The story begins with the laying of the first Atlantic cable in the sixties of the last century. It involves one of the most peculiar and fantastic errors ever committed in the name of science. It is useless to blame this error upon one man because many leading figures of the day participated in what was, and remains, one of the most curious cases of self-delusion ever indulged in by scholars. It was the product of an overconfident materialism, a vainglorious assumption that the secrets of life were about to be revealed.

Haeckel in Germany and Huxley in England were proceeding to show that as one passed below the stage of nucleated single-celled organisms one arrived at a simple stirring of the abyssal slime wherein something that was neither life nor non-life oozed and fed without cellular individuality.

This soft, gelatinous matter had been taken from the ocean bed during dredging operations. Examined and pronounced upon by Professor Huxley, it was given the name of Bathybius haeckelii in honor of his great German colleague. Speaking before the Royal Geographical Society in 1870, Huxley confidently maintained that Bathybius formed a living scum or film on the sea bed extending over thousands of square miles. Moreover, he expanded, it probably formed a continuous sheet of living matter girdling the whole surface of the earth.

Sir Charles Thomson shared this view, commenting that the “organism” showed “no trace of differentiation of organs” and consisted apparently “of an amorphous sheet of a protein compound, irritable to a low degree and capable of assimilating food … a diffused formless protoplasm.” Haeckel conceived of these formless “monera” as arising from non-living matter, their vital phenomena being traceable to “physicochemical causes.” Here was the “Urschleim” with a vengeance, the seething, unindividualized ooze whose potentialities included the butterfly and the rose. Man was mud and mud was man. Mechanism was the order of the day.

Unfortunately for this beautiful theory wistfully remembered by one writer as “explaining so much,” Bathybius proved to be what the microscopists call an artifact; that is, it did not exist. A certain unfeeling Mr. Buchanan of the Challenger Expedition discovered, as he tried to investigate the nature of Bathybius, that he could produce all the characters of that indescribable animal by the simple process of adding strong alcohol to sea water. It was not necessary to drink the potion. One simply examined a specimen under the lens and observed that sulphate of lime was precipitated in the form of a gelatinous ooze which clung around particles as though ingesting them, thus lending a superficial protoplasmic appearance to the solution.

Mr. Huxley’s original specimen had apparently been treated in this manner when it was sent to him. Huxley took the episode in good grace, but it was a severe blow to the materialists. The structureless protoplasmic “Urschleim” was a projective dream of scientists striving to build an evolutionary family tree upon existing organisms. Being nineteenth-century zoologists they unfortunately forgot the world of microscopic plant life, its basic position in the nourishment of living things, and the fact that it must have sunlight in order to perform its mysterious green miracles.

The abyss, it was now to be learned, whatever might roam its waters or slither wetly through its midnights, was not the original abode of life. If there was a past on the black plain far beneath us, if indeed the strange life of remote eras lingered there, it was not stacked with the layered neatness of geological strata as some oceanographers had imagined. The floating heads with their starveling bodies, the squid which emitted clouds of luminescent ink and vanished in their own bright explosions, were all a part of one of life’s strangest qualities—its eternal dissatisfaction with what is, its persistent habit of reaching out into new environments and, by degrees, adapting itself to the most fantastic circumstances.

Once long ago as a child I can remember removing the cover from an old well. I was alone at the time and I can still anticipate, with a slight crawling of my scalp, the sight I inadvertently saw as I peered over the brink and followed a shaft of sunlight many feet down into the darkness. It touched, just touched in passing, a rusty pipe which projected across the well space some twenty feet above the water. And there, secretive as that very underground whose mystery had lured me into this adventure, I saw, passing surely and unhurriedly into the darkness, a spidery thing of hair and many legs. I set the rotting cover of boards back into place with a shiver, but that unidentifiable creature of the well has stayed with me to this day.

For the first time I must have realized, I think, the frightening diversity of the living; something that did not love the sun was down there, something that could walk through total darkness upon slender footholds over evil waters, something that had come down there by preference from above. It was in this way that the oceanic abyss was entered: by preference from above. Life did not arise on the bottom; the muds of the deep waters did not compound it. Instead, with its own pale lanterns or with the delicate, strawlike feelers of blindness, it has groped its way down into the dark.