14 A FEW FACTS ABOUT ZOOLOGY. 



its outline that it does not retain the same shape for two suc- 

 cessive minutes. It obtains its food by flowing around it, 

 and digests by direct absorption. Here we pause. Is it 

 an animal? We feel that we are on debatable ground, on 

 the border land between the animal and vegetable kingdom, 

 where, as yet, no distinctive line has been drawn. " Proba- 

 bly life is essentially the same in the two kingdoms; and to 

 vegetable life faculties are superadded in the lower animals, 

 some of which are here and there not indistinctly foreshad- 

 owed in plants." " It must be said that there are organisms 

 whose phenomena at one period is such as to justify us in 

 speaking of them as animals, while at another period they 

 appear to be as distinctly vegetable." Leaving this debata- 

 ble ground of the protozoa till scientists have grown sure, 

 we again repeat our four divisions — the radiates, the mol- 

 lusks, the articulates, and the vertebrates. 



Geological Testimony. 



In the 16th century some stones were found bearing the 

 impression of a star on their surface. Naturalists puzzled 

 their brains about them. Beside the stony stars, impressions 

 of a peculiar kind were observed in the rocks, resembling 

 flowers on long stems, and called "stone lilies." There are 

 natural divisions of these stems, where they are easily broken, 

 and on each fragment is stamped a star-like impression. We 

 cannot in these few pages tell much of the puzzling theories 

 which naturalists formed of them, but merely the conclusion 

 finally reached. 



About a century ago a naturalist found a curious living 

 specimen at Porto Rico, which at first seemed to him a veg- 

 etable, so that he called it a marine palm; this, he felt sure, 

 bore some relation to the fossil lilies of the rocks. Cuvier 

 studied this specimen — what was it ? At last he saw it was 

 really a star-fish, but a star-fish with a stem; it was now easy 

 to see that the "stone-lilies" were the fossil remains of 



