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Updated: August 28, 2024
Light brings life: darkness may bring thought, but a dull daylight, the uncertain glimmer of a leaden sky, merely make one restless and weary. These indecisive and chaotic states of nature are ugly, like all amorphous things, like smeared colors, or bats, or the viscous polyps of the sea. The source of all attractiveness is to be found in character, in sharpness of outline, in individualization.
They are very small animals, allied to the Clams by the plan of their structure, but they have a resemblance to the Polyps on account of a radiating wreath of feelers around the upper part of their body: yet, when examined closely, this wreath is found to be incomplete; it does not, form a circle, but leaves an open space between the two ends, where they approach each other, so that it has a horseshoe outline, and partakes of the bilateral symmetry characteristic of its type and on which its own structure is based.
These polyps have a unique generating mechanism that reproduces them via the budding process, and they have an individual existence while also participating in a communal life. Hence they embody a sort of natural socialism.
It was not till the beginning of the present century that travellers like Beechey, Chamisso, Quoy and Gaimard, Moresby, Nelson, and others, began to collect accurate details concerning the forms and structure of coral-masses, and to make such observations on the habits of reef-forming polyps, as might serve as a basis for safe reasoning concerning the origin of coral-reefs and islands.
It is not the zoölogist who invents the structural relations establishing a gradation between all Polyps, it is not the geologist who places them in the succession in which he finds them in the rocks, it is not the embryologist who devises the changes through which the living Polyps pass as he watches their growth; they only read what they see, and when they compare their results they all tell the same story.
At a lower level in animal life, that of the hydroid polyps, communism has become so complete that the community has grown into an actual individual, the members not being free, but acting as organs of an aggregate mass, in which each performs some special duty for the good of the community. The social animals differ from the communal in that the individuality of the members is fully preserved.
"And now he rests beside his companions in that coral cemetery?" "Yes, forgotten by the world but not by us! We dig the graves, then entrust the polyps with sealing away our dead for eternity!" And with a sudden gesture, the captain hid his face in his clenched fists, vainly trying to hold back a sob.
It is truly a pleasure for me now to be able to demonstrate in my lectures the insensible gradations existing between polyps, medusae, and echinoderms, and to designate by the same name organs seemingly so different. Especially has the minute examination of the thickness of the test in echinoderms revealed to me unexpected relations between the sea-urchin and the medusa.
If I succeeded in explaining my subject clearly in the last article, my readers will have seen that the five Orders of the Echinoderms are but five expressions of the same idea; and I will now endeavor to show that the same identity of structural conception prevails also throughout the two other Classes of Radiates, and further, that not only the Orders within each Class, but the three Classes themselves, Echinoderms, Acalephs, and Polyps, bear the strictest comparison, founded upon close structural analysis, and are based upon one organic formula.
In a space as large as four continents, the polyps, strengthened by the lukewarm water, are building up thousands of atolls, ring-shaped islands, reefs and submarine pillars that, when united together by the work of a thousand years, are going to create a new land, an exchange continent in case the human species should lose its present base in some cataclysm of Nature.
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