Essays on the Microscope: Containing a Practical Description of the Most Improved Microscopes, a General History of Insects, etc., etc.Adams, George
Science
Essays on the Microscope: Containing a Practical Description of the Most Improved Microscopes, a General History of Insects, etc., etc.
Adams, George
Insects -- Early works to 1800; Microscopy -- Early works to 1800
There is still another method of uniting these animals together, more
wonderful in its nature, and less analogous to any known principles of
animation, and more difficult to perform. It is effected by introducing
one within the other, forcing the body of one into the mouth of the
other, and pushing it down so that their heads may be brought together:
in this state it must be kept for some time; the two individuals are at
last united, and grafted into each other; and the polype, which was at
first double, is converted into one, with a great number of arms, and
performs all its functions like another.
The hydra fusca furnishes us with another prodigy, to which we know
nothing that is similar either in the animal or vegetable kingdom. They
may be turned inside out like a glove, and, notwithstanding the apparent
improbability of the circumstance, they live and act as before. The
lining or coating of the stomach now forms the epidermis, and the former
epidermis now constitutes the coating of the stomach. A polype thus
turned, may often have young ones attached to its side. If this be the
case, after the operation they are of course inclosed in the stomach.
Those which have acquired a certain size extend themselves towards the
mouth, that they may get out when separated from the body; those which
are but little grown, turn themselves inside out, and by these means
place themselves again on the outside of the parent polype.
The polype thus turned combines itself a thousand different ways. The
fore-part often closes itself, and becomes a supernumerary tail. The
polype which was at first straight, now bends itself, so that the two
tails resemble the legs of a pair of compasses, which it can open and
shut. The old mouth is at the joint as it were of the compasses; it
cannot, however, act as one, so that a new one is formed near it, and in
a little time a new species of hydra is formed with several mouths.
Plate XXIII. B. Fig. 18, represents the upper part of a polype that has
been divided into two parts; a, the upper, c, the lower part, the end c
being something larger than that of a common polype, and is sensibly
perforated; in the summer time this part often walks and eats the same
day it is cut. Fig. 17, the other part of the same polype; the anterior
end is very open, and the edges of it turned a little outwards, which
afterwards folding inwards, close the aperture. This end now appears
swelled, as at c, Fig. 21; the arms shoot out from this end: at first
three or four points only begin to shoot, as at c, Fig. 20, and while
these increase in size, others appear between them; they can seize their
prey and eat before their arms have done growing. In the height of
summer the arms will often begin to shoot in twenty-four hours; but in
cold weather it will be fifteen or twenty days before the head is
formed. Fig. 22, represents a polype that was cut close under the arms;
this became also a complete animal in a little time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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