the preservative liquid (alcohol), forming a gelatinous ooze which clung to particles as if ingesting them. Buchanan suspected that all the Bathybius samples had been prepared the same way and notified Sir Charles Thomson, now the leader of the expedition. Thomson sent a polite letter to Huxley and told about the discovery. Huxley realized that he had been too eager and made a mistake. He published part of the letter in Nature and recanted his previous views. Later, during the 1879 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he stated that he was ultimately responsible for spreading the theory and convincing others. Most biologists accepted this acknowledgement of error. Haeckel, however, did not want to abandon the idea of Bathybius because it was so close to proof of his own theories about Urschleim. He claimed without foundation that Bathybius "had been observed" in the Atlantic. Haeckel drew a series of pictures of the evolution of his Urschleim, supposedly based on observations. He continued to support this position until 1883. Huxley's rival George Charles Wallich claimed that Huxley had committed deliberate fraud and also accused Haeckel of falsifying data. Other opponents of evolution, including George Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll, tried to use the case as an argument against evolution. The entire affair was a blow to the evolutionary cause, who had posited it as their long-sought evolutionary origin of life from nonliving chemistry by natural processes, without the necessity of divine intervention. In retrospect, their error was in dismissing the necessary role of photosynthesis in supporting the entire food chain of life; and the corresponding requirement for sunlight, abundant at the surface, but absent on the ocean floor. References Notes External links History of evolutionary biology