264 the president's address. 



Pass but a little further and we encounter another series of 

 analogies. We are most of us acquainted with those extraordinary 

 forms of animal life in "which, a single cell performs all the essentials 

 of locomotion, absorption, digestion, and excretion. Those simple 

 rhizopods with which but for the microscope we should have re- 

 mained in ignorance, the Proteus or Amceba, as elsewhere described, 

 " is in fact a little lump of jelly, and scarcely anything more. It has 

 no mouth, no eyes, no legs, no hands, no feet, no stomach, yet it 

 performs the functions of all these. No mouth, yet it extempo- 

 rizes a mouth from any portion of its surface, involves and draws in 

 its ]:>rey ; no legs, yet it elongates and pushes out any portion of its 

 gelatinous substance like a leg to move itself about ; no stomach, 

 yet it takes food, and gathers it into the midst of its gelatinous 

 mass, digests it and rejects the undigested portion. Now it is 

 almost spherical, then it becomes oblong, lengthens itself into a 

 long and narrow body, and then as speedily becomes triangular, or 

 star-shaped, or many-sided. In fact it is a very Proteus, every 

 instant changing its form, and assuming every shape of which a 

 plastic lump of gelatine is capable." This creature is recognized, 

 without doubt or demur, as a member of the animal kingdom. 

 Yet there are similar organisms developed in one stage of the 

 existence of those controverted fungi known as Myxo??iycetes, but 

 which were sought to be transferred to the animal world under the 

 name of the Mycetozoa, chiefly, if not entirely, on account of this 

 Amcebiform stage. In a recent work on Infusoria, admirable and 

 useful as a whole, this fallacy is insisted upon : " A primary 

 flagelliferous phase, an intermediate repent amoeboid condition, 

 an encysted sporiferous state, these three represent the normal 

 life-cycle of either a Myxomycetan or a simple monadiform 

 animacule," and for these reasons it is concluded that " these 

 organisms have nothing to do with Fungi, but are rightly 

 referable to the Protozoic division of the animal series " (p. 

 472). Rather than adduce any argument from organisms, the 

 systematic positions of which are disputed, let us see if any 

 analogous conditions cannot be found elsewhere. That simple uni- 

 cellular Alga now known as Chlamydococcus pluvialis consists of 

 simple subglobose cells. The life history of this organism has been 

 the subject of protracted study, and no one doubts that it has <( a 

 primary flagelliferous phase, and a final encysted sporiferous state." 

 In our Journal for 1879, my predecessor in this chair relates his 



