BEFORE THE DAWN OF ART 279 



fans and trumpets, towers and cupolas what a 

 wealth of form there is among these atomies with 

 their hundreds of different species! One of the 

 many interesting features is that certain of the 

 shapes point forward to the shells of Cephalopod 

 and Gasteropod mollusks. 



The lime shells of Foraminifera have been familiar 

 for many generations, and no one has pretended 

 to understand them. They are secreted simply 

 secreted ! by organless individuals, each " a drop of 

 protoplasm " which streams out into the water in a 

 changeful network of delicate threads. Some salt 

 of lime is absorbed from the sea water; it passes 

 through the plasmic laboratory; it is laid down as 

 an arabesque of translucent marble. That is all! 

 We cannot explain how Globigerina makes its 

 beautiful shell any more than we can explain how 

 the nightingale makes his song or the poet his epic. 

 Indeed, we are intellectually farthest from any 

 understanding of the Globigerina's poem. 



But what prompted us in this discussion had to 

 do not with calcareous shells, but with those that 

 are built up of extrinsic particles selected from the 

 surroundings. It is of the so-called arenaceous 

 Foraminifera that Mr. Heron- Allen has such won- 

 derful things to tell us, and it is obvious at once that 

 the problem is here more accessible that is to say, 

 more readily attacked by way of experiment, such 

 as Mr. Heron-Allen has, we believe, the patience 

 and ingenuity to devise. In the case of calcareous 

 shells the material that is taken in is invisible; its 



