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Without leaving the group of one-celled animals typified by Amoeba, we find colonies of the most elementary biological nature, where other natural obligations are added to the two of greatest importance. Some species of the bell-animalcule, Vorticella, provide characteristic examples of these primitive compound protozoa.
I have known a man with a single pamphlet containing an assurance that somebody else was wrong, together with a few approved quotations, produce a more powerful effect of shuddering at his approach than ever Vorticella did with her varied octavo volume, including notes and appendix.
"Yes," said Vorticella, in emphatic chest tones, "dulness is a matter of opinion; but pompous! That I never was and never could be. Perhaps he means that my matter is too important for his taste; and I have no objection to that. I did not intend to be trivial. I should just like to read you that passage about the drag-nets, because I could make it clearer to you."
My experience with Vorticella led me for a time into the false supposition that this sort of fungous disfiguration, which makes Self disagreeably larger, was most common to the female sex; but I presently found that here too the male could assert his superiority and show a more vigorous boredom.
Some of the transitional forms have been specified to show how the second kind originates from the first, and how in its turn this grows in time into the third and most complex association; thus Vorticella and Volvox connect Amoeba with the cell-community individual like Hydra and a solitary wasp, while the annually established colonies of social wasps and of bumblebees lead to the permanent colony-individual.
"I know that I am right," said Vorticella. "The fact is that no critic in this town is fit to meddle with such subjects, unless it be Volvox, and he, with all his command of language, is very superficial. It is Volvox who writes in the 'Monitor, I hope you noticed how he contradicts himself?" My resolution, helped by the equivalence of dangers, stoutly prevailed, and I said, "No." "No!
Little Vibrio, who writes the playful notice in the 'Medley Pie, has a clever hit at Volvox in that passage about the steeplechase of imagination, where the loser wants to make it appear that the winner was only run away with. But if you did not notice Volvox's self-contradiction you would not see the point," added Vorticella, with rather a chilling intonation.
Vorticella being the wife of an important townsman had naturally the satisfaction of seeing 'The Channel Islands' reviewed by all the organs of Pumpiter opinion, and their articles or paragraphs held as naturally the opening pages in the elegantly bound album prepared by her for the reception of "critical opinions."
He showed that they always reacted in a certain definite way in response to particular stimuli, and he was led to believe that he could see "what must be considered the beginnings of intelligence and of many other qualities found in the higher animals." A species of Vorticella was probably the first Protozoan that was ever observed.
The primal duties of each family are unchanged, and their biological activities are identical, as in the protozoön colony of Vorticella or in a pack of wolves; but certain new relations are established.
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