EOZOON. 23 



branching canals (d), and by others which pass directly 

 from one chamber to another placing them in communica- 

 tion. These canals are filled with serpentine or occasion- 

 ally calcite. Since this layer comes between the body- walls, 

 it will of course correspond to the supplemental skeleton, 

 such as that which occurs in Nummulina ; the branching 

 canals will represent the complicated canal-system, and 

 the canals passing between the chambers the stolon- 

 passages (e). 



If Eozoon be organic, it must certainly be placed 

 among the Foraminifera, of which it will be a gigantic 

 example. Several authors, however, especially King and 

 Rowney in this country, and Mb'bius in Germany, have 

 brought forward weighty objections to this view. They 

 state that the chamber casts of serpentine are so extremely 

 irregular in form that they cannot be compared with those 

 of the Foraminifera, and they consider them to be merely 

 granules of serpentine in a matrix of calcite. The body- 

 wall is shown to be not calcareous but to consist of 

 chrysolite, a fibrous variety of serpentine, derived from the 

 alteration of the latter, and in some cases a gradual 

 passage can be traced from the unaltered serpentine to 

 the fibrous chrysolite. A layer of the same mineral is 

 frequently found surrounding nodules of serpentine in 

 ophites. Then again the fibres are often in actual contact, 

 but if they represented the casts of the pseudopodial 

 foramina, they ought to be isolated. With regard to the 

 supplemental skeleton, this is found not to be of uniform 

 structure throughout, but to contain masses of pyrites and 

 other minerals, and in fact to correspond exactly to the 

 matrix in which pargasite and coccolite occur. The 

 branching canals are much too irregular both in form and 

 distribution to be at all comparable to the canal system 



