224 "T^E BIOLOGY OF STENTOR 



after they were minced. Often no primordium appeared (Fig. 63c), 

 or only days later. The grafted head became harmoniously 

 integrated with the minced host, and yet grafting of heads or 

 primordium-site sectors or large areas of intact striping did not 

 seem to hasten the gradual re-alignment of the patches. 



Minced 2-masses like grafted pairs produced i, 2 or 3 primordia 

 upon regeneration. In most cases two were formed, in some cases 

 only one, and very rarely 3. Again, the oral valency seems to be 

 simply an expression of the probability of obtaining more than one 

 area of fine striping in the reconstituted graft complex. Mincing 

 a fusion mass in fact definitely favors attainment of unitary shape. 

 A minced 25 -mass formed a rather unified fan shape with single 

 axis (Tartar, 1954, Fig. 33B), though large, unminced masses 

 never achieved anything like the normal form. Two 5-masses, 

 minced, became doublets with single conical shapes, much in 

 contrast to the bizarre forms produced when such masses are not 

 minced (Fig. 63D). Minced masses, unlike minced singles, seem 

 to have a better chance of producing a single shape when all traces 

 of the original axes have been obliterated, and this inference is 

 substantiated by the confusion of mildly disarranged stentors, 

 presently to be described. The response to these operations 

 demonstrates an astonishing capability of thoroughly disorganized 

 stentors to regenerate and to reconstitute the normal, orderly 

 arrangement of the ectoplasmic pattern, even within a single day, 

 after all the complex ciliary, contractile, conductive and other 

 differentiations of the ectoplasm have been cut into tiny pieces 

 scattered at random. 



Remarkable, too, is the possibility of the reverse process, in 

 which organization is sacrificed to autonomous disorganization. 

 Several instances have been found in which individual coeruleus 

 responded to certain treatments by spontaneously transforming the 

 orderly striping into a generally disarranged patchiness much as 

 if the cell had been minced (unpublished). The two instances from 

 cutting operations are shown in Fig. 64. The same effect was 

 sometimes produced by treatment with dilute salt solutions (see 

 Fig. 71). If these responses are reproducible, we have an oppor- 

 tunity to explore the significance of this peculiar break-up of 

 structure, so greatly in contrast to the general tendency of stentors 

 to integrate themselves into an orderly pattern. This behavior 



