But though it can literally
turn itself inside out, like a glove, it still has some faint beginnings
of a mouth and stomach, for it generally takes in food and absorbs water
through a particular part of its surface, where the slimy mass of its
body is thinnest. Thus the amoeba may be said really to eat and
drink, though quite devoid of any special organs for eating or drinking.
The particular point to which I wish to draw attention here, however, is
this: that even the very simplest and most primitive animals do
discriminate somehow between what is eatable and what isn't. The
amoeba has no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no tongue, no nerves of taste,
no special means of discrimination of any kind; and yet, so long as it
meets only grains of sand or bits of shell, it makes no effort in any
way to swallow them; but, the moment it comes across a bit of material
fit for its food, it begins at once to spread its clammy fingers around
the nutritious morsel. The fact is, every part of the amoeba's body
apparently possesses, in a very vague form, the first beginnings of
those senses which in us are specialised and confined to a single spot.
And it is because of the light which the amoeba thus incidentally
casts upon the nature of the specialised senses in higher animals that I
have ventured once more to drag out of the private life of his native
pond that already too notorious and obtrusive rhizopod.
With us lordly human beings, at the extreme opposite end in the scale of
being from the microscopic jelly-specks, the art of feeding and the
mechanism which provides for it have both reached a very high state of
advanced perfection.
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