Читать книгу Intelligence in Plants and Animals - Thomas G. Gentry - Страница 8

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Possibly the simplest of life’s children are the singularly unique and structureless little Finger Slimes, which live not only in the sea but also in puddles and pools, and in the gutters of our streets and of our house-tops. Anywhere that stagnant water abounds these tiny drops of slime will grow up and make it their home. Sometimes few and far between, and sometimes in such immense crowds that the entire pond would seem, if they could be seen with the unaided vision, literally alive with them, they live, and multiply and die under our very feet.

Nothing can be less animal-like than one of these shapeless masses of pure protoplasm, yet under a microscope of strong power it may be seen moving lazily along by pulling out a thick finger of slime and then letting all the rest of its body flow after it. When coming into contact with food it may be said to flow over it, dissolving the soft parts and sending out the hard, indigestible refuse anywhere, no matter where, for its body is devoid of skin, being merely one general mass of homogeneous slime.

But what can these little slime specks tell us about the wonderful powers of life? Nothing at all, it would seem, for in these tiny creatures life has nothing better to work with than a mere drop of living matter, which is all alike throughout, so that if broken into a hundred pieces every piece would be as much a living being as the whole. And yet by means of the wonderful gift of life, with which the all-wise Omnipotence has endowed it, this slime-drop lives, and breathes, and eats, and increases, shrinks away when you touch it, feels for its food, and moves from place to place, changing its shape to form limbs and feeling-threads, which are let into the general organism when they have served the purpose of their existing, only to be succeeded by others as short-lived as themselves when necessity requires their development.

So small are these creatures that the largest specimen will be found to be smaller than the smallest pin’s head. Examine how we will, there will be found no mouth, no stomach, no muscles, no nerves, no parts of any kind. The animal looks merely like a minute drop of gum with fine grains diffused throughout, floating in the water, some times with outstretched arms, and at other times as a simple drop. An analysis of the matter of which it is composed shows it to be much the same as a speck of white-of-egg. Yet it is alive, for it breathes. Kept in a drop of water, it uses up the oxygen it contains, and renders the water foul by the carbonic acid it breathes out. The arms, so necessary in the procurement of food, can be drawn in and thrown out when and where the animal chooses, showing that some option is undoubtedly exercised in the matter. Minute jelly-plants, that live in the water, and even higher animals than itself, constitute its food. The presence of an animal with a shell does not deter it from attack, for it is just as able to deal with it as with the softer, shell-less kinds, sucking their jelly-like contents, and discarding the empty, innutritious shells.

Quite as interesting among the Moners, to which the Finger Slime belongs, is the Protomyxa aurantiaca, a shapeless bit of transparent matter, containing merely circulating granules. Locomotion is effected by extending the body into pseudopodia, or false feet, and contracting them. Its movement is slow and gliding. When at rest it appears as a mere lump of jelly, but its whole demeanor changes when in the presence of a living animal suited for food. Fine threads immediately begin to shoot out from all sides, which fuse about the unsuspecting prey, while all the little grains in the slime course to and fro. For five or six hours the little fellow hugs closely round the prey until it has become thoroughly absorbed, at least the nutritious parts, into its body-mass, when it draws itself away, or back into its original place, leaving by its side the skeleton of its late victim. Without eyes or ears or parts of any kind it knows how to find its food; without muscles or limbs it is able to seize it; without a mouth it can suck out its living body, and without a stomach it can digest the food in the midst of its own slime, and cast out the parts for which it has no use.

PROTOMYXA FEEDING.

When Protomyxa has become a burden to itself it divides itself by a simple process of fission, each part being complete in itself, or it assumes a thick covering, becoming encysted, as it is termed. In a little while the enclosed mass divides into spheres, the cell-wall bursts, and the little spheres, which have now taken on a sort of tadpole shape, float out upon the water, where they soon assume the parent-form.

Like all living things, these Moners have a desire for food, which their protoplasm first appropriates, then converts into available material. They thus grow and increase in size, but when they become too large to be comfortable they usually split into two, in obedience to the law of their being, and each half goes its own way as a living animal. This is the earliest form of parentage, the simplest form of reproduction. Thus yielding to this necessity of a separation of one into more than one, these Moners live on forever, or as long as the earth continues to support life, thus becoming immortal in the scientific sense in which the term is used to devote a continuance of the physical life on earth. They only and their nearest relatives, as simple in structure as themselves, achieve this stupendous result, for in such a division of their entire substance they know no loss, no death of any part, violence only being able to sunder them from life. They resolve themselves into their own offspring, and nothing perishes.