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Updated: June 27, 2025
These enormous questions would need an army of workers; and we have not one. The fashion is all for the Mollusc and the Zoophyte. While waiting for the fashion to change, I open my harmas laboratory of living entomology; and this laboratory shall not cost the ratepayers one farthing. We are in the middle of July.
The zoophyte condition of the Grecian states, where each individual enjoyed an independent life, and could, in cases of necessity, become a separate whole and unit in himself, gave way to an ingenious mechanism, when, from the splitting up into numberless parts, there results a mechanical life in the combination.
The spirit which gives freely, because it knows that it has received freely; which communicates knowledge without hope of reward, without jealousy and rivalry, to fellow- students and to the world; which is content to delve and toil comparatively unknown, that from its obscure and seemingly worthless results others may derive pleasure, and even build up great fortunes, and change the very face of cities and lands, by the practical use of some stray talisman which the poor student has invented in his laboratory; this is the spirit which is abroad among our scientific men, to a greater degree than it ever has been among any body of men for many a century past; and might well be copied by those who profess deeper purposes and a more exalted calling, than the discovery of a new zoophyte, or the classification of a moorland crag.
It tells us, also, of God's myriad and multiform creatures, that dwell in its depths, from the vast whale, whose speed is so great, that it might, if it chose, circle round the world in a few days, to the languid zoophyte, which clings to the rock, and bears more resemblance to a plant than to a living animal.
I will state one other instance of uniform action, though of a very different nature, in a zoophyte closely allied to Clytia, and therefore very simply organised.
On other occasions, when dissecting small marine animals beneath the microscope, I have seen particles of pulpy matter, some of large size, as soon as they were disengaged, commence revolving. I have imagined, I know not with how much truth, that this granulo-pulpy matter was in process of being converted into ova. Certainly in this zoophyte such appeared to be the case.
It will be admitted, I suppose, that the lower animals possess, in their degree, similar cerebral or at least nervous mechanism with ourselves; in their degree, I say; for a zoöphyte and a caterpillar have brains, though not in the head; and to this day Waterton does not know whether he shot a man or a monkey, so closely is his nondescript linked with either hand to the grovelling Australian and the erect orang outang.
The chaotic world that was first shelled off from the sun differed not less widely from the admirably furnished planet we now inhabit, than does the zoöphyte, whose remains are not split out of the rock, from man, the present head of the animal tribe. At any rate, geology informs us, that the causes, whatever they may be, which produce life, have been long and frequently in operation.
Seeing the blind persistency with which some straying zoöphyte has refused to follow other counsel than its own, I have learned that self-reliance and strength of will are not, in higher natures, virtues for gratulation, but, if unsanctified, faults to blush for.
Around this basin, inside elegant glass cases fastened with copper bands, there were classified and labeled the most valuable marine exhibits ever put before the eyes of a naturalist. My professorial glee may easily be imagined. The zoophyte branch offered some very unusual specimens from its two groups, the polyps and the echinoderms.
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