Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/671

Rh The authors whom I quote say that they "cannot express" the excessive minuteness of the granules in question, and they estimate their diameter at less than $1⁄200000$ of an inch. Under the highest powers of the microscope at present applicable, such specks are hardly discernible. Nevertheless, particles of this size are massive when compared to physical molecules; whence there is no reason to doubt that each, small as it is, may have a molecular structure sufficiently complex to give rise to the phenomena of life. And, as a matter of fact, by patient watching of the place at which these infinitesimal living particles were discharged, our observers assured themselves of their growth and development into new monads. These, in about four hours from their being set free, had attained a sixth of the length of the parent, with the characteristic cilia, though at first they were quite motionless; and in four hours more they had attained the dimensions and exhibited all the activity of the adult. These inconceivably minute particles are therefore the germs of the Heteromita; and from the dimensions of these germs it is easily shown that the body formed by conjugation may, at a low estimate, have given exit to 30,000 of them; a result of a matrimonial process whereby the contracting parties, without a metaphor, "become one flesh," enough to make a Malthusian despair of the future of the universe.

I am not aware that the investigators from whom I have borrowed this history have endeavored to ascertain whether their monads take solid nutriment or not; so that, though they help us very much to fill up the blanks in the history of my Heteromita, their observations throw no light on the problem we are trying to solve—Is it an animal or is it a plant?

Undoubtedly it is possible to bring forward very strong arguments in favor of regarding Heteromita as a plant.

For example, there is a fungus, an obscure and almost microscopic mould, termed Peronospora infestans. Like many other fungi, the Peronosporœ are parasitic upon other plants; and this particular Peronospora happens to have attained much notoriety and political importance, in a way not without a parallel in the career of notorious politicians, namely, by reason of the frightful mischief it has done to mankind. For it is this Fungus which is the cause of the potato-disease; and, therefore, Peronospora infestans (doubtless of exclusively Saxon origin, though not accurately known to be so) brought about the Irish famine. The plants afflicted with the malady are found to be infested by a mould, consisting of fine tubular filaments, termed hyphœ, which burrow through the substance of the potato-plant, and appropriate to themselves the substance of their host; while, at the same time, directly or indirectly, they set up chemical changes by which even its woody framework becomes blackened, sodden, and withered.

In structure, however, the Peronospora is as much a mould as the