Henry Woodward — Dawn of Life on the Earth. 299 



But you will probably say, " This is too mucb to ask one to accept ; the 

 idea of a kind of common composite animal, however simple, stretch- 

 ing from the shores of Labrador to the margin of Lake Superior, 

 and thence northwardly to an unknown distance, constituting a wild 

 and rugged region, often rising into hills 40Q0 feet high, and form- 

 ing cliffs 1500 feet sheer vertical depth ! " 



Let us instead look for a moment at the Paofic Ocean. Not an 

 island in the -intertropical region that lifts its head above the wave 

 but is made of, or fringed with, Coral Eeefs. Florida and the West 

 Indian Islands, as well as those of the Indian Ocean, within the 

 tropics, are alike eoral-bound or coral-built. Here then, I think, we 

 shall find a parallel instance, derived from a higher grade (the 

 Zoophyta), in which composite animals are world-makers on fully 

 as large a scale as the Eozoon Canadense, if not larger. 



Speaking of the Atlantic mud, Prof. Wyville Thomson writes: 

 " The mud was entirely filled with the delicate siliceous root-fibres 

 of the vitreous sponges, binding it together, and traversing it in all 

 directions like hairs in mortar. TJiis mud (he goes on to say) was 

 actually alive; it stuck together in lumps, as if there were white of 

 egg mixed with it, and the glairy mass proved under the microscope 

 to^e living sarcode. Prof. Huxley regards this as a distinct creature, 

 and calls it " Bathybius." Wyville Thomson inclines to look upon 

 it as ''simply a sort of diffused mycelium of the different distinct 

 sponges growing at the bottom." " This view," he adds, " accords 

 well with the mode of nutrition of the sponges." 



This Batliyhius agrees exactly with Huxley's description of his 

 universal basis of life, or Protoplasm, which he traces in so many and 

 various bodies, and which behaves like an ordinary Amceba, " draw- 

 ing in and thrusting out prolongations of its substance." 



Whether the so-called Protoplasm is, or is not, the ultimate basis 

 of life, — whetlier it grows naturally from dead matter on which it 

 feeds, as the brewer supposes the beer or wine to feed on the lees, — 

 whether it can be made as a chemical compound from the elements 

 of which it is composed, — we are not yet prepared to state. But 

 I have been enabled to show you in a very rough and hasty Avay 

 — (1) That the oldest organism with which v/e are acquainted is 

 one of the simplest, being an aggregate of a number of Foraminifera 

 associated together so as to form a common Protozoan Eeef, just as a 

 Coral island is a Zoophytan Reef. (2) That the Chalk and Nummulitic 

 Limestone have been similarly built up of aggregations of myriads 

 of Protozoans filled with the same sarcode, or Protoplasm, as 

 the Eozoon. (3) That each geologic period as we ascend stage by 

 stage upwards in the chronology of our Earth does not point to a 

 periodic re-creation of all things, but rather tends to show that a 

 . gradual development of life has been taking place ever since its first 

 appearance. 



We have not a perfect and complete history of life on the globe, 

 nor is it a thing to be ever expected. Geologists have learned to 

 say " we don't know " about a great many things which at one time 

 they either thought they did knoAV, or they were credited by their 

 friends with such prescience. 



