630 

NATURE 
[AUGUST 5, 1915 

ON BEAUTY, DESIGN, AND PURPOSE IN 
THE FORAMINIFERA.1 
N the dawn of history the Tartars in their flight 
before the victorious army of Ladislaus, King of 
Transylvania, scattered money as they fled, trusting 
to the apparently already established instincts of the 
Teuton soldiers that their pursuit would be thereby 
arrested. But King Ladislaus prayed that this money 
might be turned into stones, and his prayer was imme- 
diately granted. Hence the Nummulites. This, at 
any rate, is the account given of the matter in the 
sixteenth century by the learned Clusius,? and it is 
probably the first mention of the Foraminifera in 
print. The equally learned Strabo, however, had 
recorded that the Egyptian Nummulites were the 
petrified remains of beans left behind them by the 
builders of the Pyramids,’ in spite of the explicit state- 
ment of Herodotus that the Egyptians never grew 
or ate beans in any form.*| This Nummulite, which 
rightfully claims to be the earliest recorded Foramini- 
fer, is also the highest and most complex of its order, 
and it was based upon his study of this family that 
Dr. Carpenter in 1885 claimed for the Foraminifera 
that they are the most highly specialised and struc- 
turally developed of the Protozoa.* ‘They stand at 
the summit of a long branch of the whole tree of 


Fic. 1.—Section of Nummulitic Limestone. 
life,’ ® and have with perhaps the single exception of 
the Globigerinidz, played a more important part in the 
building up of vast tracts of the earth’s surface than 
any other organism. The Nummulitic Limestones 
(Fig. 1) stretch in a broad band, in many places several 
thousands of feet in thickness, across Europe and 
Northern Africa, and through Asia by the Himalayas 
to China, the matrix, containing the perfect fossils, 
being a rock formed of their comminuted remains. 
The deposit is characteristic of the Eocene period; but 
the Nummulites have now died out, being represented 
to-day in the tropics by a single living species, 
N. cummingii. 
Coeval with the Nummulites, and closely approxi- 
mating to them in importance as world-builders, is 
the genus Alveolina, which is found in the same beds, 
either gradually replacing them, or sometimes taking 
their place with startling suddenness in the strata. 
Off the extreme point of Selsey Bill, in Sussex, the 
locally named ‘‘ Mixon reef’’ rises at the summit of 
1 From a discourse delivered at the Royal Institution on Friday, May 21, 
by Mr. Edward Heron-Allen. 
2 “Caroli Clusii et aliorum epistolae,” Ep. xxxvii. 
3 Strabo, ‘‘ Geographica,” bk. xvii., cap. i., 34. 
4 Herodotus, ‘‘ Euterpe,” ii., 37. 
5 W.B. Carpenter, ‘‘On the Structure of Orbitolites,” 
Micr. Club, ser. 2, vol. ii., p. 102. 
6 P. Chalmers Mitchell, Art. “‘ Evolution” in ‘‘ Encyel. Britannica,”’ 11th 
ed., vol. x., p. 35. 1910. 
NO. 2388, VOL. 95] 
Paris (¢. 1550). 

Journ. Quekett 


the Eocene deposits, composed almost entirely of fossil 
shells of A. boscii (Fig. 2), indistinguishable from the 
living shells of the species which abound to-day in the 
shallow water and littoral sands of Australian and 
other tropical shores.’ 
With all respect, however, to the recent utterances 
of its most noteworthy protagonist,* the Nummulite is 
a mere parvenu compared with the species Spfirillina 
groomii, discovered in the Cambrian rocks of Malvern 
by Chapman,’ and rediscovered by Arthur Earland 
and myself alive in the shallow waters of the west 
of Ireland,!° which probably represents the earliest 
specific form of life to be found living at the present 
day. Even the conservative little Lingula shell has 
become slightly modified since its earliest ancestors 
wallowed in Cambrian mud a hundred million years 
ago.1 
I have alluded to the Globigerinze, which are to-day 
forming a geological deposit of unknown thickness 
over 48 millions of square miles in the modern 
oceans.!2 Agassiz has observed that ‘‘no lithological 
distinction of any value has been established between 
the chalk proper and the calcareous mud of the 
Atlantic,’ 3% and it has been estimated that the time 

Fic. 2.—Alveolina boscii, Defrance. 
occupied by the deposit of the English chalk, arguing 
by the rate at which the Atlantic ooze is formed (which 
is about one foot in a century), must have been 
150,000 years."* 
As Maury has picturesquely said, ‘‘The sea, like 
the snow-cloud, with its flakes in a calm, is always 
letting fall upon its bed showers of microscopic 
shells.” 1° These are some of the Foraminifera that 
7 E. Heron-Allen and A. Earland, ‘‘The Foraminifera in their rdle as 
World-Builders.” Journ. Quekett Micr. Club, ser. 2, vol. xi., pp. 9-11, 
1913. 
8 R. Kirkpatrick, ‘* The Nummulosphere.” Tondon, 1913, etc. 
9 F. Chapman, ‘‘ Foraminifera from an Upper Cambrian Horizon of the 
Malverns.” Q. Journ. Geol. Soc., p. 257. 1900. 
10 E. Heron-Allen and A. Earland, ‘‘The Foraminifera of the Clare 
Island District." Proc. R. Irish Acad., vol. xxxi. (Clare Island Survey 
part 64), p. 107, pl. ix., figs. 2, 3. 1913. 
11 Cf. E, Heron-Allen, ‘‘ Selsey Bill.” London, 1911, p. 24. 
12 Sir J. Murray, ‘‘ The Ocean,” p. 207. London, 1973. 
% A. Agassiz, *‘ Three Cruises of the Blake,” vol. i., p. 150. 


London 
16 
44 A. J. Jukes-Brown, ‘‘ Handbook of Physical Geology,”’ p. 130. London, 
1884. The rate of deposition varies slightly according to depth. See 
Murray, of. czt., p. 224. 
10 M. F. Maury, ‘‘ The Physical Geography of the Sea,” 15th ed., p. 322. 
London, 1874. Cf. H. N. Moseley, ‘‘ Notes ofa Naturalist onthe Challenger," 
p- 582. London, 1879. ‘‘ The dead Pelagic animals must fall as a constant 
j rain of food upon the habitation of their deep-sea dependants.” 

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