14 THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 



feeds in this way — the strictly animal way — it also obtains 

 nutriment like a plant. It is filled with chlorophyll, the green 

 colouring matter of plants, and under the influence of sunlight it 

 can decompose carbonic acid gas, taking to itself the carbon and 

 giving ofit' the oxygen. Like protococcus, too, it passes into the 

 resting condition, in which it loses it fiagellum, secretes a cell 

 wall, and undergoes the same phases of subdivision within the 

 envelope, rupture of the envelope, and escape of the daughter cells. 

 We thus see that in the Euglena there is a blending of the 

 essential plant and animal characteristics ; it is the one or the 

 other as we list. The same doubtful position is occupied by a 

 remarkable group of organisms known as Myxomycetes, or slime- 

 fungi, which are found on bark, stones, or decaying vegetable 

 matter. They are extended expansions of protoplasm, so 

 ramified and interlaced as to form a network. The illustration 

 shows one of them. Strange £o say, these so-called fungi are 

 constituted by the fusion of a number of organisms indistinguish- 

 able from amoebae, as becomes evident if we keep them under 

 observation for a time. The protoplasm of the network, or 

 Plasmodium, as it is called, breaks up after arranging itself into a 

 number of spherical spores, each surrounded by a cell wall of 

 cellulose — a starch-like substance of which the wall of the typical 

 plant cells is composed. These spores burst their enclosing 

 cysts and assume the form of small amoebae, which, after 

 remaining free for a time, coalesce to form the expansion or 

 Plasmodium with which we started. As if the more conclusively 

 to show that nature abhors a line of demarcation even more than 

 a vacuum came the discovery of Professor Haeckel, in the Canary 

 Islands, of a minute orange-red marine organism of the lowest 

 type of animal life, which he called protomyxa. It bears a 

 striking resemblance to the slime-fungi just referred to. Like 

 them, it is a network of protoplasm, which interlace and exhibit 

 a constantly flowing and changing movement. In this phase it 

 feeds like an amceba, by the ingestion of small creatures. But 

 after a time the tree-like extensions are all drawn in. Then the 

 interior protoplasm divides into a number of bodies, first 

 spherical, but afterwards pear-shaped, and furnished with 

 processes. The sphere bursts, and these bodies being set free 

 swim actively about by means of their fiagella. Soon they 

 become transformed into amoebffi, which coalesce to form 

 the extended network or plasmodium. Another lowly animal of 



