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Updated: June 2, 2025
Macdonald is at all like a Globigerina, and there are some peculiarities about even this which make me greatly doubt its affinity with that genus. The form, indeed, is not unlike that of a Globigerina, but it is provided with long radiating processes, of which I have never seen any trace in Globigerina.
My first impression was that it might be the most minutely divided material, the ultimate sediment produced by the disintegration of the land, by rivers and by the action of the sea on exposed coasts, and held in suspension and distributed by ocean currents, and only making itself manifest in places unoccupied by the Globigerina ooze.
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.
Wallich ascertained that the sea-bottom at this point consisted of the ordinary Globigerina ooze, and that the stomachs of the star-fishes were full of Globigerinæ.
The 'Globigerina' of the Atlantic soundings is identical with that which occurs in the chalk; and the casts of lower silurian 'Foraminifera', which Ehrenberg has recently described, seem to indicate the existence at that remote period of forms singularly like those which now exist.
GLOBIGERINA OOZE. Beyond the reach of waste from the land the bottom of the deep sea is carpeted for the most part with either chalky ooze or a fine red clay. The surface waters of the warm seas swarm with minute and lowly animals belonging to the order of the Foraminifera, which secrete shells of carbonate of lime.
The Globigerina of the present day, for example, is not different specifically from that of the chalk; and the same may be said of many other Foraminifera. The longest line of human ancestry must hide its diminished head before the pedigree of this insignificant shell-fish. We Englishmen are proud to have an ancestor who was present at the Battle of Hastings.
The Mid-Atlantic swarms with pelagic Mollusca, and, in moderate depths, the shells of these are constantly mixed with the Globigerina ooze, sometimes in number sufficient to make up a considerable portion of its bulk. It is clear that these shells must fall in equal numbers upon the red clay, but scarcely a trace of one of them is ever brought up by the dredge on the red clay area.
They have neither mouth nor stomach, eyes nor limbs. They are mere live bags full of jelly, which can take almost any shape they like, and thrust out arms or what serve for arms through the holes in their shells, and then contract them into themselves again, as this Globigerina does.
This soft substance is, in fact, the remains of the creature to which the Globigerina shell, or rather skeleton, owes its existence and which is an animal of the simplest imaginable description.
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