Origins of Ooze-Part Three

Here's another long one, but just remember: we're going back billions of years here.

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Primordial ooze, primordial slime, and primordial soup have become accepted terms and accepted concepts, even though they describe something that no one has ever observed in nature nor created or recreated in a laboratory. Like the ether of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these concepts are based on lots of assumptions, furthermore in the absence of any evidence or any real knowledge regarding a persistent and nagging scientific problem. In the case of ether, the problem involved the propagation of electromagnetic waves through space. In the case of primordial ooze, the problem has to do with the origins of life on earth. Nobody of a scientific mind seems to question the idea that life here originated in ooze. A belief in its existence would appear dogmatic.

So what are the origins of ooze? Well, the earliest use of the expression "primordial ooze" that I have found in American newspapers is from November 9, 1899, in reference to Sir John Murray's explorations of the ocean floor on board the HMS Challenger. (Sir John Murray, 1841-1914.) The article I found (in the first of its many appearances in stateside papers) is "Floor of the Sea" in the Washington, D.C., Beacon. In its original, the article was in the London Spectator and was written by F.T. Bullen. Bullen's article treats "primordial ooze" as if knowledge of the concept was common. Evidently, even in 1899, it had been around for a while. Murray is considered the father of oceanography. He has an octopus named after him, Cirrothauma murrayi, thus he has connections both to cephalopods and slime. If you're an oceanographer, you'll have that.

The earliest occurrence of "primordial slime" that I have found is in a review of a scientific article called "Bathybius and the Moneres" [sic] by Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) in Popular Science Monthly, October 1877. The review, entitled simply "Periodicals," is in the Boston Evening Transcript, October 4, 1877, page 6. In it, reference is made to Haeckel's discovery of a "peculiar slimy substance" on the Mediterranean seafloor. Haeckel called this substance Bathybius or "The Primordial Slime of the Sea Depths." It was supposed to have been a substance that was giving rise, even in contemporary times, to life.

Mention of "Bathybius and the Moneres" leads to the article itself, entitled "Bathybius and the Moners." (I'm not sure which is the correct spelling, but even in Haeckel's article, "moneres" is the spelling used.) In that article, there is more talk of slime, ooze, Bathybius-ooze, and even amoebas. There is also an organism called Vampyrella, though I doubt it's the one with which we're familiar. Again, check the spelling.

The concept of Bathybius was older even than Haeckel's article. The stuff was supposed to have been brought up from the ocean floor during the deep-sea soundings made for the laying of the transatlantic cable in 1857. (Remember that part.) In 1868-1870, Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) and Haeckel went back and forth in some excitement to claim that Bathybius: a) was a type of protoplasm; b) covered the ocean floor; c) was constantly coming into being; and d) was a link between life and non-life. Scientists on board the Challenger blew lots of really big, Fearless Fosdick-sized holes in those claims. Huxley admitted his error in 1879. A poem in Punch from 1879 (see below) poked fun at the concept of Bathybius. Yet there were still people who believed in it or at least failed to question it.

To wit:

The earliest reference to "primordial soup" in an American newspaper that I have found is, surprisingly, from 1960. And guess who referred to it? Twenty-five-year-old Dr. Carl E. Sagan (1934-1996) of Yerkes Observatory, that's who! In "Life on Jupiter, Astronomer Says" (Oakland Tribune, May 11, 1960, page 11), journalist Tom Riley wrote of how Dr. Sagan had "suggested that a process of organic synthesis is going on over Jupiter's surface in much the same way as the primordial soup of earth evolved millions of years ago." Dr. Sagan famously said later that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. So where was the proof of organic synthesis, either on Jupiter or on the primordial earth? To paraphrase a well-known bandito: Proof? We don't need no stinking proof! When it comes to the abiogenesis of life, the message is clear: We have faith! No evidence is needed!

By the way, H.G. Wells (1866-1946) studied biology under Thomas Huxley, and so maybe we have a line of descent for the concept of primordial ooze, from Huxley and Haeckel to Wells . . . thence to Anthony M. Rud? And from him, to lots of other creators of slime creatures, ooze monsters, and things that arise from muck, mire, and the swamplands of the earth? I can't say for sure, but I'm getting ahead of myself in any case.

In his article of October 1877, Ernst Haeckel wrote:

With this formless primordial organism of the simplest kind, which, occurring in thousands of millions, covers the sea-bottom with a living layer of slime, a new light seemed to be thrown upon one of the most difficult and most obscure problems of the history of creation--namely, the question of the origin of life upon the earth. With Bathybius, the ill-famed "Urschleim" (primordial slime) appeared to have been found, of which it had been prophetically affirmed, fifty years before, by Oken, that from it was sprung the whole world of organisms, and that this "Urschleim" itself had sprung from inorganic matter at the sea-bottom in the course of planetary development.

At last (I think) we have arrived at the origins of ooze. And they are evidently in the work of another German, a natural philosopher called Lorenz Oken (1779-1851), who wrote, in 1805:

[A]ll organic beings originate from and consist of vesicles or cells. These vesicles, when singly detached and regarded in their original process of production, are the infusorial mass or protoplasma (urschleim) whence all larger organisms fashion themselves or are evolved.

So, in the beginning there was urschleim, the first slime, the slime that is life and from which all life arises in the form of cells of protoplasm, which bind themselves to each other to form ever-higher forms through some unexplained process of genesis and evolution. And now here we are: we came out of slime, we are made of slime, and each of us carries within him or her an ocean floor, a tidal pool, a warm little pond, a swamp.

Thirteen years after Oken wrote came these words:

With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. 

They're from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1797-1851).

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From Oken to Huxley and Haeckel to H.G. Wells, ooze, blobs, jellies, and slime found their home in the oceans, either on the ocean floor or in tidal pools. "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud is set in the piney woods and swamplands of southern Alabama. In his account of what happened at Cranmer's lodge, Rud's narrator uses ooze and similar words to refer mostly to the remnants of the scientist's giant amoeba, which perished in the enclosure that he had constructed for it after it had eaten his son, daughter-in-law, and manservant. Those remnants now lie in a disgusting, fishy-smelling residue over the grounds. But at least once, that narrator also seems to use ooze in reference to the substrate of the surrounding swampland. So, questions arise:

• Was Rud aware of the concept of primordial ooze or primordial slime as a putative source of life on earth?

• Did he move primordial ooze or primordial slime from the oceans onto land, specifically to the swamplands of the American South?

• If so, was he the first to do so? In other words, was Rud's giant amoeba the first science-fictional, weird-fictional, or pseudo-scientific swamp monster--that is, a monster that arises from the swamp--in American popular culture?

We should be clear here that Cranmer's giant amoeba didn't make itself. It did not arise spontaneously from swamp-ooze. Instead, the author Rud replaced spontaneous generation with a pseudo-scientific or science-fictional process: the amoeba was created by a super-scientist in his laboratory using rearrangement of its chromosomes.

Cranmer didn't mean to do what he had done. "Mine is the crime of presumption," he wrote in his final notebook entry. He aimed too high and because of that fell far. His science was Frankensteinian, but he was not like Dr. Frankenstein. Rud's narrator writes that John Corliss Cranmer "believed in both God and humankind." In fact it was not he, the scientist, who brought on disaster but his son, the writer, who did it. The father understood fully the danger posed by the amoeba. He instructed his son to destroy it. The son, though, was more ambitious, and more than a little foolish. He believed at some level that nature can be controlled. There is a phenomenon in the world of today of sons who lack the moral, physical, and intellectual development of their fathers. We see that all of the time. It may be an irreversible trend. The loss of the first of John Corliss Cranmer's twin beliefs might be the best explanation for that.

One more convention appears in "Ooze," that of the widowed scientist, only this one has a beautiful daughter-in-law rather than daughter. This isn't exactly hopeful science fiction though--in this case it's more like fateful weird fiction--and so they all die.

* * *

"In the womb of the world," an illustration for Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Deep-Sea Cables" drawn by William Heath Robinson; from A Song of the English (1909). That looks like ooze to me.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a near contemporary of H.G. Wells. It's safe to say that Kipling was an entirely different kind of man and artist than was Wells. Like Wells and the men who preceded him, Kipling knew about ooze and slime and the deep sea except that he wrote about these things from a nonscientific viewpoint rather than a scientific one. I don't want to sound like Garrison Keillor, but here's a poem for today by Kipling:

"The Deep-Sea Cables" (1896)
By Rudyard Kipling

The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar--
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great gray level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.

Here in the womb of the world--here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat--
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth--
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.

They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time;
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, "Let us be one!"

"The wrecks dissolve above us," by Robinson.

Here's another:

"In the Matter of One Compass" (1892)
By Rudyard Kipling

WHEN, foot to wheel and back to wind,
The helmsman dare not look behind,
But hears beyond his compass-light,
The blind bow thunder through the night,
And, like a harpstring ere it snaps,
The rigging sing beneath the caps;
  Above the shriek of storm in sail
    Or rattle of the blocks blown free,
  Set for the peace beyond the gale,
    This song the Needle sings the Sea:

Oh, drunken Wave! Oh, driving Cloud!
  Rage of the Deep and sterile Rain,
By Love upheld, by God allowed,
  We go, but we return again!

When leagued about the 'wildered boat
The rainbow Jellies fill and float,
And, lilting where the laver lingers,
The Starfish trips on all her fingers;
Where, 'neath his myriad spines ashock,
The Sea-egg ripples down the rock,
An orange wonder dimly guessed
From darkness where the Cuttles rest,
Moored o'er the darker deeps that hide
The blind white Sea-snake and his bride,
Who, drowsing, nose the long-lost Ships
Let down through darkness to their lips--
Safe-swung above the glassy death,
Hear what the constant Needle saith:

Oh, lisping Reef! Oh, listless Cloud,
  In slumber on a pulseless main!
By Love upheld, by God allowed,
  We go, but we return again!

E'en so through Tropic and through Trade,
  Awed by the shadow of new skies,
As we shall watch old planets fade
  And mark the stranger stars arise,
So, surely, back through Sun and Cloud,
  So, surely, from the outward main
By Love recalled, by God allowed,
  Shall we return--return again!
  Yea, we return--return again!

The first poem is easier for me to understand than the second, but both have imagery of the ocean and its benthic regions: ooze, slime, jellies, cuttlefish, "the blind white Sea-snake," and so on. If we consider one or both of these poems to be genre works, then we have some early examples of ooze and slime in such works.

To be continued . . .

Cirrothauma murrayi, an octopus named for Sir John Murray.

Finally, "Bathybius," a poem from Punch, reprinted in British newspapers in 1879.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley