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THE OCEAN WORLD. 
This is assuredly one of the most startling funis belonging to 
natural history. Divide a fresli-water polype into five or sijc parts, and 
at the end of a fow days all the separate parts will he organised, deve- 
loped, and form so many new beings, resembling the primitive indi- 
vidual. Let us add, that the polype; which should thus have lost five- 
sixths of its body, the mutilated father of all this generation, remains 
complete in itself; in the interval, it has recuperated itself and re- 
covered all its primitive substance. 
After this, if a Hydra vulgaris wishes to procure for itself the 
blessings of a family, it has only one thing to do : cut off an arm ; if 
it desire two descendants, let it cut the arm in two parts ; if three, let 
it divide itself into three ; and so on ad infinitum. “ Divide one of 
the animate,” says Trembley, “ and each section will soon form a new 
individual in all respects like the creature divided.” “ A whole host 
of polypes hewn into pieces,” says Fredol, “ will be far from being 
annihilated.” “ On the contrary,” we may say, in our turn, “ its youth 
will be renewed, and multiplied in proportion to the number of pieces 
into which it has been divided.” “ The same polype,” says Trembley, 
“ may be successively inverted, cut into sections, and turned back again, 
without being seriously injured.” 
If a green Hydra is cut into two pieces, and the stomach is cut off 
in the operation, the voracious creature will, nevertheless, continue to 
eat the prey which presents itself. It gorges itsolf with the food, 
without troubling itself with the loss which it has sustained ; but the 
food no longer nourishes it, for it merely enters by one opening, passes 
through the intestinal canal, and escapes by the other. It realises 
Harleville’s pleasantry of M. de Orac’s horse, in the piece of that name, 
which eats unceasingly, but never gets any fatter. 
All these instances of mutilation, resulting in an increase of life, are 
very strange. The naturalists to whom they were first revealed could 
scarcely believe their own eyes. Reaumur, who repeated many of 
Trembley ’s experiments, writes as follows : “ I confess that when I 
saw for the first time two polypes forming by little and little from that 
which I had cut in two, I could scarcely believe my eyes ; and it is a 
fact that, after hundreds of experiments, I never could quite reconcile 
myself to the sight.” 
In short, we know nothing analogous to it in the animal kingdom- 
About the same period Charles Bennet writes : “ We can only judge 
