Читать книгу Intelligence in Plants and Animals онлайн

42 страница из 113

In addition to organs of locomotion Star-fishes possess blood-vessels, digestive and respiratory apparatus, and a nervous system of a very low order, an inference to which its seeming capacity of enduring vivisection without pain unmistakably leads.

Interesting as its manner of progression, even under the most trying circumstances, must be, yet there is nothing in the life of this lowly-organized animal that has half the charm to the true lover and student of nature than the mother Star’s devotion to her young. Her eggs she carries in little pouches placed at the base of the rays. When emitted through an opening, which occasionally and unintentionally occurs, the mother does not abandon them to the cruel charities of the ocean world, but gathers them together, forming a kind of protecting cover of them, very much like a hen brooding over her chickens. Her actions bespeak an anxiety which could only be born of an affection, as real and sympathetic as that which a human mother feels for the loss of any of her offspring. No matter how often the eggs become accidentally scattered, the mother does not grow weary of her charges and leave them to themselves, but gathers them to the maternal fold with the same tender, patient solicitude as characterized her first efforts. Confined to a tank, when with ova, the mother Star has been known to traverse the entire length of the vessel until she has found and recovered her scattered treasures.