The dinner having been purely
mutual, the resulting animal represented both the litigants equally;
just as, in cannibal New Zealand, the chief who ate up his brother chief
was held naturally to inherit the goods and chattels of the vanquished
and absorbed rival, whom he had thus literally and physically
incorporated.
A jelly-speck, floating about at his ease in a drop of stagnant water
under the field of a microscope, collides accidentally with another
jelly-speck who happens to be travelling in the opposite direction
across the same miniature ocean. What thereupon occurs? One jelly-speck
rolls itself gradually into the other, so that, instead of two, there is
now one; and the united body proceeds to float away quite unconcernedly,
without waiting to trouble itself for a second with the profound
metaphysical question, which half of it is the original personality, and
which half the devoured and digested. In these minute and very simple
animals there is absolutely no division of labour between part and part;
every bit of the jelly-like mass is alike head and foot and mouth and
stomach. The jelly-speck has no permanent limbs, but it keeps putting
forth vague arms and legs every now and then from one side or the other;
and with these temporary and ever-dissolving members it crawls along
merrily through its tiny drop of stagnant water. If two of the legs or
arms happen to knock up casually against one another, they coalesce at
once, just like two drops of water on a window-pane, or two strings of
treacle slowly spreading along the surface of a plate.
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