i86S BATHYBIUS 317 



in 1869 upon the Dinosaurs (see Chap. XXIII. ), and is 

 referred to in a letter to Haeckel, p. 325. 



His Hunterian lectures on the Invertebrata appeared 

 this year in the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science 

 (pp. 126-129, and 191-201), and in the October number 

 of the same journal appeared his famous article " On some 

 Organisms living at great depth in the North Atlantic 

 Ocean," originally delivered before the British Association 

 at Norwich in this year (1868). The sticky or viscid char- 

 acter of the fresh mud from the bottom of the Atlantic had 

 already been noticed by Captain Dayman when making 

 soundings for the Atlantic cable. This stickiness was appar- 

 ently due to the presence of innumerable lumps of a trans- 

 parent, gelatinous substance, consisting of minute granules 

 without discoverable nucleus or membranous envelope, 

 and interspersed with cretaceous coccoliths. After a de- 

 scription of the structure of this substance and its chemical 

 reactions, he makes a careful proviso against confounding 

 the statement of fact in the description and the interpre- 

 tation which he proceeds to put upon these facts : — 



I conceive that the granulate heaps and the transparent 

 gelatinous matter in which they are embedded represent masses 

 of protoplasm. Take away the cysts which characterise the 

 Radiolaria, and a dead Sphaerozoumwould very nearly represent 

 one of this deep-sea " Ur-schleim," which must, I think, be re- 

 garded as a new form of those simple animated beings which 

 have recently been so well described by Haeckel in his Mono- 

 graphic der Moneras, p. 210.* 



Of this he writes to Haeckel on October 6, 1868: — 



[This paper] is about a new " Moner " which lies at the 

 bottom of the Atlantic to all appearances, and gives rise to 

 some wonderful calcified bodies. I have christened it Bathybius 1^ 

 Haeckelii, and I hope that you will not be ashamed of your god- 

 child. I will send you some of the mud with the paper. 



The explanation was plausible enough on general 

 grounds, if the evidence had been all that it seemed to be. 



* See Coll. Ess. v. 153. 



