"NONE of the processes of Nature, since the time when Nature began, have produced the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule. We are, therefore, unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules, or the identity of their properties, to the operation of any of the causes which we call natural. The quality of each molecule gives it the essential character of a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent." - PROFESSOR CLERK MAXWELL, "Lecture delivered before the British Association at Bradford," in Nature, vol. viii. p. 441.

"THERE is a wider teleology which is not touched by the doctrine of evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of evolution. The teleological and the mechanical views of Nature are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The teleologist can always defy the evolutionist to disprove that the primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the phenomena of the universe." - PROFESSOR T. H. HUXLEY in The Academy for October, 1869, No. 1, p. 13.

IN 1868 Professor Huxley, in an elaborate paper in the Microscopical Journal, announced his belief that the gelatinous substance found in the ooze of the beds of the deep seas is a sheet of living matter extending around the globe. The stickiness of the deep-sea mud, he maintained, is due to innumerable lumps of a transparent, jelly-like substance, each lump consisting of granules, coccoliths, and foreign bodies, embedded in a transparent, colorless, and structureless matrix. It was his serious claim that these granule-heaps, and the transparent gelatinous matter in which they are embedded, represent masses of protoplasm.

1. To this amazingly strategic and haughtily trumpeted substance found at the lowest bottoms of the oceans Huxley gave the scientific name Bathybius, from two Greek words meaning deep

and sea, and assumed that it was in the past, and would be in the future, the progenitor of all the life on the planet. "Bathybius," was his language, "is a vast sheet of living matter enveloping the whole earth beneath the seas."

2. No less a man than David Friedrich Strauss, who, in 1872, wrote "The Old Faith and New," his last work, used Bathybius as a presumably triumphant keystone of the physiological portion of his argument against the belief in the supernatural (The Old Faith and New, sect. 48). This deep-sea ooze he made the bridge between the inorganic and the organic. "At least two, miracles or revelations," wrote Jean Paul Richter, face to face with the French Revolution, "remain for you uncontested in this age, which deadens sound with unreverberating materials. They resemble an Old and a New Testament, and are these, the birth of finite being and the birth of life within the hard wood of matter. In one inexplicable every other is involved, and one miracle annihilates a whole philosophy" (Levana, sect. 38). It is very noteworthy, that, according to Strauss's own final admission in 1872, miracle must be confessed to have occurred once at least at the introduction of life, unless some method of filling up the chasm between the dead and the living forms of matter can be found. Bathybius was to occupy this gap. "Huxley," wrote Strauss, "has discovered the Bathybius, a shining heap of jelly on the seabottom; Häckel, what he has called the Moneres, structureless clots of an albuminous carbon, which,

although inorganic in their constitution, yet are all capable of nutrition and accretion. By these the chasm may be said to be bridged, and the transition effected from the inorganic to the organic. As long as the contrast between inorganic and organic, lifeless and living nature, was understood as an absolute one, as long as the conception of a special vital force was retained, there was no possibility of spanning the chasm without the aid of a miracle" (The Old Faith and New, sect. 48). As devout believers in Bathybius, educated men Strauss affirmed in the name of

what he mistook for German culture could no longer be Christians. Bathybius had expelled miracle. Thus in 1868 and 1873 Bathybius was the watchword of the acutest anti-supernaturalistic discussions, and was adopted as a victorious weapon by Strauss, when, with his dying-hand, he was using his last opportunity to equip his philosophy with armor. Men have trembled before Strauss's negation of the supernatural. Bathybius was his chief support of that denial. Huxley called his discovery Bathybius Häckelii. Ernst Häckel, well knowing what stupendous issues were at stake, elaborately applauded the discovery.

3. Great microscopists and physiologists, like Professor Lionel Beale and Dr. Carpenter, rejected Huxley's testimony on this matter of fact. Dr. Wallich, in 1869, in the Monthly Microscopical Journal, presented evidence that the deep-sea ooze has nothing in it to conârm Huxley's views. The ship Challenger, engaged now in deep-sea soundings, has accu

mulated evidence of the same sort; and at present Bathybius is a scientific myth and a by-word of derision. "Bathybius," says Professor Lionel Beale in his work on "Protoplasm" (London, 1874, pp. 110, 368, 371), which the North British Review well calls one of the most remarkable books of the age, "instead of being a widely-extending sheet of living protoplasm, which grows at the expense of inorganic elements, is rather to be regarded as a complex mass of slime, with many foreign bodies and the débris of living organisms which have passed away. Numerous minute living forms are, however, still found upon it." At the meeting of the German Naturalists' Association at Hamburg, in September, 1876, Bathybius was publicly interred. It was my fortune to converse for a while, lately, with Professor Dana of Yale College, when I put to him the question, "Does Bathybius bear the microscope?" He replied, "You know, that, in a late number of The American Journal of Science and Arts,' Huxley has withdrawn his adhesion to his theory about Bathybius." Thus the ship Challenger has challenged the assertion with which Strauss challenged the world; and Huxley himself has left Bathybius to take its place with other ghosts of not blessed memory in the history of hasty speculation.

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4. Nevertheless, in his New-York definition of the doctrine of evolution, Professor. Huxley speaks of a gelatinous mass, which, so far as our present knowledge goes, is the common foundation of all life." As, by his own confession, no such gelatinous mass