PROTOZOA. 
2i 
sluggish amoeba , 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. mystacina'l ), 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 affection, 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, ct 'priori , that a dull, heavy, sluggish amoeba could catch 
such an agile little thing 1 ? But the amoeba are as unerring 
and unrelaxing in then* 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. Being 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 
becoming broken down and digested. 1 
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- 
1 H. J. Carter, F.R.S., Annals of Ncutural History , 3rd Series, 1863, 
pp. 45-6. 
