Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/676

656 with a tube, which serve as mouth and gullet, but the food ingested takes a definite course and refuse is rejected from a definite region. Nothing: is easier than to feed these animals and to watch the particles of indigo or carmine accumulate at the lower end of the gullet. From this they gradually project, surrounded by a ball of water, which at length passes with a jerk, oddly simulating a gulp, into the pulpy central substance of the body, there to circulate up one side and down the other, until its contents are digested and assimilated. Nevertheless, this complex animal multiplies by division, as the monad does, and, like the monad, undergoes conjugation. It stands in the same relation to Heteromita on the animal side, as Coleochœte does on the plant side. Start from either, and such an insensible series of gradations leads to the monad that it is impossible to say at any stage of the progress. Here the line between the animal and the plant must be drawn.

There is reason to think that certain organisms which pass through a monad stage of existence, such as the Myxomycetes, are, at one time of their lives, dependent upon external sources for their proteine-matter, or are animals, and at another period manufacture it, or are plants. And, seeing that the whole progress of modern investigation is in favor of the doctrine of continuity, it is a fair and probable speculation—though only a speculation—that, as there are some plants which can manufacture proteine out of such apparently intractable mineral matters as carbonic acid, water, nitrate of ammonia, and metallic salts, while others need to be supplied with their carbon and nitrogen in the somewhat less raw form of tartrate of ammonia and allied compounds, so there may be yet others, as is possibly the case with the true parasitic plants, which can only manage to put together materials still better prepared—still more nearly approximated to proteine—until we arrive at such organisms as the Psorospermiœ and the Panhistophyton, which are as much animal as vegetable in structure, but are animal in their dependence on other organisms for their food.

The singular circumstance observed by Meyer, that the Torula of yeast, though an indubitable plant, still flourishes most vigorously when supplied with the complex nitrogenous substance, pepsin; the probability that the Peronospora is nourished directly by the protoplasm of the potato-plant; and the wonderful facts which have recently been brought to light respecting insectivorous plants, all favor this view; and tend to the conclusion that the difference between animal and plant is one of degree rather than of kind; and that the problem, whether, in a given case, an organism is an animal or a plant, may be essentially insoluble.—Macmillan's Magazine.