The glistening deposits, Dr. Barr stated, were nothing more nor less than protoplasm, that gray, jelly-like stuff that is the primal life-substance, the basis of all life upon earth. Protoplasm itself, he explained, composed of an extremely complex mixture of organic compounds, had never been analyzed or even partly analyzed, and no more could these clear deposits be analyzed, but his investigation had proved without doubt that they were living protoplasm, and not the minute organisms that had been supposed. The appearance of these deposits on all earth's shores, he added, meant that great quantities of protoplasm had appeared in all earth's seas, and that could be explained in only one way. Protoplasm, the primal life-stuff, had appeared in earth's seas eons before, its complex compounds built by some force out of the elements of sea-silt and sea-water themselves. And if those protoplasmic masses had formed spontaneously out of the sea's elements eons before, giving rise eventually to all earth's life, it could only be supposed that similar great protoplasmic masses had now suddenly formed again in earth's seas in the same way as in the remote past. That first report of Dr. Barr's, though puzzling enough to a newspaper reading public but little interested in talk of organic and inorganic compounds, proved a sensation in the scientific and especially in the biological world. The New York biologist's classification of the clear, jelly-like deposits as protoplasm was, it was admitted, correct; since by that time scientists in laboratories at London and Stockholm and Sydney had confirmed independently the fact that the glistening gray stuff was indeed the basic life-substance of earth. What was not admitted, though, and what swiftly became the center of as fiery a scientific controversy as could be recalled, was his contention that the great masses of protoplasm which had apparently appeared throughout the seas had been formed spontaneously from the sea's inorganic elements, as in the remote past. That contention, within hours of the time his statement was published, became a veritable storm-center of conflicting scientific opinion.