The Express.
London, England, 1868-08-25 00:00:00

TIIN BRITISH ASSOCIATION.

NORWICH. MONDAY.
The sections re-assembled at the usual places
this morning.

SECTION D.-1110LOOY DIPAITYENT OF ZOOLOGY AND
BOTANY.

This department met in the Friends' Meeting-house, the
Rev. J. M. Baccarat, M.A., presiding.
Professor HUXLEY read a paper on some organisms
which live at the bottom of the North Atlantic, in depths
of 6,000 feet to 16,000 feet. He said he had no doubt they
were aU acquainted with the subject os the Atlantic cable,
which lay over 1,700 miles of sea bottom, extending from
the west coast of Ireland to Newfoundland. In 1857 a
plan for laying that cable was first taking a thoroughly
practical shape. Our government had at that time been
moved by representations made to them to have the sea
bottom throughout that extent carefully examined, forthe
purpose of finding out whether there wore any impedi-
ments to the safe lodgment of the cable at the bottom of
the sin. Very various opinions were held on the subject,
and many persons maintained that there were great rocks
which would catch or cut the cable. The Admiralty de-
tputehed the Bulldog steam-vessel, under the command of
Captain Dayman, who was supplied with an inge-
nious apparatus, by means of which larger or
smaller portions of the sea bottom could be brought
bodily up from any depth at which soundings
could be made. Captain Dayman made his sound-
ings, and brought back his specimens of the sea bottom,
and the Admiralty sent the whole of the soundings to him
(Professor Huxley) for examination. ' They wore ex-
tremely interesting, as they for the first time supplied the
means of ascertaining what was the precise nature of the
mud which covered the bottom of the sea. He should speak
only of the soundings brought from a depth of from 1,000
to 2,400 or 2,500 fathoms, or from 6,000 to 15,000 feet.
The depth of the Atlantic was such, that in the deepest
part of it if Mont Blanc was sunk. the top would be
covered, and he had specimens of the bottom from that
depth. It became his business to report on these sound-
ings, and report of their nature ; and he stated in his
report that the deposits consisted of minute round bodies,
to all appearance consisting of several concretic layers,
surrounding a clear centre. As these bodies were rapidly
dissolved by dilute acids he thought at that time that they
could not be organic. That, however, he found
on more minute and careful investigation to be
an imperfect statement of the facts of the case.
The largest of them was the 16-100 of an inch in diameter,
and he had not examined them at first with a sufficient
power. Three or four years afterwards Dr. Warwick
printed his " Notes on the Existence of Organic Bodies at
great Depths in the Sea." He discovered what he called
cocoepheres, which he thought looked extremely like as
if they were made up of a number of what he (Professor
Huxley). had called cooolites set side by side in a kind
of mosaic. In 1861 Dr. Warwick publishedanother paper,
in which he stated that the cocolites were identical with
minute bodies which had been discovered in chalk by
Mr. Swaby, who was the first person to point out this in-
teresting circumstance. In the same year Mr. Swaby
got a step further, and found that these bodies—which he
(Professor Huxley) had called cocolites, from their being
concretionary if they were turned round, no easy matter
with so minute an object—were concave—such things
as might be cut out of a hollow sphere of glass that they
were, in fact, like thick watch glasses; and be showed
that they could not be concretious—that is, that they
could not be of animal nature. He (Professor Huxley)
re-examined the specimens of deep sea soundings, by app--
bad
plying to them a muchdregif power than he
bad used before. He mightion that all persona who
had been concerned inup Atlantic mud spoke
of it as being a wonderfully tenacious and sticky
substance. He found it to contain an immense number
of minute shells, and of an enormous number of little,
irregular pellets of jelly, dotted all over. It was to the
dotted pellets he desired to draw attention. On applying
a power of 1,200 diameters, they could be analysed and
resolved pretty well. In each of the peUets would be
found a great number of granules scattered about, each
being the 40,000 th to the 20,000 th of an inch. These he
found were all organic particle!, yielding, as they did, to
all the changes to which organic bodies yielded when the
materials were applied to them. The average
proper
of each heap of granules was the 12-100th of an
inch, and each represented a mass actually living at the
depth of the sea, and developed in its slime. So that,
intermixed amongst the shell, there was an immense body
of jelly, which contained the bodies of the simplest kinds
of organisms, each representing a kind of spicule of
primitive organism. The fact that those bodies existed at
the depths he had stated was beyond dispute, so that the
depths of the sea contained those living organisms from
which old philosophers held that all things proceeded.
And some persons were coming round to that opinion again.
(Laughter.) For his part he expressed no opinion as to
whether they, were plants or animals. They were,
perhaps, the simplest representatives of that common
ground between plants and animals as to which so much
was said in the present day. (Applause.)
A vote of thanks was passed to the learned professor
for his paper.