is the seat of conscious intelligence? None but He alone, the Giver of
all life, who sits enthroned and exalted in the everlasting heavens.
SLIME-ANIMALS.
Possibly the simplest of life’s children are the singularly unique and
structureless little Finger Slimes, which live not only in the sea but
also in puddles and pools, and in the gutters of our streets and of
our house-tops. Anywhere that stagnant water abounds these tiny drops
of slime will grow up and make it their home. Sometimes few and far
between, and sometimes in such immense crowds that the entire pond
would seem, if they could be seen with the unaided vision, literally
alive with them, they live, and multiply and die under our very feet.
Nothing can be less animal-like than one of these shapeless masses
of pure protoplasm, yet under a microscope of strong power it may be
seen moving lazily along by pulling out a thick finger of slime and
then letting all the rest of its body flow after it. When coming into
contact with food it may be said to flow over it, dissolving the soft
parts and sending out the hard, indigestible refuse anywhere, no matter
where, for its body is devoid of skin, being merely one general mass of
homogeneous slime.
But what can these little slime specks tell us about the wonderful
powers of life? Nothing at all, it would seem, for in these tiny
creatures life has nothing better to work with than a mere drop of
living matter, which is all alike throughout, so that if broken into
a hundred pieces every piece would be as much a living being as the
whole. And yet by means of the wonderful gift of life, with which
the all-wise Omnipotence has endowed it, this slime-drop lives, and
breathes, and eats, and increases, shrinks away when you touch it,
feels for its food, and moves from place to place, changing its shape
to form limbs and feeling-threads, which are let into the general
organism when they have served the purpose of their existing, only to
be succeeded by others as short-lived as themselves when necessity
requires their development.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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