21 6 TJic Study of Animal Life part iii 



which evolves gas bubbles and thus rises or rights itself when cap- 

 sized, and also detected perception and decision in the motions of 

 young Vorticellx or in the pursuit of one unit by another ; Oscar 

 Schmidt granted them only "a very dim general feeling" and the 

 power of responding in different ways to definite stimuli ; Schneider 

 believed that they acted on impulses based upon definite impressions 

 of contact ; Moebius would credit them with the power of reminis- 

 cence and Eimer with will. 



Romanes finds evidence of the power of discriminative selection 

 among the protoplasmic organisms, and he quotes in illustration Dr. 

 Carpenter's account of the making of shells. "Certain minute 

 particles of living jelly, having no visible differentiation of organs 

 . . . build up ' tests ' or casings of the most regular geometrical 

 symmetry of form and of the most artificial construction. . . . 

 From the same sandy bottom one species picks up the coarser quartz 

 grains, cements them together with phosphate of iron (?) which must 

 be secreted from their own substance, and thus constructs a flask- 

 shaped 'test' having a short neck and a single large orifice. Another 

 picks up the finer grains and puts them together with the same 

 cement into perfectly spherical ' tests ' of the most extraordinary 

 finish, perforated by numerous small tubes, disposed at pretty regular 

 intervals. Another selects the minutest sand-grains and the terminal 

 points of sponge spicules, and works these up together apparently 

 with no cement at all, but by the 'laying' of the spicules into 

 perfect spheres, like homoeopathic globules, each having a single 

 fissured orifice." This selecting power is marvellous ; we cannot 

 explain it ; the animals are alive and they behave thus. But it 

 must be remembered that even ' dead ' substances have attractive 

 affinities for some things in preference to others, that the cells of 

 roots and those lining the food-canal of an animal or floating in its 

 blood show a power of selection. Moreover, if we begin with a 

 unit which pro\ades itself with a coating of sponge spicules, 

 at first perhaps because they were handiest, it is not difficult to 

 understand why the future generations of that species should con- 

 tinue to gather these minute needles. Being simply separated parts 

 of their parents, whose living matter had become accustomed to 

 the stimulus of sponge spicules, the descendants naturally sustain 

 the tradition. This organic memory all Protozoa must have, 

 for the young are separated parts of the parents. 



Haeckel was one of the first (1S76) to urge the necessity of 

 recognising the "soul" of the cell. He maintained that the con- 

 tinuity of organic life led one to assume a similar continuity of 

 psychical life, that an egg-cell had in it not only the potency of 

 foiming tissues and organs hut the rudiments of a higher life as well, 

 that the Protozoa likewise must be regarded not only as physical 



