Part 11

In this pond at our feet there is an object worthy of a moment's observation, minute though it is, for it is only visible as a speck to the unassisted eye. On one of the whorl-filaments of this tuft of _Myriophyllum_, there stands up a cylindrical tube, firmly adherent to the plant by its foot, but free at its upper end. Small as it is, this chimney is built up of hundreds of pellets, solid, round, and yellow; placed in symmetrical order, and firmly cemented together. What has made this tube? Ha! here is the little architect ready to answer for himself; he thrusts out his head and shoulders from his chimney-top, and announces his scientific cognomen as _Melicerta ringens_.

Look! he is in the very act of building now. Did you see him suddenly bow down his head and lay a brick on the top of the last course? And now he is busy making another brick; his mould is a tiny cup-shaped cavity just below his chin; his material the floating floccose atoms of vegetable refuse. Cilia along his flower-like face collect these atoms into a stream, and pour them into the cup; and cilia within the cup whirl them rapidly round and round in many rotations, until with the aid of mucus they are somewhat consolidated into a round pellet. The brick is made, and nothing remains but that it be deposited next the former, in regular progression, and this is done by the tiny [Greek: tektôn], suddenly bending his head forward, and bringing the chin-cup with exact precision to the spot.

And how long has he been engaged in this piece of work? Little more than a day. It was commenced yesterday, when the creature was not more than one-third as large as he is now. But he had lived a few hours before the commencement of his work. He was a rover before he began to be a house-keeper. In that early stage of youth and freedom, before he had made up his mind to settle in life, he had no chin-cup, no flower-like face, and of course no tube. A cylindrical gelatinous pellucid worm, he issued out of the egg, with a brush of cilia on his crown, and danced waywardly through the water. While thus occupied, his form underwent some preliminary modifications, and at length was sufficiently matured, to enable him to choose a spot for the passing of his future life, and to commence the building on which he is still engaged.

Not so. The pellet which he deposited when we began to look at him, was the first he had ever made; he had been created but that moment; and all the previous pellets of the case had been called into being just as we saw them. They were built up prochronically.

I tear a piece of bark from the trunk of this half-decayed tree, and have disclosed amidst the rank-smelling damp and rotten wood, a large _Julus_, a slow-moving creature, with some hundred-and-fifty little twinkling feet. As this specimen has attained its adult condition, it must be at least two years old; for it does not acquire its reproductive organs and perfect development till that age.[70]

This creature has passed through a rather curious history of evolutions. The egg from which it was produced was lodged in a chamber excavated by the parent, a few inches below the surface of the rotten mould. From this egg proceeded a little kidney-shaped body, without limbs or motion, completely enveloped in a swathe of delicate transparent membrane. About a fortnight it remained in this helpless state, during which its organs had been forming out of the constituent cells, by repeated subdivision, and definite arrangement. At length it burst its cerement, and a minute Julus appeared, not more than 1/200th of an inch in length, composed of a head with antennæ, and a body of eight segments, of which the first three carried each a pair of legs.

All the multitudinous limbs which we see in this adult have been produced in successive moultings, and all the numerous segments have been produced by the subdivision of the last but one,--that is the joint preceding the anal one,--six at a time.

By the time the little animal was ready for the second sloughing, that is, in about a week after the preceding, three more pairs of feet were seen, which had budded from the fourth, fifth, and sixth segments, but which were as yet closely packed down beneath the investing skin; the seventh segment also was obscurely marked into six divisions. The skin was now thrown off, and these changes were perfected; the little Julus now had six pairs of feet, and thirteen segments.

This process was repeated again and again; the new limbs always developing on the segments last produced, and six new segments being always formed out of the existing penultimate. And by this gradual succession of development, the animal has attained the number of limbs and segments which we now perceive. The antennæ and the eyes have likewise passed through successive stages.

We have a right to infer the lapse of a period sufficient to produce these changes, for we see their indubitable results; but our inference would only lead us astray, because we have not allowed for a disturbing influence,--that of the Law of Creation. This is the Julus's first hour of life.

See, on the trunk of that towering _Cedrela_, a round hole, out of which a large Beetle is in the act of emerging. It is a noble _Buprestis_, encased in glittering mail, of the most refulgent metallic splendour, crimson, gold, and green. Can we find any clue to his age? Yes: the white grab has rioted and fattened in its burrows in the timber of this tree for many years; ever gnawing away with its horny auger-like jaws the solid wood in tortuous galleries, which constantly enlarged, as it progressively grew, while its wake, as it advanced, was partially filled by its ordure. The old tree is, no doubt, perforated, through and through, by its winding corridors, as large as your middle finger. As soon as the vermin had passed this his nonage, which, as I say, may have occupied a dozen years at least,[71] he sank into his short pupa-sleep, and here we see him paying his first visit to the light of day.

True; this is his first experience of daylight, and indeed of anything; for all the pupa-sleep and the larva-labour were prochronic in this case. The Beetle is just created.

Hark to that hollow roar! There is no mistaking that majestic sound. It is the voice of the many-sounding sea. Yonder through the trees we catch a glimpse of its shining face, and here we are at the verge of the cliffs, against whose feet the waves are breaking in white foam. We will clamber down to the rocks.

In this weed-fringed tide-pool there is a fine specimen of the Shore-crab (_Carcinus moenas_). It is a male just arrived at the perfection of adult age; its carapace smooth and wholly dark-green in hue, its under parts rufous orange. Its claws. are large and sharp; and the promptitude with which it presents these formidable weapons, extended to the utmost, shows how conscious it is of its warlike powers.

To all appearance this Crab is several years old;[72] I mean in this his present perfect or imago form. When this form was first assumed, the diameter of the carapace was not more than an eighth of an inch; it is now two inches; a great many periodical sloughings of the crust must have occurred to accomplish this sixteen-fold increase.

But four distinct metamorphoses were passed before the commencement of this form. There was the Grapsoid form with the outline of the carapace nearly parallel-sided, and the dentations on the sides. Before this there was the Megalopa form, with the carapace ovate, and the abdomen projecting behind. Before this there was the Zoea form, with the carapace rising into a tall erect spine, sessile eyes, no claws, and the abdomen a slender jointed cord ending in a triangular plate. And before this, there was the egg, which was laid by the mother Crab, and carried by her for a considerable time attached to the false feet of her abdomen.

All these evidences of age, clear and unanswerable though they are, are yet fallacious, because the Crab has been created but this morning.

On this sea-washed branch of a tree, which has been blown off by some tempest, and carried into the ocean, there is a single Barnacle (_Lepas_). It consists of a hand of many pairs of fringed fingers, protected by a shell of five pieces, and a long flexible cartilaginous stalk, by the lower extremity of which it adheres to the timber.

The shelly valves are all crossed by strongly marked lines running over their surfaces in a direction parallel with each other, and with the outer margins of each valve. These, like the corresponding foliations in the tube of the _Serpula_, indicate the successive stages of growth; the outlines of every valve having stood at each of these growth lines in succession. On each of the scutal valves in this individual I can count about 260 growth-lines: if we suppose one of these to be made in a week,[73] and the increase to proceed uniformly throughout the year, we must conclude the valve to have been just five years in making.

This animal, like others we have already examined, had, moreover, a history before the first vestige of a valve was formed. It had passed through several metamorphoses; in its pupa stage it had the form of a _Cypris_, and in this condition it first became adherent to the timber: before this it was a larva, having a general resemblance to another Waterflea, the _Cyclops_, especially in its younger stages: in this state it moulted several times. Nor was this the beginning of its life; for there was the still earlier condition common to all these classes of animals, viz. that of the egg, which was laid and carried for some time by the parent Barnacle, and at length hatched while within the valves of her shell.

Thus, through a course of several years we are able to trace back the existence of this Cirriped, to its parent of a former generation. But our conclusions are altogether vitiated by the simple fact that this individual is the first of its species; it never had a parent; it never was an egg.

From the rocky pool before us I have picked up a rough pebble, the surface of which is incrusted with a delicate work of stony lace. This fabric, too fine to be resolved by the unassisted eye, consists of the oval cells of a species of _Lepralia_. There are some hundreds of cells in this patch, which altogether does not cover a square inch of the pebble; and they are all made after one pattern, and set in a very regular manner, in quincunx. Each is a minute slipper-shaped box of stone, with the orifice set round with spines for the protection of the inmate, a transparent, elegant, and sensitive Polypide, which bears on its head a coronet of ciliated tentacles.

I am not going to describe the interesting structure and economy of this atom of life; but merely wish to direct your attention to one point,--the evidence which it affords of the lapse of past time.

Every one of these hundreds of stony cells, together with its living tenant, was normally produced by a process of gemmation; each having budded forth from the side of its predecessor as a knob of clear gelatinous flesh, in the midst of which was developed, first the cell, and then the polypide,--the latter appearing in a rudimentary condition, and gradually acquiring its proper organs, before the orifice of the cell was opened.

I said every one of the cells was thus formed; but I ought to have excepted a single cell, which, though in nowise differing from the rest in form or structure, had a very different origin. This was the primal cell, and its beginning was as follows:

A minute atom of a scarlet hue, and of a semi-elliptical shape, was one day whirling round and round with rapid gyrations in the open sea. It was of soft consistence, covered with strongly vibrating cilia, and furnished with some stouter setæ. After enjoying its motile instincts awhile, it settled down on this pebble, and became stationary. Presently it secreted and deposited calcareous matter around at, like a coating of the thinnest glass, the red parenchyma receding from the hyaline wall towards the centre.

Soon an orifice with thickened edges appeared on the upper side, and minute spines grew from the edges, which quickly lengthened. It was now a _Lepralia_ cell, and now the polypide was developed, and protruded its mouth from the orifice, surrounded by its elegant bell of ciliate tentacles. This solitary cell became the parent of hundreds more, by the gemmative process which I have already described.

But the red swimming atom;--whence came that? Well, it was shot out from the interior of a previous _Lepralia_, the result not of a gemmative but of a generative act. It originated in another patch similar to the one which incrusts this pebble, and that, in like manner, and by exactly similar stages, looked back to an anterior patch, and so on.

Plausible as this inference is, it is false; for the little aggregation of cells and polypides has been called into existence by the Divine _fiat_, this very instant.

We are still at the sea-shore. Within the long and narrow crevices into which these low-lying ledges of shale are split, innumerable tufts of sea-weed,--olive, purple, and green,--are perpetually waving in the wash of the sea. On one of these branching shrubs of _Phyllophora_, there is adhering, apparently cast there by accident, an irregular mass of pellucid jelly. It firmly cleaves to the alga, enclosing the bases of several branches within its firm but gelatinous substance.

This knob of jelly is a compound animal of the genus _Botryllus_, and it has just been created as we see it. In order to understand its nature, look at it more closely.

Enclosed in the clear purplish-grey jelly, in the midst of scattered lighter specks, we see several star-like figures of bright hues, in which yellow and red are predominant; the symmetrical arrangement of which pleases the eye, and reminds us of some ornamental pattern designed by human art. Each star is composed of several (three, seven, ten or more) pear-shaped animals, with their smaller ends meeting in the centre around a common orifice, from which a current of water is discharged.

Now this assemblage of animals bears evidence of progressive development. Some time ago a tiny egg was discharged from a parent _Botryllus_, which presently produced a little active tadpole-like larva, called a "spinule." This swam actively by means of its wriggling tail; but at length it settled head downward on this piece of sea-weed. Immediately the head adhered, by an effused cement, to its support; the tail now gradually disappeared; and the round head, in the midst of a mass of jelly-like cement, began to display two orifices on its surface. It soon assumed a pear-like shape, and thus the first _Botryllus_ was formed.

From the side of this "pear," another was developed by gemmation, and a third on the opposite side; the smaller ends of all were in contact, and the orifices of these extremities began to merge into one; while the large ends diverged. A fourth and a fifth "pear" were successively produced in the same mode, until a star or "system" was formed. Meanwhile the surrounding mass of living jelly had been commensurately enlarging, and a new _Botryllus_, separate from the other star, had been produced in the jelly, which was the commencing point of a second system; and thus, by degrees, the compound mass of systems has grown to its present state of development.

This process has been one of time: the adhesion of the "spinule" took place in about sixteen hours after its escape from the egg. The appearance of the two orifices was when the little animal was four days old; and by the end of a week a second "pear" had budded. The attainment of the present condition may have occupied about six months.

Nay; time has been no element in this development; it is prochronic development; it is the development of creation, not of nature.

Behold that ruffling of the smooth surface of the water; it is caused evidently by the forcible ejection of a current from some source a little way beneath the surface. Yes, it proceeds from the orifice in this mass of calcareous grit; where the protruding pipe of shell indicates the snug fortress of a _Clavagella_. I will carefully break away a little of the soft stone, and we shall see the curious structure more clearly. Ha! I have split off a piece which nicely exposes the whole burrow, without having materially injured the creature or his shell.

You see it is a bivalve Mollusk with one valve firmly imbedded and cemented into the stony wall of its chamber. But the hinder end of this valve is continued into a shelly tube, intended to protect the siphons, which is carried through the gallery forming the entrance into the chamber, and opens by a wide orifice in the free water outside. It is to this tube that I call your attention.

You observe that on its outer surface there are several foliated expansions of the shelly substance, surrounding it like so many frills at pretty regular intervals. Each of these foliations is a permanent record of a certain epoch. The terminal one is the margin of the tube-wall everted. The one below this was at some past period the eversion of the margin at what was at that time the extremity. The third frill had in like manner terminated the tube still earlier; and so with the fourth and fifth. It is impossible to look at these expansions, and not to believe that they have been formed in succession, in this way, by the periodic growth of the tube.

There was a time when, the first frill was not commenced; when the creature was a Mollusk with simple valves. But even this was not the beginning of its history. It was as a swimming Infusory with a broad ciliated disk, and a lashing _flagellum_, that the creature commenced its independent career; and it was doubtless in this condition[74] that it found its way into the burrow of some _Saxicava_. Here its tiny transparent valves were secreted; the left valve was soon cemented to the chamber; and then the creature began to secrete and form the tube around its siphons, which was progressively enlarged, and adorned at every stage of elongation by these witnessing frills--whose testimony is recorded in imperishable stone.

What can be more irresistible than such evidence as this? And yet we must take exception to it on the ground that this is the very hour of the animal's creation.

The elegant spinous shell-fish that we discern yonder, half-buried in the sandy floor of the sea--I mean that lilac-tinted Prickly Venus (_Dione Veneris_) needs no shelly protection for its siphons, which, as you may observe, are protruded to a great length. But a lesson not less instructive than that taught by the tube-frills of the _Clavagella_, is inculcated by the valves of the _Dione_. Near the hinder margin of each valve there is a ridge which runs from the beak to the front edge, a ridge which bears the series of long slender shelly spines, that imparts such a charm to this shell.

Each of these spines records an interval in the growth of the shell. There are sixteen distinctly enumerable; each of which may possibly mark a year's growth. The increase of bivalves, however, is slow; and it may be that a longer interval than a year has intervened between spine and spine. For if we look more closely at this beautiful shell, we see that the whole exterior of both valves is marked with concentric foliated ridges, which are also indubitable lines of growth; and that these are twice or thrice as numerous as the spines, from one to five being intercalated between those which support the prolongations of the shelly substance.

Each of these concentric lines has a history. Every line, as well as every spine, has been produced by a protrusion and eversion of the glanduligerous edge of the mantle, which then secreted and poured out a copious deposit of calcareous matter along the margin of the previously existing valve. In this species each periodic deposit took the form of a ridge slightly elevated above the general surface; and, because the turned up margin of the mantle invested the edge of the valve already formed, therefore the new layer, with its elevated ridge, was concentric with the last edge, which was concentric with the previous one, and so on, the common centre of all being the beak (_umbo_) at the back of the valve.

The spines were formed in a manner essentially similar. At every second or third period of increase, the margin of the mantle, which is very versatile and protrusile, was thrust out, at the point which corresponds to the spines, into a long fleshy groove, by the reduplication of its edge. Within this groove the calcareous secretion was poured out; and after it had been allowed a few moments to harden or "_set_," the mantle-groove was cautiously withdrawn, and a new spine was exposed, as a produced end to the foliated ridge.

Yet, though this is the normal and natural mode of production, both of the concentric line and of the spines, it would be illusory to conclude that they have been so produced in the present example. The entire formation of the _Dione_ before us has been ab-normal and preter-natural: it has been _created_, not _born_: the whole development so legibly written on the shell has been prochronic.

There goes the Scorpion Stromb (_Pteroceras scorpio_), crawling over the rocks with protruded head and tentacles, and bearing his massive house on his back. This shelly house of his will afford us a good example of structural development.

The great dilated lip, and the long finger-like processes of its edge, had no existence in the youthful days of the shell; they are marks of adult age: when young, the shell was simply spiral, with a thin straight lip bounding a narrow aperture.

Observe also a far more beautiful creature by its side, the Tiger Cowry (_Cypræa tigris_). Its shell is now entirely enveloped in the meeting wings of the great fleshy mantle, which is mottled with changing hues; and its foot or crawling disk covers a space three or four times as large as the shell. On lifting it in our hand, the whole of this array of soft flesh has been rapidly retracted, and has wholly disappeared within that very narrow orifice, bordered with toothed projections, on the under side of the shell, which we can hardly believe capable of receiving a twentieth part of the bulk that has vanished within it. And now we see nothing but the shell, with its smooth rounded back, marked with dark spots, its white inferior surface cleft by this longitudinal denticulate aperture, and its brilliant porcellanous varnish over the whole.

Now here is evidence of change and progress again. This Cowry-shell is very unlike that of an Olive, with a simple spire, an oval body, a smooth thin lip, and a wide orifice; and as unlike that of a Nautilus. Yet it has passed through both of these stages before it was disguised as we see it now. When it escaped from the egg-shell, it was a minute Pteropod, with two great ciliated disks, inhabiting a transparent nautiloid shell, and swimming giddily about in a revolving fashion. By and by, the tiny shell increased, and the outer whorl lengthened, putting on a long-oval figure. Then--that is, after a considerable period occupied in increasing the dimensions of the shell in this form--it began to assume the adult appearance. The outer lip, which had hitherto been thin, gradually thickened and encroached upon the spire, and the mantle began to secrete and deposit on the outer surface the coat of glassy enamel.