SOME AXIMAL ARCHITECTS. 127 



and results of its work, when compared with the fruits of 

 intelligence, and with the highest exercise of experience and 

 acquired art. 



In no phase of their operation do the vital acts and 

 functions of animals present us with greater profusion of 

 detail than in the consideration of the ways and means 

 adopted for the construction of various portions of their 

 bodies from materials derived from the outer world. The 

 power possessed by living beings, not only of laying hold of 

 such materials, but of duly selecting and appropriating such 

 substances as are best adapted to the work in hand, consti- 

 tutes, after due reflection, one of the marvels of life at large. 

 Nowhere can we see this marvellous power of selection 

 better exemplified than in certain of the lowest forms of 

 animal life, as representing one extremity of the scale of 

 being, and in man as illustrating the highest grade in the 

 ranks of animal society. The waters of our oceans, both at 

 the surface and in their depths, are inhabited by beings of 

 microscopic size, and of a marvellous simplicity of body. 

 Each of these minute animals consists of a speck of struc- 

 tureless, jelly-like substance, the protoplasm or sarcode of 

 the physiologist. Placed under the microscope, these living 

 particles may be seen to live and move, to eat and digest, as 

 do their higher neighbours. Compared with the latter, they 

 may be noted to present singular and paradoxical exceptions 

 to the ordinary rules of living and being, since they are thus 

 observed to live, literally without possessing any apparent 

 structures to carry on the functions of life. Such are the 

 beings known to naturalists as the foraminifera and the 

 radiolarians (Figs. 10, n, 12). Between these two groups 

 no absolute distinction, as far as their living substance is 

 concerned, can be drawn. Yet that distinctions may and do 

 exist is perfectly obvious, if we consider the results of the life 

 in each case. The particle of living jelly we term a fora- 

 minifer (Fig. 12), takes from the water of the sea a proportion 

 of the lime which exists dissolved in that medium, and from 

 this lime moulds and forms a shell, in which it protects its 



