R^SUM^, AND GENEE.U. DISCUSSION. 531 



special value as allowing even- 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 EozoiJn. The exact 

 position of Professor Mobius when 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 Mobius have been 

 acknowledged by Zittel, 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, by the exhaustive memoir of Mobius." To 

 this emphatic testimony on the part of Zittel may be added the equally 

 positive statement, to the same effect, of the eminent palceontologist, 

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

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

 rying on which he was able to make use of the best material in the pos- 

 session both of Dawson and Cai-penter, and he reached the positive and 

 unquestionable result [sicheres unzweifelhaftes Ergebniss] that the sup- 

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

 serpentine and chiysotile in limestone. Consequently, by far the larger 

 majority of geologists and palseontologists will consider this question as 

 definitively settled, and will be all the more ready to do so, since the 

 occurrence of a fossil of this character in the oldest crystalline limestone 

 was, on general princijiles, in the highest degree improbable.'" t 



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

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

 sidering the Eozoon as a fossil. "NVe have, however, a statement of 

 Professor Leidy — a high 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." t 



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

 by Carter, Kowney, and King, we have that of our own obtaining, and 



* I. c, p. 1S9. 



t F. Roemer, Lethaea Palaeozoica, 13S0, p. 2S5. 



} Proceediugs of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelpliia, 1S77, p. 20. 



