AMERICAN GEOLOGY THE EOZOON QUESTION. t)4.'-> 



The result of Moebius's work was not at all, presumably, what Car- 

 penter was led to expect or Dawson to hope. He wrote: 



My task. was to examine the Eozoon from a biological point of view. I com- 

 menced it with the expectation that I should succeed in establishing its organic 

 origin beyond all doubt, but facts led me to the contrary. When I saw first the 

 beautiful stem systems in Professor Carpenter's sections, I became at once a partisan 

 of the view of Professor Dawson and Professor Carpenter, but the more good sec- 

 tions and isolated stems I examined the mure doubtful became to my mind the 

 organic origin of Eozoon, until at last the most magnificent canal systems taken alto- 

 gether and closely compared with foraminiferal sections preached to me nothing but 

 the inorganic character of Eozoon over and over again. 



Dawson thereupon became particularly indignant, and characterized 

 Moebius's work as furnishing "only another illustration of partial and 

 imperfect investigation, quite unreliable as a verdict on the question 

 in hand." He claimed that Moebius should have studied the fossil in 

 situ and in its various stages of preservation; that he confounded the 

 "proper wall' 1 with the chrysotile veins traversing many of the speci- 

 mens; and that, further, in his criticisms he regarded each structure 

 separately, and did not ""consider their cumulative force when taken 

 together." This cumulative force he presented as follows: 



1. it (i. e., Eozoon) occurs in certain layers of widely distributed limestones, evi- 

 dently <>f aqueous origin, and on other grounds presumably organic. 



2. Its general form, lamination, and chambers resemble those (if the Silurian 

 Stromatopora and its allies, and of such modern sessile foraminifera as Carpentaria 

 and Polytrema. 



3. It shows under the microscope a tubulated proper wall similar to that of the 

 numnmlites, though of even finer texture. 



4. It shows also in the thicker layers a secondary or supplemental skeleton with 

 canals. 



5. These forms appear more or less perfectly in specimens mineralized with very 

 different substances. , 



6. The structures of Eozoon are of such generalized character as might be expected 

 in a very early Protozoan. 



7. It has been found in various parts of the world under very similar forms, and 

 in beds approximately of the same geological horizon. 



8. It may be added, though perhaps not as an argument, that the discovery of 

 Eozoon affords a rational mode of explaining the immense development of lime- 

 stones in the Laurentian age; and on the other hand that the various attempts which 

 have been made to account for the structures of Eozoon on other hypotheses than 

 that of organic origin have not been satisfactory to chemists or mineralogists, as 

 Doctor Hunt has very well shown. 



Singularly enough, although found on the Western Continent, 

 active work regarding the nature of the Eozoon was confined largely 

 to the Canadians and English, with an occasional European collabora- 

 tor, workers in the United States taking little part in the dispute so 

 far as indicated by literature, although watching the contest with 

 interest and becoming more or less partisans, according to the extent 

 of their own observations or the character of the evidence offered. 

 In 1ST1 Messrs. Burbank and Perry made a study of the Eozoonal 



