United States or Western Sahara ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
All our later ancestors are complex organisms, or individualities of a higher order social aggregations of a plurality of cells. The earliest of these, the Moraeada, which represent the third stage in our genealogy, are very simple associations of homogeneous, indifferent cells undifferentiated colonies of social Amoebae or Infusoria.
As these two young amoebae lie side by side under the microscope the thoughtful student will inquire what has become of the parent organism? Whereas at first there was one mature amoeba, now we have before us two young amoebae of the next succeeding generation. The parent organism has sacrificed its substance and its individuality absolutely and completely for the next generation.
And, in order to understand every thing from the beginning, you must look through microscopes at the movements of amoebae, and cells in worms, or, with still greater composure, believe in every thing that men with a diploma of infallibility shall say to you about them.
Let us now return to our insects. If I am to believe the evolutionists, the various game-hunting Wasps are descended from a small number of types, which are themselves derived, by an incalculable number of concatenations, from a few amoebae, a few monera and lastly from the first clot of protoplasm which was casually condensed.
With this we reach the lowest of the solid data to which we are to apply our biogenetic law, and by which we may deduce the extinct ancestor from the embryonic form. But the further question now arises: "Whence came these first amoebae with which the history of life began at the commencement of the Laurentian epoch?" There is only one answer to this.
Mr. Worcester took along for the whole party an ingenious apparatus of his own contrivance for boiling drinking-water, as all streams in the Philippines at a level lower than 6,000 feet have been found to contain amoebae, the parasitic presence of which in the intestines produces that frightful disease, amoebic dysentery.
The plant-branch begins with the sea-weeds, and passes on to the fungi, lichens, mosses, ferns, pines and palm-ferns, grasses, etc., then to the trees, shrubs and herbs. The animal-branch begins with the monera, or single-cell forms, which are little more than a drop of sticky, glue-like protoplasm. Then it passes on to the amoebae, which begins to show a slight difference in its parts.
Large unicellular organisms like the Amoebae were found creeping about inside the body of the sponge, and were thought to be parasites. It was afterwards discovered that they were really the ova of the sponge from which the embryos were developed.
The tiny Protamoebae, which are found both in fresh and salt water, have the same unshapely form and irregular movements of their simple naked body as the real Amoebae; but they differ from them very materially in having no nucleus in their cell-body.
As a matter of fact, these sponge-ova are so much like many of the Amoebae in size, shape, the character of their nucleus, and movement of the pseudopodia, that it is impossible to distinguish them without knowing their subsequent development.
Word Of The Day