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Though Haeckel his large experience of Monera fortified by the discovery of a close parallel near Greenland in 1876 would not desert Bathybius, the rest of its sponsors gave it up. The evidence in this particular case was tainted. At the meeting of the British Association in 1879 Huxley came forward and took occasion to "eat the leek" in a speech as witty as it was candid.
Sir William Thomson, as President of the British Association in 1871, suggested that a germ of life might have been wafted to our world on a meteorite; but to say that is obviously only to banish the problem to a greater distance. Huxley had, in 1868, invented the name "Bathybius" to describe the deep-sea slime which he held to be the progenitor of life on the planet.
These were connected by a mass of living gelatinous matter to which he has given the name of Bathybius, and which contains abundance of very minute bodies termed Coccoliths and Coccospheres, which have also been detected fossil in chalk. Sir Leopold MacClintock and Dr. Wallich have ascertained that 95 per cent of the mud of a large part of the North Atlantic consists of Globigerina shells.
About the same time bathybius, which at one time bade fair to supplant it upon the throne of popularity, died suddenly, as I am told, at Norwich, under circumstances which did not transpire, nor has its name, so far as I am aware, been ever again mentioned.
The most celebrated instance of this was the story of Bathybius. In 1868, while soundings were being made in connection with the laying of the Atlantic cable, certain specimens of mud were dredged up. The mud was sticky, owing to the presence of innumerable lumps of a transparent gelatinous substance. This was in fine granules, which possessed neither a nucleus nor a covering membrane.
The notion of matter being ever changed except by other matter in another state is so shocking to the intellectual conscience that it may be dismissed without discussion; yet if bathybius had not been promptly dealt with, it must have become apparent even to the British public that there were indeed but few steps from protoplasm, as the only living substance, to vital principle.
Petersburg, in his essay, “Protoplasm and Vital Force.” He sharply castigates the one-sidedness and impetuosity of the mechanical theory, as in Haeckel’s discovery of Bathybius and of non-nucleated bacteria. The latter are problematical, and the former has been proved an illusion. To penetrate farther into the processes of life is simply to become aware of an ever-deepening series of riddles.
Take away the cysts which characterize the Radiolaria, and a dead Sphærozoum would very nearly represent one of this deep-sea "Urschleim," which must, I think, be regarded as a new form of those simple animated beings which have recently been so well described by Haeckel in his Monographie der Moneras. So it received the name of Bathybius Haeckelii.
The explanation was plausible enough, if the evidence had been all that it seemed to be. But the specimens examined by himself and by Haeckel, who two years later published a full and detailed description of Bathybius, were seen only in a preserved state. It was dredged up again on the voyage of the Porcupine and examined in a fresh state by Sir Wyville Thomson and Dr.
Now, Bathybius had often been pointed to as an example of almost primordial life, from which the evolutionary chain might have begun; and later controversialists, not acquainted with the precise limitations of the matter, seized upon the Bathybius recantation as a convenient stick with which to beat the Darwinian dog. To the most noteworthy case of this, eleven years later, Huxley retorted:
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