Page:Weird Tales v15n01 1930-01.djvu/62

ports of mildly interesting incidents. The phenomenon was unusual, certainly, but hardly enough so to merit any special attention. This was evidenced by the small space given the matter by the New York newspapers on that same evening, most of them according it but a few inconspicuous lines; though one went so far as to publish a photograph of the curious onlookers who had gathered to watch the glistening scum of the stuff, slowly moving and flexing a little now and then, that had been deposited on the Battery sea-wall. Save for these casually curious ones, though, and the disgusted bathers who found themselves barred by it from their favorite beaches, it can not be said that any portion of the public, even in such seaside cities as New York, gave the advent of the glistening gray stuff any consideration on that afternoon and evening. It was not until the newspapers of the following morning, the 26th, published their later dispatches on the phenomenon that the world, or the scientific world at least, began to awake to its extraordinary nature.

Those dispatches converted the matter from a mere unusual incident into something like a minor sensation. For, according to them, the deposits of glistening gray slime had been left by the tides not only along the Atlantic coast but along the Pacific also, and not only along American shores but upon those of Europe and Asia and Africa, upon all the shores of all earth's seas, in fact. Upon the jungle-bordered beaches of the Philippines, and the cold gray Norwegian shores, and the shelving sands of the Chilean coast, and the rocky cliffs of England, the retreating tides had left the same thick coatings of jelly-like, living slime. The phenomenon, whatever its cause, was world-wide, as those morning dispatches showed, and because of that world-wide scope was accorded a greatly increased space by the majority of that morning's newspapers, seeming extraordinary enough to call for greater attention. And even more extraordinary was it made, later in that day, by the Barr-McMasters controversy concerning it, that acrid dispute of scientists about the phenomenon's causes that stirred even the public into a somewhat greater interest in it.

The controversy was precipitated, with surprizing abruptness, by the statement made by Dr. Almeric Barr early on the 26th. It was toward Dr. Barr, whose reputation among contemporary biologists was exceeded only by that of the brilliant Dr. Herbert Munson of the Starford Foundation, that the puzzled newspapers had turned when the glistening deposits had first appeared at New York. They had brought him samples of the stuff, asking his opinion of it, and his curiosity had been so stirred that he had undertaken an analysis of it. It had proved, apparently, an interesting enough analysis, for it was not until the next day that he had given to the waiting journals any summary of it. When that summary was published, though, appearing in the noon editions of that day's papers, it proved a startling one.

The glistening deposits, Dr. Barr stated, were nothing more nor less that 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