BIOLOGICAL LABORATORY AT NAPLES 



the little fishlike vertebrate, amphioxus, and even the 

 lower orders of true fishes. Of course the division 

 of one being to form two is perfectly familiar in the 

 case of those lowly, single-celled creatures such as the 

 protozoa and the bacteria, but it seems quite another 

 matter when one thinks of cutting a fish in two and 

 having two complete living fish remaining. Yet this 

 is virtually what the biologists did. 



Let me hasten to add that the miraculous feat was 

 not accomplished with an adult fish. On the contrary, 

 it is found necessary to take the subject quite at the 

 beginning of its career, when it consists of an egg-cell 

 in the earliest stages of proliferation. Yet the prin- 

 ciple is quite the same, for the adult organism is, after 

 all, nothing more than an aggregation of cells resulting 

 from repeated divisions (growth accompanying) and 

 redivisions of that original egg-cell. Considering its 

 potentialities, the egg-cell, seemingly, is as much en- 

 titled to be considered an individual as is the devel- 

 oped organism. Yet it transpires that the biologist 

 has been able so to manipulate a developing egg-cell, 

 after its bisection, that the two halves fall apart, and 

 that each half (now become an independent cell) de- 

 velops into a complete individual, instead of the half- 

 individual for which it seemed destined. A strange 

 trick, that, to play with an individual Ego, is it not? 

 The traditional hydra with its reanimating heads was 

 nothing to this scientific hydra, which, when bisected 

 bodily, rises up calmly as two whole bodies. 



But even this is not the full measure of the achieve- 

 ment, for it has been found that in some cases the ex- 

 periment may be delayed until the developing egg 



