Stories of the Universe:Animal Life
Animal Life
9781465547958
pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
THE STORY OF ANIMAL LIFE If the microscope had never been invented, the Story of Animal Life, as it is related by modern science, could never have been told. It is to the microscope that we owe our knowledge of innumerable little animals that are too small to be seen by the unassisted eye; and it is to the microscope that we owe the most important part of our knowledge about the bodies of larger animals, about the way in which they are built up, and the uses of their different parts. The earlier opticians who toiled, one after another, to bring the microscope to perfection, never dreamed, in their most ambitious moments, of the value of the gift that their labour was to confer upon mankind. For the microscope alone has made it possible for men of science to study the world of living things. This is the value of honest and thorough work in almost every department of intellectual labour; that it builds a firm and sure though perhaps hidden foundation for the loftier and more perfect work of after days. The microscope has shown us the intimate structure of every organ of the animal body; and thus, in most cases, the uses of the organ, and the steps by which it performs its tasks, have been made clear. The microscope has also shown the true nature of the sexual functions, and all the steps of the processes of growth in young animals. None of these things could ever have been rightly understood without the microscope, for all their most important details are invisible to the naked eye. To the microscope, too, we owe our knowledge of the essential kinship between plants and animals; to it, also, our understanding of the oneness, the solidarity, as the French would say, of the animal kingdom, for it is in the structure of microscopic parts that resemblances are revealed under the most strikingly different circumstances of outward form. Let us inquire a little into the history of the animals that can only be seen by the aid of the microscope. Most of them live in water, especially dirty water, containing decaying remains of plants or animals. The naturalists who first discovered them studied them in infusions of hay, and so on, and hence these little creatures were named Infusoria—a name that has since been somewhat restricted in its application. By an infusion is meant that water is poured on some substance and allowed to stand; the more ancient and evil-smelling the infusion becomes, the more of these little animals do you find living in it. Nature provides dirty water ready made, in ditches and in ponds, and these are full of microscopic animals. And not only do they appear in dirty water, but kindred kinds appear in clean water also, and many in the waters of the sea. It will easily be understood that when the existence of microscopic animals was discovered, zoologists had greatly to modify their ideas of the animal world. Still more was this the case afterwards, when it was found that all animals were built up of minute parts much resembling these microscopic animals in their main features. To these unit parts, of which all animal bodies are composed, the term cell is applied. The name of cell is not very descriptive of these units in the animal body, but correctly describes the unit of plant structure. In certain important essential particulars both, however, are alike. Nowadays we are not content to describe the grouping and external features of cells; their minute structure also is made a subject of research and inquiry, and affords a field for most of the fashionable speculations of our own day
