I conceive [wrote Huxley] that the granulate heaps and the transparent gelatinous matter in which they are embedded represent masses of protoplasm.  Take away the cysts which characterize the Radiolaria, and a dead Sphaerozoum would very nearly represent one of this deep-sea “Urschleim,” which must, I think, be regarded as a new form of those simple animated beings which have recently been so well described by Haeckel in his Monographie der Moneras.

So it received the name of Bathybius Haeckelii.

The explanation was plausible enough, if the evidence had been all that it seemed to be.  But the specimens examined by himself and by Haeckel, who two years later published a full and detailed description of Bathybius, were seen only in a preserved state.  It was dredged up again on the voyage of the Porcupine and examined in a fresh state by Sir Wyville Thomson and Dr. W.B.  Carpenter, but they found no better explanation to give of it.  Doubt only arose when, in 1879, the Challenger expedition failed to find it very widely distributed, as expected, over the sea bottom; and the behaviour of certain specimens gave good ground for suspecting that what had been sent home before as genuine deep-sea mud was a precipitate due to the action on the specimens of the spirit in which they were preserved.  Though Haeckel—­his large experience of Monera fortified by the discovery of a close parallel near Greenland in 1876—­would not desert Bathybius, the rest of its sponsors gave it up.  The evidence in this particular case was tainted.  At the meeting of the British Association in 1879 Huxley came forward and took occasion to “eat the leek” in a speech as witty as it was candid.

Now, Bathybius had often been pointed to as an example of almost primordial life, from which the evolutionary chain might have begun; and later controversialists, not acquainted with the precise limitations of the matter, seized upon the Bathybius recantation as a convenient stick with which to beat the Darwinian dog.  To the most noteworthy case of this, eleven years later, Huxley retorted:—­

That which interested me in the matter was the apparent analogy of Bathybius with other well-known forms of lower life....  Speculative hopes or fears had nothing to do with the matter, and if Bathybius were brought up alive from the bottom of the Atlantic to-morrow the fact would not have the slightest bearing that I can discern upon Mr. Darwin’s speculations, or upon any of the disputed problems of biology.

As to the eating of the leek, he had commended it many a long year before to an over-impetuous German friend who had read enough Shakespeare to understand the meaning of the phrase:—­

Well, every honest man has to do that now and then, and I assure you that, if eaten fairly and without grimaces, the devouring of that herb has a very wholesome cooling effect on the blood, particularly in people of a sanguine temperament.

Reflections on making mistakes lead to a striking conclusion:—­