Page:The Day after Death.djvu/171

Rh polype. Take a fresh-water polype, and cut it into as many fragments as you choose. Each of these fragments, left to itself, will become a polype. These new individuals may be in their turn cut into pieces, which will produce as many new ones. This is multiplication by cuttings, exactly similar to the process in plants, so that the generation of fresh-water polypes does not differ from that of one of our fruit-trees. It is not only the entire polype which, thus cut to fragments, furnishes a new polype; the skin of this animal can also produce one new individual or several. Is not this a vegetable ingraftment?

A similar generation by ingraftment is to be observed in another instance, in the case of the fresh-water polype. Take different portions of the same polype, or those of different polypes, and join them at the ends, or lay them upon one another, and you will combine them so closely that they reciprocately nourish each other, and ultimately form only one individual. Here is vegetable ingraftment carried out in an animal.

5. Other points of resemblance exist between plants and animals. If they are not generally remarked, it is because the authors of the classics of natural history do not direct the attention of the reader to these facts. We are about to supplement their silence, and to bring the analogies between the two natural kingdoms into view.

Firstly, there exists in both a common and equally astonishing fecundity. Among plants, as among animals, one individual can give birth to thousands of individuals like him