United States or Mauritania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When the vibrio encounters an obstacle it turns, or after assuring itself by some visual effort or other that it cannot overcome it, it retraces its steps. The colpoda undoubted infusoria behave in an exactly similar manner.
The body consists of a soft granular protoplasmic substance, the middle of which is occupied by a large oval mass called the "nucleus"; while, at its hinder end, is a "contractile vacuole," conspicuous by its regular rhythmic appearances and disappearances. Obviously, although the Colpoda is not a monad, it differs from one only in subordinate details.
We there demonstrated that, when we place in water some of the dust formed of desiccated vibrios, containing a host of these refractive corpuscles, in the course of a very few hours large vibrios appear, well-developed rods fully grown, in which the brilliant points are absent; whilst in the water no process of development from smaller vibrios is to be discerned, a fact which seems to show that the former had issued fully grown from the refractive corpuscles, just as we see colpoda issue with their adult aspect from the dust of their cysts.
And if this were not sufficient evidence of the animality of Colpoda, there comes the fact that it is even more similar to another well-known animalcule, Paramoecium, than it is to a monad.
Numerous forms of such animals have been described by Ehrenberg, Dujardin, H. James Clark, and other writers on the Infusoria. Indeed, in another infusion of hay in which my Heteromita lens occurred, there were innumerable such infusorial animalcules belonging to the well-known species Colpoda cucullus.
Word Of The Day