Among animals the same thing takes place. Among the lower forms of
animal life, the infusorial animalculae we have already spoken of throw
off certain portions, or break themselves up in various directions,
sometimes transversely or sometimes longitudinally; or they may give off
buds, which detach themselves and develop into their proper forms. There
is the common fresh-water Polype, for instance, which multiplies itself
in this way. Just in the same way as the gardener is able to multiply
and reproduce the peculiarities and characters of particular plants
by means of cuttings, so can the physiological experimentalist--as was
shown by the Abbe Trembley many years ago--so can he do the same thing
with many of the lower forms of animal life. M. de Trembley showed that
you could take a polype and cut it into two, or four, or many pieces,
mutilating it in all directions, and the pieces would still grow up
and reproduce completely the original form of the animal. These are
all cases of asexual multiplication, and there are other instances,
and still more extraordinary ones, in which this process takes place
naturally, in a more hidden, a more recondite kind of way. You are all
of you familiar with those little green insects, the 'Aphis' or blight,
as it is called. These little animals, during a very considerable part
of their existence, multiply themselves by means of a kind of internal
budding, the buds being developed into essentially asexual animals,
which are neither male nor female; they become converted into young
'Aphides', which repeat the process, and their offspring after them,
and so on again; you may go on for nine or ten, or even twenty or more
successions; and there is no very good reason to say how soon it might
terminate, or how long it might not go on if the proper conditions of
warmth and nourishment were kept up.
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