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He showed that they were capable not only of surviving the death of the Radiolarian, but even of multipying, and of passing through an encysted and an amoeboid state, and urged their mode of development and the great variability of their numbers within the same species as further evidence of his view.
Every one knows that all the colorless cells of a plant share the starch formed by the green cells; and it seems impossible to doubt that the endoderm cell or the Radiolarian, which actually incloses the vegetable cell, must similarly profit by its labors.
"That mud," he said, "was dredged up from the bottom of the ocean, and every particle of it is the shell of a radiolarian." "Impossible," said Haeckel. "Yet true," replied Murray, "as the microscope will soon prove to you."
The silicious particles which constitute this mud, are derived, in part, from the diatomaceous plants and radiolarian animals which throng the surface, and, in part, from the spicula of sponges which live at the bottom.
To him a radiolarian, or any other creature, is of interest, not so much on its own account as for its associations. He sees it not as an individual but as a link in the scale of organic things, as the bearer of a certain message of world-history. Thus the radiolarians, insignificant creatures though they seem, have really taken an extraordinary share in building up the crust of the earth.
For this reason it was that Professor Murray, the naturalist of the famous expedition which the British government sent around the world in the ship Challenger, asked Haeckel to work up the radiolarian material that had been gathered during that voyage. Murray showed Haeckel a little bottle containing water, with a deposit of seeming clay or mud in the bottom.
Brandt, of Berlin, although failing to confirm Haeckel's observations as to the presence of starch, has completely corroborated the main discovery of Cienkowski, since he finds the yellow cells to survive for no less than two months after the death of the Radiolarian, and even to continue to live in the gelatinous investment from which the protoplasm had long departed in the form of swarm-spores.
In 1871 a very remarkable contribution to our knowledge of the Radiolarians was published by Cienkowski, who strongly expressed the opinion that these yellow cells were parasitic algae, pointing out that our only evidence of their Radiolarian nature was furnished by their constant occurrence in most members of the group.
The next important work was that of Richard Hertwig, who inclined to think that these cells sometimes developed from the protoplasm of the Radiolarian, and failing to verify the observations of Cienkowski, maintained the opinion of Haeckel that the yellow cells "fur den Stoffwechsel der Radiolarien von Bedeutung sind."
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