326 Dr. G. C. Wallich on the true 



introducing this singular substance into the list of living 

 things, I think I err on the right side in attaching even 

 greater weight than he does to the view which he suggests." 



With reference to this remarkable withdrawal of opinion 

 and of previously assumed facts, it only remains for me to 

 say that, rejoiced though I am to find my views on the sub- 

 ject so fully substantiated, the persistent mode in which my 

 published observations have for a long series of years been 

 ignored, and the fact that Prof. Huxley to the last moment 

 ascribes the rectification of his error altogether to Prof. 

 Wyville Thomson, who has throughout his writings upon the 

 " coccoliths" -a,nd-coccosphere question, as on numerous other 

 equally important points, failed to accord to my observations 

 the recognition to which his not unfrequent appropriation 

 of their substance, and even of the very words in which 

 they were couched, proves me to have been entitled, renders 

 it more than ever indispensable that I should place in the 

 clearest light the methods by which these ends have been 

 gained, quite as much in the interest of scientific truth as in 

 vindication of my own claims*. 



In the appendix to Captain Dayman's Report on ' Deep-sea 

 Soundings in the North Atlantic Ocean,' taken in 1857, 

 published in 1858 t> Prof. Huxley, who was then intrusted 

 with the examination of the materials, observes that he " found 

 in almost all these deposits a multitude of very curious 

 rounded bodies, to all appearance consisting of several con- 

 centric layers surrounding a minute clear centre, and looking, 

 at first sight, somewhat like single cells of the plant Proto- 

 coccus ; as these bodies, however, are rapidly and completely 



* The contradictory nature of Prof. Thomson's statements will ap- 

 pear from the following 1 passages. In his work, 'The Depths of the Sea/ 

 published in 1873, p. 413, he says, with a singular disregard of accu- 

 racy in his quotation uf my opinion, that " the ' coccoliths ' are some- 

 times found aggregated on the surface of small transparent membranous 

 balls ; and these, which seemed (it first to have something to do with 

 the production of the ' coccoliths,' Dr. Wallich has called cocco- 

 spheres ; " whereas, in a communication dated from the ' Challenger,' 

 and published in ' The Proceedings of the lioyal Society ' for Nov. 1874 

 (p. 38), he unhesitatingly renounces the opinion just cited, and in- 

 forms us that " his observations have placed it beyond a doubt that the 

 ' coccoliths' are the separated elements of a peculiar calcareous armature 

 which covers certain spherical bodies (the coccospheres of Dr. Wallich)." 

 Thus while he repudiated, in the first instance, my conclusion, supported 

 as it was by direct and detailed evidence, he now claims the merit of 

 the discovery, without having offered a particle of evidence on the 

 subject ! 



t ' Deep-sea Soundings in the North Atlantic,' made in H.M.S. 

 'Cyclops' by Lieut. -Commander Dayman, in June and July 1857: 

 London, 1858, p. 64. 



