Moreover, this mode of formation has been actually witnessed and
described, though in a somewhat exceptional case. The little flagellate
monad Herpetomonas is normally destitute of an undulating membrane,
but possesses a single long terminal flagellum. According to Dr D. L.
Mackinnon, the cytoplasm in a certain stage of growth becomes somewhat
“sticky,” a phrase which we may in all probability interpret to mean
that its surface tension is being reduced. For this stickiness is shewn
in two ways. In the first place, the long body, in the course of its
various bending movements, is apt to adhere head to tail (so to speak),
giving a rounded or sometimes annular form to the organism, such as
has also been described in certain species or stages of Trypanosomes.
But again, the long flagellum, if it get bent backwards upon the body,
tends to adhere to its surface. “Where the flagellum was pretty long
and active, its efforts to continue movement under these abnormal
conditions resulted in the gradual lifting up from the cytoplasm of the
body of a sort of _pseudo_-undulating membrane (Fig. 92). The movements
of this structure were so exactly those of a true undulating membrane
that it was {269} difficult to believe one was not dealing with a
small, blunt trypanosome[316].” This in short is a precise description
of the mode of development which, from theoretical considerations
alone, we should conceive to be the natural if not the only possible
way in which the undulating membrane could come into existence.
There is a genus closely allied to Trypanosoma, viz. Trypanoplasma,
which possesses one free flagellum, together with an undulating
membrane; and it resembles the neighbouring genus Bodo, save that the
latter has two flagella and no undulating membrane. In like manner,
Trypanosoma so closely resembles Herpetomonas that, when individuals
ascribed to the former genus exhibit a free flagellum only, they are
said to be in the “Herpetomonas stage.” In short all through the
order, we have pairs of genera, which are presumed to be separate
and distinct, viz. Trypanosoma-Herpetomonas, Trypanoplasma-Bodo,
Trichomastix-Trichomonas, in which one differs from the other mainly if
not solely in the fact that a free flagellum in the one is replaced by
an undulating membrane in the other. We can scarcely doubt that the two
structures are essentially one and the same.
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