Читать книгу Intelligence in Plants and Animals онлайн

32 страница из 113

But what can these little slime specks tell us about the wonderful powers of life? Nothing at all, it would seem, for in these tiny creatures life has nothing better to work with than a mere drop of living matter, which is all alike throughout, so that if broken into a hundred pieces every piece would be as much a living being as the whole. And yet by means of the wonderful gift of life, with which the all-wise Omnipotence has endowed it, this slime-drop lives, and breathes, and eats, and increases, shrinks away when you touch it, feels for its food, and moves from place to place, changing its shape to form limbs and feeling-threads, which are let into the general organism when they have served the purpose of their existing, only to be succeeded by others as short-lived as themselves when necessity requires their development.

So small are these creatures that the largest specimen will be found to be smaller than the smallest pin’s head. Examine how we will, there will be found no mouth, no stomach, no muscles, no nerves, no parts of any kind. The animal looks merely like a minute drop of gum with fine grains diffused throughout, floating in the water, some times with outstretched arms, and at other times as a simple drop. An analysis of the matter of which it is composed shows it to be much the same as a speck of white-of-egg. Yet it is alive, for it breathes. Kept in a drop of water, it uses up the oxygen it contains, and renders the water foul by the carbonic acid it breathes out. The arms, so necessary in the procurement of food, can be drawn in and thrown out when and where the animal chooses, showing that some option is undoubtedly exercised in the matter. Minute jelly-plants, that live in the water, and even higher animals than itself, constitute its food. The presence of an animal with a shell does not deter it from attack, for it is just as able to deal with it as with the softer, shell-less kinds, sucking their jelly-like contents, and discarding the empty, innutritious shells.