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His pamphlet, On the Mesoblastic Origin of Excitomotor Nerve Roots, had won him his fellowship of the Royal Society; and his researches, Upon the Nature of Bathybius, with some Remarks upon Lithococci, had been translated into at least three European languages.
Murray's assistants poured a large quantity of spirits of wine into a bottle containing some pure sea-water, when lo! the wonderful protoplasm Bathybius appeared! It was the chemical precipitate of sulphate of lime produced by the mixture of alcohol and sea-water! Thereafter 'Bathybius' disappeared from science." The term "protoplasm" has, indeed, been retained by writers on biology.
Etheridge, however, has ascertained by microscopical examination that it is made up of Coccoliths, Discoliths, and other minute fossils like those of the Chalk classed by Huxley as Bathybius, when this term is used in its widest sense.
Nor should we omit mention of Huxley's Bathybius Haeckelii, a slimy substance supposed to exist in great masses in the depths of the ocean and to consist of undifferentiated protoplasm, the exhaustless fountain from which all other forms of life had been derived.
We can no longer mention as belonging to the bridges which are said to lead from the organic world to the inorganic, the often-named bathybius, discovered by Huxley, and so strongly relied upon for the mechanical explanation of life a slimy net-like growth, which covers the rocks in the great depths of the ocean.
As we hinted above, he is very far from being the only scientific man who has made a mistake. Huxley had a very bad fall over Bathybius and was man enough to admit that he was wrong. Curiously enough, what Huxley thought a living thing really was a concretion, just as what Fallopius thought a concretion had been a living thing.
Organic form which, in its lowest stages, is so simple, like the moneron and the bathybius, and which stands still lower than a cell, is, moreover, something which there is no difficulty in explaining from inorganic matter.
I opened to the first chapter, on "Protoplasm and the Cell," but I couldn't fix my thoughts on Bathybius or the Protomoeba. I walked toward an aquarium, flanking which stood a jar half-filled with water in which floated what seemed a big cup-shaped flower of bright brown jelly with waving petals of white and rose colour.
The lowest and most formless moneron is the bathybius, discovered by Thomas Huxley, a network of recticular mucus, which in the greatest depths of the sea, as far down as 7,000 metres, covers stone fragments and other objects, but are also found in less depths, in the Mediterranean Sea, for instance.
But, if the ghost theory of the high Gods is wrong, as it is conspicuously superfluous, that does make some difference. It proves that a widely preached scientific conclusion may be as spectral as Bathybius. On other more important points, therefore, we may differ from the newest scientific opinion without too much diffident apprehensiveness.
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