From T. G. Bonney   5 February 1882

My dear Sir

I am greatly obliged to you for the trouble which you have taken in writing to me on the subject of the statement in Science¹   Either D^r Hahn or the writer of that paragraph, is as I suspect, a person of vivid imagination and inaccurate habits— I disbelieved it when I read it from à priori reasons, but in contradicting a statement one likes to have something better than one’s own conception of the possible or impossible in another person—²

I saw a few of Dr Hahns slides but did not look at many because I saw enough to perceive it would be a waste of time, as he clearly could not distinguish between mineral and organic structures. Such as I saw were not unfamiliar to me as a microscopic petrologist and very different to those organic structures with which occasional work with foraminifera and their slices of sedimentary rocks had acquainted me.³

As regards Eozoon, though I admit the question is not without its difficulties, I think the evidence in favour of its being an organic structure is rather strong—⁴ The particular direction my researches have taken have made me very familiar with olivine rock serpentine, devitrified glassy rocks, and many kinds of metamorphic sedimentary rocks, and I have very rarely seen structures at all parallel.⁵ The structure most nearly and commonly paralleled is the ‘nummuline layer’ of the ‘proper wall’—⁶ I have occasionally seen structures something like—though the resemblance is but distant—to the canal system—and of course one has sometimes rocks irregularly banded with more than one mineral

Now there seem to me two strong arguements in favour of the organic origin— One. that Carpenter Dawson &c positively assert that you have the ‘canal system’ sometimes preserved by infiltration with more than one mineral (in one case with three) I have seen nothing like this in a mineral imitative structure, and it seems to me most improbable that it can occur except in an organism—⁷ The other: that supposing you get to some minerals or rocks—a sort of chamber like banding— in others occasionally (but seldom) something like the nummuline layer, in others (very rarely) a rude approximation to the canal system— the chance of these three structures being found, and rather persistently, in a large mass of rock is extremely small, unless, seeing they do meet in certain organisms, the specimen has had an organic origin.—

Still I think that it is more prudent to wait for further evidence before building any theories on Eozoon as a foundation—

With many thanks for your kindness in writing | I am Dear Sir | Very faithfully yours | J. G Bonney