KfeUMiS, AND GENERAL DISCUSSION. 



531 



Special value as allowing every one to see for himself just what the speci- 

 mens amounted to, which were held by Carpenter and Dawson to fur- 



nish full evidence of the organic character of the Eozoon. The exact 

 position of Professor Mobius wlicn he began the investigation, and the 

 result to which he attained, can be easily made out from the following 

 sentence, in which the whole thing is summed up in a few words : *' I 

 began this investigation with the hope that I should succeed in prov- 

 ing, beyond possibility of doubt, that the Eozoon was organic. The 

 facts, however, led me to the opposite conclusion,"* 



The value and importance of the investigations of ^lobius have been 

 acknowledged by Zittcl, who thus expresses his opinion of the nature of 

 the Eozoon : *' In spite of the repeated answers of Dawson and Carpen- 

 ter, this long struggle to maintain the organic nature of the Eozoon 

 may well be admitted to have been brought to an end, and with a result 

 unfavorable to that view, b}^ the exhaustive memoir of Mobius." To 

 this emphatic testimony on the j^art of Zittel may be added the equally 

 positive statement, to the same efFect, of the eminent palaeontologist, 

 F. Eocmer, who thus states the case: "Finally, Mobius undertook an 

 exhaustive microscopical investigation of this body [the Eozoon], in car- 

 rying on "whicli ho was able to make use of the best material in the pos- 

 session both of Dawson and Carpenter, and he reached the positive and 

 unquestii)nablo result [sicheros unzweifelhaftcs Ergebniss] that the sup- 

 posed Eozoon is simply an inorganic formation [Bildung] consisting of 

 serpentine and chi'ysotile in limestone. Consequently, by far the larger 

 majority of geologists and palaeontologists will consider this (question as 

 dclinitivoly settled, and will bo all the more ready to do so, since the 

 ocGicrrence of a fossil of this chaixicter in the oldest crystalline Uviestone 

 was, on general principles, in the highest degree improhnhle.'''^ \ 



It is believed that in this country no geologist or pahicontologist of 

 eminence has distinctly put himself on record as being opposed to con- 

 sidering tlie Eozoon as a fossil. We have, however, a statement of 

 Professor Leidy — a l)igli authority on the lower forms of animal life, 

 and who at the same time is familiar with minerals — to the effect 

 that he, in 1877, *' was not fully convinced of its [the Eozoou's] animal 

 nature." :|: 



Apart from the evidence so skilfully presented by Moliius, as well as 

 by Carter, Pu)wney, and King, w^e have that of our own obtaining, and 



* L c, p. 189. 



t F. UooiiKu-, LctkfEa Pal;-cozoica, 18S0, p. 285. 



X rroccediiigy uC the AcaJciuy of NaLuial Sciences of rhiLidelpIua, 1877, p. 



20. 



