the midst of the Atlantic (still a mys- 

 terious phenomenon in a number of ways), 

 might have been the original source of Earth- 

 life, which started in the water somewhere, 

 according to most scientists. Perhaps, too, it 

 still might be regarded as the reservoir in 

 which Earth-life, ever passing away, is fed 



