Page:Life and death (1911).djvu/221

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

evacuation of fæces, and the rhythmical contraction of the pulsatile vesicules are concerned. But Balbiani's researches in 1892 have shown us that secretion, complete regeneration, and the faculty of reproduction by fission can take place only in the nucleated fragment—i.e., in the nucleus.

Accidental Reproduction in the Metazoa.—Among multicellular beings the faculty of reproduction is met with in the highest degree in plants, where we find it in the process of propagation by slips. In animals it is the most marked in Cœlenterata. Trembley's experiments are a striking instance. We know that when the hydra is cut into tiny pieces it reproduces exactly as many complete beings. Among the worms, Planaria afford a similar example. Every fragment, provided its volume is not less than a tenth of that of the whole, can reproduce a complete, entire being. The snail can produce a large part of its head, including the tentacles and the mouth. Among the Tritons and the Salamanders the faculty of regeneration reproduces the limbs, the tail, and the eye. In the Frog family, on the contrary, the work of regeneration does not go beyond cicatrization, and it is the same with Birds and Insects.

It is really startling to see in a vertebrate like the Triton the stump of an arm with its fragment of humerus reproducing the forearm and the hand in all their complexity, with their skeleton, blood vessels, nerves, and teguments. We say that the limb has budded, as if there were a germ of it which develops like the seed of a plant, or as if each transverse portion of the limb, each slice, so to speak, could re-form the slice that follows.

The mechanism of generation and that of regenera-