Page:Weird Tales v15n01 1930-01.djvu/63

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.

The opinion of a great mass of biologists was curtly summed up late in that afternoon by Professor Theodore McMaster, biologist-in-chief of one of the great Massachusetts universities. "While Dr. Barr is undoubtedly right in assuming that great quantities of protoplasm have in some way appeared in all earth's seas," he stated, "his theory that those masses have formed suddenly out of the sea's inorganic elements is, with all respect, a crazy one. It is true that in the earth's youth such great protoplasmic masses did form thus from the elements of sea-silt, but we know that their process of formation, their change from inorganic to organic living matter, required eons in itself to complete, so slow was it. This hypothesis, therefore, that the same great process has taken place on a world-wide scale within a day or so is patently absurd. My own theory is that great masses of protoplasm have existed from the remote past on the sea's floor, and that some subterranean or submarine convulsion has thrown them up to be scattered by the tides upon all earth's coasts."

This new theory, it must be admitted, found much greater support in biological circles than the more radical one of Dr. Barr, but it was roundly criticized by the latter. The presence of protoplasm in great masses on the sea's floor, he pointed out, had never been detected by any of the great oceanographic expeditions of the past, and the stupid hypothesis of a submarine convulsion could hardly be held when there was no slightest seismographic evidence of such a convulsion having taken place within the last weeks. Dr. Barr was supported in these criticisms by a number of fellow biologists, and so acrid had become the exchange of opinions by the next day, the 27th, that one of the great scientific societies, the World Science Association, stepped in. It proposed to settle the question of the phenomenon's causes to the satisfaction of public and scientists alike by appointing a committee of research to investigate it, to be headed by Dr. Herbert Munson of the Starford Foundation, the most noted biologist of the day.

This was a proposition acceptable to all, for the cold, massive Dr. Munson's competence and scientific impartiality were unquestioned. The World Science Association found, however, to its disappointment, that the brilliant biologist had been absent from the Starford Foundation for some months. He had established a