Here we have, indeed, a creature little provided and in great peril. She is superior already; she has senses, and, if we may judge from her contractions, a great sensibility to suffering. She cannot, like the Polypus, be divided and live. Divide him and you double his existence; divide her and she dies. Gelatinous as the polypus, the Medusa seems to be an embryon cast away too soon from the bosom of the common mother, torn from the solid base and the association to which the Polypus owes his safety, and launched into adventure. How has the imprudent creature set out? How, without sails, or oars, or helm, has she left her port? What is her point of departure? Ellis, as long ago as 1750, saw a little Medusa produced from the campanular polypus, and many later observers have ascertained that she is a kind of polypus that has left the society. To speak more simply, she is an escaped polypus. And the learned M. Forbes who has so deeply studied them, very aptly asks, what is there astonishing in that? It only shows that to that extent the animal still obeys the vegetable law. From the tree, the collective being, proceeds the individual, the detached fruit which fruit will make another tree. A pear tree is a sort of vegetable polypus of which the pear, (the emancipated individual) can give us a pear tree. In like manner, adds Forbes, as the leaf laden tree, stops in its development, contracts, and becomes an organ of love--i. e. a flower, the _Polypier_, contracting some of its polypes and transforming their contractions, forms the placenta, the eggs from which proceeds the young and graceful Medusa. One would guess as much from her hesitating grace, that weakness at once so unarmed and so fearless, which embarks without instruments of navigation, and trusts too much to life. It is the first tender and touching adventure of the new soul going forth without defence from the security of the common life, to be itself, an individual acting and suffering on its own account--soft sketch of free nature; an embryon of liberty.