In this dredging, as in most others in the bed of the Atlantic, there was evidence of a considerable quantity of soft gelatinous organic matter, enough to give a slight viscosity to the mud of the surface-layer. This gelatinous matter is capable of a certain amount of movement, and there can be no doubt that it manifests the phenomena of a very simple form of life. To this organism, if a being can be so called which shows no trace of differentiation of organs, consisting apparently of an amorphous sheet of a protein compound, irritable to a low degree and capable of assimilating food, Professor Huxley has given the name of Bathybius haeckelii. The circumstance which gives its special interest to Bathybius is its enormous extent: whether it be continuous in one vast sheet, or broken up into circumscribed individual particles, it appears to extend over a large part of the bed of the ocean; and as no living thing, however slowly it may live, is ever perfectly at rest, but is continually acting and reacting with its surroundings, the bottom of the sea becomes like the surface of the sea and of the land--a theatre of change, performing its part in maintaining the “balance of organic nature.” Living upon and among this Bathybius, we find a multitude of other protozoa--foraminifera and other rhizopods, radiolarians, and sponges; and we as yet know very little of the life-history of these groups. Many foraminifera of different groups inhabit the deep water, lying upon or mixed in the upper layer of the globigerina ooze, or fixed to some foreign body, such as a sponge, coral, or stone; and all of these are remarkable for their large size. The few hauls of the dredge which we have already had in deep water have been enough to teach us that our knowledge of sponges is in its infancy--that those which we have collected from shallow water along our shores, and even those few which have been brought up from deep water on fishing lines, and have surprised us by the beauty of their forms and the delicacy of their lustre, are the mere margin and remnant of a wonderfully diversified sponge-fauna which appears to extend in endless variety over the whole of the bottom of the sea.