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Updated: June 19, 2025
The apparent suddenness of the appearance of multitudes of such organisms as these in any nutritive fluid to which one obtains access is thus easily explained. During these processes of multiplication by fission, the Heteromita remains active; but sometimes another mode of fission occurs.
Thus, so far as outward form and the general character of the cycle of modifications, through which the organism passes in the course of its life, are concerned, the resemblance between Chlamydomonas and Heteromita is of the closest description.
If the whole history of the zoospores of Peronospora and of Coleochaete were unknown, they would undoubtedly be classed among "Monads" with the same right as Heteromita; why then may not Heteromita be a plant, even though the cycle of forms through which it passes shows no terms quite so complex as those which occur in Peronospora and Coleochaete?
Of the four monads described and figured by these investigators, one, as I have said, very closely resembles Heteromita lens in every particular, except that it has a separately distinguishable central particle or "nucleus," which is not certainly to be made out in Heteromita lens; and that nothing is said by Messrs.
This process obviously corresponds with the conjugation and subsequent setting free of germs in the Heteromita.
Full-sized specimens of this animalcule attain a length of between 1/300 or 1/400 of an inch, so that it may have ten times the length and a thousand times the mass of a Heteromita. In shape, it is not altogether unlike Heteromita.
And, in fact, there are some green organisms, in every respect characteristically plants, such as Chlamydomonas, and the common Volvox, or so-called "Globe animalcule," which run through a cycle of forms of just the same simple character as those of Heteromita.
But, in the first place, in order that I may conveniently distinguish this "Monad" from the multitude of other things which go by the same designation, I must give it a name of its own. I shall, therefore, call it not Monas, but Heteromita lens.
Thus there is really no reason why Heteromita may not be a plant; and this conclusion would be very satisfactory, if it were not equally easy to show that there is really no reason why it should not be an animal.
However, it does not enter into my present plan to treat of the potato disease, instructively as its history bears upon that of other epidemics; and I have selected the case of the Peroganspora simply because it affords an example of an organism, which, in one stage of its existence, is truly a "Monad," indistinguishable by any important character from our Heteromita, and extraordinarily like it in some respects.
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