More Science from an Easy ChairLankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
History
More Science from an Easy Chair
Lankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
Natural history; Science
different, and have naturally been supposed at first to have nothing
to do with each other.
Thus some of the little "coralline polyps" and other most beautiful
little marine flower-like polyps attached to rocks, weeds, and shells
in the sea reproduce by budding and division. But after a period of
such growth and such budding they produce on their stalks--jelly-fish!
These jelly-fish are budded and thrown off by them, as glass-like
swimming bells, which lead an independent life, seize prey, nourish
themselves, and grow to a size varying from that of a sixpence to that
of a cart-wheel. These "bells" are commonly known as "jelly-fish."
They discharge thousands of egg-cells into the sea and fertilise them
with sperms! From those fertilised eggs grow young polyps, which fix
themselves to rocks or weeds, and grow up to bud and multiply by
fission, and eventually to produce again by fission a generation of
jelly-fishes! Such a marvellous history of alternating modes of
reproduction has been discovered, and described in greatest
microscopic detail and with most ample pictorial representations of
all the minutest structures of the organisms studied, not only in many
marine polyps, but also in the case of many parasitic worms, such as
the tape worms and the liver-flukes. Some of the most fascinating
cases, on account of the beauty of the little creatures concerned, are
found amongst the surface-swimming Ascidians of the sea--the
glass-like Salps. But our common ferns and mosses also show this same
alternation of sexual and sexless generations, the two generations
differing greatly in size, form, and structure from one another,
whilst the whole story of "flowers" and their structure is bound up
with a wonderful "telescoping" or rolling of the two generations
(sexless and sexual) into one plant!
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