120 THE MICEOSCOPIST IN BERMUDA. 



prived of their customary food or supply of fresh water, and 

 were trying to get out. A sea-weed or any senseless organism 

 would have quietly settled down and died. But this morsel of 

 structureless protoplasm has the same feeling, when deprived of 

 the proper conditions of life, that an insect or a mouse has, and 

 equally tries to escape. There is then sense and feeling in the 

 first and simplest form of animated matter. ISTow so far as 

 chemical analysis can determine, the body of the foraminifera is 

 precisely the same albuminoid substance that fills the germ which 

 originates, and the cells which make up, the body substance of 

 every living creature. I can therefore readily conceive that as 

 the scale of animal life ascends as cell is added to cell of this 

 already sensitive matter as organs and members gradually 

 appear, built up so variously and receiving their different func- 

 tions from this same wonderful bioplasm I can conceive that 

 the combination of so many myriad batteries of electric sen- 

 sitiveness might at last result in the complicate volitions and the 

 high intelligence of the superior orders of creation. 



Just in what way the foraminifera commence their little span 

 of life, has not yet been fully determined. I have no doubt that 

 the smallest morsel stricken off from any living individual, 

 would go on growing and finally develop into the same form as 

 that from which it was taken. This may in some manner be one 

 mode of generation. But it is also probable that, in conformity 

 with the law which seems to govern in all the lowest orders of 

 the animal kingdom, separate individuals become merged in 

 some way into one ; and then the entire body thus united granu- 

 lates into germs, which escaping become new individuals of the 

 same species. Every shelled foraminifer, however generated, 

 begins its growth as a little speck of jelly, around which it de- 

 posits a layer of carbonate of lime, leaving one or more openings 

 for communication with the outer world. Then when the body 

 substance has grown so that its shell will no longer hold it, the out- 

 side portion secretes and deposits another shelly layer about 

 itself, inclosing the apperture into the first shell, and leaving 

 others in the new. At the next stage of growth another or 

 other segments are added. And according to the way in which 



