

658 WHAT IS BATHYBIUS ? 
to separate them." * The relations subsisting between these 
Coecospheres on the one hand, and the Cyatholiths on the 
other, are very obscure ; but Professor Huxley deems it prob- 
able that some close affinity does exist ; but whether the Coc- 
cospheres have been formed from a coalescence of Cyatho- 
liths, whether the Cyatholiths have resulted from the breaking 
up of the Coccospheres, or whether the Coccospheres are al- 
together independent structures, yet remains to be decided. 
There appears, however, no reason to doubt that Coccoliths, 
Coccospheres and Cyatholiths, equally belong to Bathybius, 
as the skeleton of a sponge, or the shell of a Foraminifer 
belong to their respective protoplasmic sarcodes. 
Since Professor Huxley completed the observations to 
which I have referred, Dr. Carpenter and Professor Wyville 
Thompson have conducted a very important series of deep- 
sea dredgings off the north coasts of Scotland, and in the 
neighborhood of the Faroe Islands. In Capt. Dayman’s 
dredging operations the viscid mud was found between the 
fifteenth and forty-fifth degrees of W. longitude. Those of 
Drs. Carpenter and Thompson were carried on much further 
eastward; but in the latter instance the same deposit was 
found over a range of at least two hundred miles, through- 
out which the dredge came up from time to time filled with 
Globigerina-mud and saturated with Bathybius, with its asso- 
ciated Coccoliths and Coccospheres. The Globigerina de- 
posit exists in a similar manner in many and distant parts 
of the ocean, in both hemispheres ; and it is more than prob- 
able that when the remote localities are subjected to the 
same examination as our northern seas have recently under- 
gone, Bathybius will be found in them also. Its low organ- 
ization renders it probable that it will be found to be like its 
companion Globigerina, a thorough cosmopolite. On this 
= point Dr. Carpenter suggests that the range of these objects 
— by temperature rather than by locality. It was 


2 uo E some DA. f great Depths » the North Atlantic Ocean, Quarterly 
Jour f erst Sec, Oct., 1868, p. 


