The Day After Death; Or, Our Future Life According to Science (New Edition)Figuier, Louis
Religion
The Day After Death; Or, Our Future Life According to Science (New Edition)
Figuier, Louis
Cosmology; Future life; Transmigration
The function of reproduction in plants is rich in conclusions in
support of our thesis. The plants called phanerogamous are not
reproduced only by impregnation by means of the visible sexual organs,
the pistil and the stamen, they are also multiplied by grafts, buds,
and cuttings. Cryptogamous plants, which have no sexual organs,
are multiplied either by effects which detach themselves from the
individual plant at a certain period of its vegetation as we see
in the case of fungi, algæ, mushrooms, &c., or by fragments of the
individual itself, which, being thrown into the ground, germinate and
multiply themselves.
Animals, in their several classes, represent all these modes of
reproduction; there is not one which does not exist among them. Animals
are not reproduced by eggs only, either interior or exterior, and by
living young ones, they are equally multiplied, like vegetables, by
offsets, by cuttings, and by ingraftment.
Multiplication by offsets may be observed in the fresh-water polype.
Little buds which grow and lengthen come out of the body of this
animal. While the bud is lengthening, he throws off other and smaller
offsets, which throw off still smaller ones. All these are so many
little polypes, which derive their nourishment from the principal
polype. Having attained a certain size, these offsets separate
themselves from the primitive individual, and constitute so many new
polypes. Coral multiplies itself in the same manner. From the principal
branch spring secondary branches which have originated in a bud or
shoot, and these branches, inserting themselves into the chief stem,
form new individuals. Thus the exterior aspect of the coral resembles a
ramified tree rather than an animal.
Madrepores, another kind of zoophytes, resemble trees so closely, that
for centuries they were supposed to be marine plants; they too, like
coral, are reproduced by offsets.
Multiplication by cuttings is seen in the fresh-water polype. Take a
fresh-water polype, and cut it into as many fragments as you choose.
Each of these fragments, left to itself, will become a polype. These
new individuals may be in their turn cut into pieces, which will
produce as many new ones. This is multiplication by cuttings, exactly
similar to the process in plants, so that the generation of fresh-water
polypes does not differ from that of one of our fruit-trees. It is not
only the entire polype which, thus cut to fragments, furnishes a new
polype; the skin of this animal can also produce one new individual or
several. Is not this a vegetable ingraftment?
A similar generation by ingraftment is to be observed in another
instance, in the case of the fresh-water polype. Take different
portions of the same polype, or those of different polypes, and join
them at the ends, or lay them upon one another, and you will combine
them so closely that they reciprocally nourish each other, and
ultimately form only one individual. Here is vegetable ingraftment
carried out in an animal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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