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Updated: June 22, 2025
The world of which the polype has any perception is not a very large one. The outer world of a bird is vastly greater; and man knows a world without, which is immeasurably large beyond that of which any other animal is conscious, because both his physical organs and his mental faculties bring him into far the most diversified and intimate relations with all created things.
So that if you suppose a single polype of this kind settled upon the bottom of the sea, it may by these various methods that is to say, by cutting itself in two, which we call "fission," or by budding; or by sending out these swimming embryos, multiply itself to an enormous extent, and give rise to thousands, or millions, of progeny in a comparatively short time; and these thousands, or millions, of progeny may cover a very large surface of the sea bottom; in fact, you will readily perceive that, give them time, and there is no limit to the surface which they may cover.
There is reason to believe that such masses as these take a long time to form, and hence that the age a polype tree, or polype turf, may attain, may be considerable.
Beast and fowl, reptile and fish, mollusk, worm, and polype, are all composed of structural units of the same character, namely, masses of protoplasm with a nucleus. There are sundry very low animals, each of which, structurally, is a mere colourless blood-corpuscle, leading an independent life.
On the contrary, in their earliest condition they are all alike, and the primordial germs of a man, a dog, a bird, a fish, a beetle, a snail, and a polype are, in no essential structural respects, distinguishable.
We have tables properly arranged in regard to light, microscopes, and dissecting instruments, and we work through the structure of a certain number of animals and plants. As, for example, among the plants, we take a yeast plant, a Protococcus, a common mould, a Chara, a fern, and some flowering plant; among animals we examine such things as an Amoeba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-water polype.
Or, what is still more common, a polype may throw out buds, which are converted into polypes, or branches bearing polypes, until a tree-like mass, sometimes of very considerable size, is formed. This is what happens in the case of the red coral of commerce. A minute polype, fixed to the rocky bottom of the deep sea, grows up into a branched trunk.
A plant may throw off bulbs, but these, sooner or later, give rise to seeds or spores, which develop into the original form. A polype may give rise to Medusae, or a pluteus to an Echinoderm, but the Medusa and the Echinoderm give rise to eggs which produce polypes or glutei, and they are therefore only stages in the cycle of life of the species.
I lay no stress on certain flaws in the fundamental propositions that 'we have no knowledge of anything but phenomena, and that our knowledge of phenomena is only relative, not absolute; that we know not the essence nor the real mode of production of any fact, but only its relations to other facts in the way of succession or similitude; that the constant resemblances which link phenomena together, and the constant sequences which unite them as antecedent and consequent, are all we know about them, and that their causes, whether efficient or final, are unknown and inscrutable. I will only suggest that our mere consciousness of possessing some knowledge of phenomena is itself a knowledge distinct from the knowledge which constitutes its subject distinct, that is, from the knowledge of phenomena; that if it were possible for us to be aware of only one single fact, we should know something about that fact, notwithstanding that there were no other facts which it could be perceived to have preceded or followed, or to which it could be likened, even as a polype with a stomach-ache would know something about a stomach-ache, although ignorant that it had a stomach, and oblivious of any former sensation, whether painful or pleasurable; and that if the causes of phenomena be utterly unknown, our ignorance of them ought not to be so signified as to sound like knowledge, as it does when resemblances are said to link, and sequences to unite, phenomena together, thereby warranting the inference that one phenomenon succeeds another because the two are so linked and united.
If I had worked my way from a sponge instead of a lobster, I should have found it associated, by like ties, with a great number of other animals into the sub-kingdom 'Protozoa'; if I had selected a fresh-water polype or a coral, the members of what naturalists term the sub-kingdom 'Coelenterata', would have grouped themselves around my type; had a snail been chosen, the inhabitants of all univalve and bivalve, land and water, shells, the lamp shells, the squids, and the sea-mat would have gradually linked themselves on to it as members of the same sub-kingdom of 'Mollusca'; and finally, starting from man, I should have been compelled to admit first, the ape, the rat, the horse, the dog, into the same class; and then the bird, the crocodile, the turtle, the frog, and the fish, into the same sub-kingdom of 'Vertebrata'.
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