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Updated: June 22, 2025
Among the lower forms of animal life, the infusorial animalculae we have already spoken of throw off certain portions, or break themselves up in various directions, sometimes transversely or sometimes longitudinally; or they may give off buds, which detach themselves and develop into their proper forms. There is the common fresh-water Polype, for instance, which multiplies itself in this way.
He heaped fresh wood upon his fire, that the bright light might drive out the gruesome things that lurked above, below, and around him. He became afraid to look behind him, lest some shapeless mass of mid-sea birth some voracious polype, with far-reaching arms and jellied mouth ever open to devour might slide up over the edge of the dripping caves below, and fasten upon him in the darkness.
It is a forest of glass bells, on branching stalks. They are Vorticellae; and every one of those bells, by the ciliary current on its rim, is scavenging the water till a tadpole comes by and scavenges it. How many millions of living creatures are there on that one sprig? Look here! a brown polype, with long waving arms a gigantic monster, actually a full half-inch long.
And thus, although the polype itself may be a fixed creature unable to move about, it is able to spread its offspring over great areas.
The barren Platygaster larva, the fertile Cecidomyia larva, the fertile Aphis larva, the fertile Chironomus pupa, the fertile hydroid polype, and the fertile adult queen bee are simply animals in different degrees of organization, and with reproductive systems differing not in quality, but in the greater or less rapidity of their development as compared with the rest of the body.
Again, when this great cup was alive, the whole surface was covered with a beautiful body upon which were set innumerable small polype flowers, if we may so call them, often brilliantly coloured; and the whole cup was built up in the same fashion by the deposit of carbonate of lime in the interior of the combined polype body, formed by budding and by fission in the way I described.
Know, also, that a great portion of the soil which we tread under foot has no other origin. It was manufactured formerly in the sea by infinite myriads of beings, often infinitely small. Each one, whether polype or shell, produced its grain of stone, and from all these grains God, who directed their work, has made our country.
Again, in experiments upon the lower animals, such as the polype, to which I have referred, it is most extraordinary that, although cut up into various pieces, each particular piece will grow up into the form of the primitive stock; the head, if separated, will reproduce the body and the tail; and if you cut off the tail, you will find that that will reproduce the body and all the rest of the members, without in any way deviating from the plan of the organism from which these portions have been detached.
And thus, although the polype itself may be a fixed creature unable to move about, it is able to spread its offspring over great areas.
The investigation of a polype, of a snail, of a fish, of a horse, or of a man, would have led us, though by a less easy path, perhaps, to exactly the same point. Unity of plan everywhere lies hidden under the mask of diversity of structure the complex is everywhere evolved out of the simple.
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