PEOTOZOA. 21 



sluggish amceha, as the former left its parent ; and this took 

 place as follows : — 



In the evening of the 2nd of June, 1858, in Bombay, while 

 looking through a microscope at some Euglence^ &c., which had 

 been placed aside for examination in a watch-glass, my eye fell 

 upon a stalked and triangular acineta {A. mystacinafj, around 

 which an amoeba was creeping and lingering, as they do when 

 they are in quest of food. But knowing the antipathy that the 

 amoeba, like almost every other infusorian, has to the ten- 

 tacles of the acineta, I concluded that the amoeba was not en- 

 couraging an appetite for its whiskered companion, when I was 

 surprised to find that it crept up the stem of the acineta, and 

 wound itself round its body. This mark of afiection, too much 

 like that frequently evinced at the other end of the scale, even 

 where there is a mind for its control, did not long remain with- 

 out interpretation. There was a young acineta, tender, and 

 without poisonous tentacles (for they are not developed at birth), 

 just ready to make its exit from the parent, an exit which takes 

 place so quickly, and is followed by such rapid bounding move- 

 ments of the non-ciliated acineta, that who would venture to 

 say, d, priori, that a dull, heavy, sluggish amoeba could catch 

 such an agile little thing? But the amoeba are as unerring 

 and unrelaxing in their grasp as they are unrelenting in their 

 cruel inceptions of the living and the dead, when they serve 

 them for nutrition ; and thus the amoeba, placing itself round 

 the ovarian aperture of the acineta, received the young one, 

 nurse-like, in its fatal lap, incepted it, descended from the 

 parent, and crept off. BeiDg unable to conceive at the time 

 that this was such an act of atrocity on the part of the amoeba 

 as the sequel disclosed, and thinking that the young acineta 

 might yet escape, or pass into some other form in the body of 

 its host, I watched the amoeba for some time afterwards, until 

 the tale ended by the young acineta becoming divided into two 

 parts, and thus in their respective digestive spaces ultimately 

 becominof broken down and diorested.^ 



With regard to these remarkable observations it can 

 only, I think, be said that although certainly very sug- 

 gestive of something more than mechanical response to 

 stimulation, they are not sufficiently so to justify us in 

 ascribing to these lowest members of the zoological scale 

 any rudiment of truly mental action. The subject, how- 



* H. J. Carter, F.R.S., Annals of Natwral History, 3rd Series, 1863, 

 pp. 45-6. 



