278 THE BIOLOGY OF STENTOR 



shape. Finally, the animals become completely amorphous, 

 showing incomplete feeding organelles and finger-like processes 

 extending out from the mass in all directions. 



In these abnormal forms the nucleus appears quite normal. 

 There are several indications that the nucleus is not involved. 

 Pigmented cores have also appeared in enucleated stentors; but 

 these generally did not live long enough, apparently, to develop 

 the amorphous shape. When nuclei from abnormals were sub- 

 stituted in normal stentors no abnormality resulted; but when 

 abnormal cytoplasm was added by grafting to normals, the whole 

 fusion mass usually became and remained aberrant. Whole normal 

 cells were grafted to abnormal whole cells. In about half the cases 

 normals resulted; in the remainder, a normal stentor, even when 

 predominant in volume, was converted into an abnormal, and this 

 might even occur overnight. (Fig. 77B). 



Amorphous animals could also be simulated by coeruleus to 

 which a minor piece of colorless polymorphus was grafted. Some- 

 times the central mass was of colored pigment granules, in other 

 cases the mass was colorless but granular (Fig. 77c). In the latter, 

 the mass may have been composed of depigmented coeruleus 

 granules or possibly of the non-pigmented ectoplasmic granules 

 typical oi polymorphus. 



In some instances it was demonstrated that tadpole-shaped 

 abnormals could recover if transferred onto a slide with fresh 

 medium, but the introduction of normal animals into fluid dishes 

 in which abnormals had appeared did not result in their becoming 

 promptly abnormal. Therefore changes in the medium do not 

 seem to induce this condition. Racial differences may be more 

 important. Three races of coeruleus produced abnormal stentors 

 when starved, but five did not. 



The development of such amorphous forms is much in contrast 

 to the usually amazing capacity of stentors to return to normal 

 after the most drastic operations and disturbances. A connection 

 with cancer or abnormal growth is suggested, first, by the stentor — 

 as an organism — "going wild", and second — as a cell — 

 transforming, among its normal fellows, into a pathological type. 



Treatments which prevent or hinder primordiiim formation 

 may do so by disrupting the basis of protein synthesis, and these 



