Scientific American Supplement, No. 470, January 3, 1885Various
Science
Scientific American Supplement, No. 470, January 3, 1885
Various
Science -- Periodicals
I will now give you the facts in relation to two which shall be typical.
We obtained them in enormous abundance in a maceration of fish. I will not
take them in the order of our researches, but shall find it best to
examine the largest and the smallest. The appearance of the former is now
before you. It is divergent from the common type when seen in its perfect
condition, avoiding the oval form, but it resumes it in metamorphosis. It
is comparatively huge in its proportions, its average extreme length being
the 1/1000 of an inch. Its normal form is rigidly adhered to as that of a
rotifer or a crustacean. Its body-substance is a structureless sarcode.
Its differentiations are a nucleus-like body, not common to the monads;
generally a pair of dilating vacuoles, which open and close, like the
human eyelid, ten to twenty times in every minute; and lastly, the usual
number of four flagella. That the power of motion in these forms and in
the Bacteria is dependent upon these flagella I believe there can be no
reasonable doubt. In the monads, the versatility, rapidity, and power of
movement are always correlated with the number of these. The one before us
could sweep across the field with majestic slowness, or dart with
lightning swiftness and a swallow's grace. It could gyrate in a spiral, or
spin on its axis in a rectilinear path like a rifled bullet. It could dart
up or down, and begin, arrest, or change its motion with a grace and power
which at once astonish and entrance. Fixing on one of these monads then,
we followed it doggedly by a never-ceasing movement of a "mechanical
stage," never for an instant losing it through all its wanderings and
gyrations; We found that in the course of minutes, or of hours, the
sharpness of its outline slowly vanish, its vacuoles disappeared, and it
lost its sharp caudal extremity, and was sluggishly amoeboid. This
condition tensified, the amoeboid action quickened as here depicted, the
agility of motion ceased, the nucleus body became strongly developed, and
the whole sarcode was in a state of vivid and glittering action.
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