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Rylance decided that this girl was incorrigible: she was beyond the pale: she was a kind of monster, a being of imperfect development, a blunder of nature like the sloth and his fellow tardigrades: a psychological mystery: inasmuch as she did not care for him. So having made up his mind to have done with her, Dr. Rylance found that the end of love is the beginning of hate.
This is an indication of its low rank, and hints of a relationship to the Tardigrades and the Pentastoma, the latter being a degraded mite, and the lowest of its order, living parasitically within the bodies of other animals.
A few years ago Doyere brought to life some tardigrades that had been dried at a temperature of 150 deg. and kept four weeks in a vacuum. If we ascend the scale of beings, we find analogous phenomena produced by diverse causes. Flies that have been imported in casks of Madeira have been resuscitated in Europe, and chrysalids have been kept in this state for years.
In the Tardigrades, a long step lower, we have unjointed fleshy legs armed with from two to four claws, but the mouth-parts are essentially mite in character. A decided worm feature is the fact that they are hermaphrodites, each individual having ovaries and spermaries, as is the case with many worms.
Our Leptus at first undoubtedly breathed through the skin, as do most of the Poduras, since we have been unable to find tracheæ in them, nor even in the prolarva of a genus of minute ichneumon egg parasites, nor in the Linguatulæ and Tardigrades, and some mites, such as the Itch insect and the Demodex, and other Acari. In the Myriopod, Pauropus, Lubbock was unable to find any traces of tracheæ.
We have the faintest possible indication in the structure of some mites, and of the Tardigrades and Pentastoma, where there is a striking recurrence, as we may term it, to a worm-like form, readily noticed by every observer, whatever his opinion may be on the developmental theory. In the Demodex we see a tendency of the mite to assume under peculiar circumstances an elongated, worm-like form.
Here is a fine confession of intellectual weakness; but what an inexplicable frame of mind is that of belief. As for Rotifers and Tardigrades being spontaneously generated, my mind can no more digest such statements, whether true or false, than my stomach can digest a lump of lead. Dr.
Fabre has proved this: let the temperature suddenly fall twenty degrees: the eggs of Geotrupes and the larvae of the cockchafer or the rose-beetle endure such vicissitudes of temperature with impunity; contracted and stiffened into little masses of ice, but not destroyed, they revive in spring no less than the eel fry, the rotifers, or the tardigrades.
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