Professor Huxley succeeded in separating these bodies from the mass of granules in which they were embedded, and by examining them apart, he has ascertained still more fully their exact structure and composition. “Each one of them,” he says, “is a beautifully constructed calcareous fabric, made up of a number of chambers communicating freely with one another. They are of various forms. One of the commonest is something like a badly-grown raspberry, being formed of a number of nearly globular chambers of different sizes congregated together. It is called Globigerina; and some specimens of Chalk consist of little else than Globigerinæ and granules.” Previous to 1857 the Globigerinæ of the Chalk were a matter of no small controversy among Geologists and Naturalists. Some contended that they were the organic remains--the shells or skeletons--of ancient animalcules. Others were disposed to regard them simply as aggregations of lime, which, so to speak, chanced to assume the form of these little chambered bodies; though it was not easy to explain, on this hypothesis, how these chance concretions, however much they varied in size, preserved over the whole of Europe the same exact form and structure. But the controversy is now at an end. The specimens of the Atlantic ooze brought home by Captain Dayman, when examined under the higher powers of the Microscope, are found, like Chalk, to be composed almost entirely of Globigerinæ. And that no doubt may remain as to their organic origin, a portion of the fleshy integument of the little animalcules is seen, in many cases, still adhering to the calcareous skeleton. “Globigerinæ of every size,” we are told, “from the smallest to the largest, are associated together in the Atlantic mud, and the chambers of many are filled by a soft animal matter. This soft substance is, in fact, the remains of the creature to which the Globigerina shell, or rather skeleton, owes its existence--and which is an animal of the simplest imaginable description. It is, in fact, a mere particle of living jelly, without defined parts of any kind--without a mouth, nerves, muscles, or distinct organs; and only manifesting its vitality to ordinary observation by thrusting out and retracting, from all parts of its surface, long filamentous processes which serve for arms and legs. Yet this amorphous particle, devoid of everything which, in the higher animals we call organs, is capable of feeding, growing, and multiplying; of separating from the ocean the small proportion of carbonate of lime which is dissolved in sea-water; and of building up that substance into a skeleton for itself, according to a pattern which can be imitated by no other known agency.”