HYDRA. 185 
“ What kind or degree of pain,” Baker remarks, “ this 
creature feels upon being divided, it is impossible to con- 
ceive or know; but we commonly find that the parts contract 
themselves immediately after the operation, and a sort of 
tremor or quivering motion may frequently be observed in 
them by the microscope. And yet its eating so soon after 
it has been cut asunder would almost induce one to imagine, 
either that the pain is not very great, or that it is over in- 
stantly, or that the pain of hunger is greater.” 
Were those who make these experiments to be accused of 
cruelty, they might, perhaps, say that the seeming cruelty 
is greatly overbalanced by the results; for though they do 
inflict pain on a single animal by cutting it into fifty pieces, 
as M. Trembley has at times done, this pain, at the longest, 
is only of a few days’ continuance, and after that you have 
fifty times the original amount of happiness, for instead of 
one, you have fifty living creatures as full of enjoyment as 
had been the single polype from whose mangled body this 
great troop has sprung. 
The first experiment that Baker records is the cutting off 
the head of a polype close under the tentacula. This he 
did on the 25th of March. He made observations on both 
the parts every day. There was daily progress in both, and 
