again. The power of recognition must be acquired by familiarity: and it is because men can't begin with familiarity, and can't recognize these Polypes without it, that so few persons really ever see them. But the familiarity may be acquired by a very simple method. Make it a rule to pop every unknown object into your wide-mouthed phial. In the water it will probably at once reveal its nature: if it be a Polype, it will expand its tentacles; if not, you can identify it at leisure on reaching home, by the aid of pictures and descriptions. See, as I drop one of these into the water, it at once assumes the well-known shape of the Polype. And now we will see what these blood-red dabs may be; in spite of their unusual colour, I cannot help suspecting them to be Polypes also. Give me the camel-hair brush. Gently the dab is removed, and transferred to the phial. Shade of Trembley! it is a Polype![1] Is it possible that this discovery leaves you imperturbable, even when I assure you it is of a species hitherto undescribed in text-books? Now, don't be provokingly indifferent! rouse yourself to a little enthusiasm, and prove that you have something of the naturalist in you by delighting in the detection of a new species. "You didn't know that it was new?" That explains your calmness. There must be a basis of knowledge before wonder can be felt—wonder being, as Bacon says, "broken knowledge." Learn, then, that hitherto only three species of fresh-water Polypes have been described: Hydra viridis, Hydra fusca, and Hydra grisea. We have now a fourth to swell the list; we will christen it Hydra rubra, and be as modest in our glory as we can. If any one puts it to us, whether we seriously attach importance to such trivialities as specific distinctions resting solely upon colour, or size, we can look profound, you know, and repudiate the charge. But this is a public and official attitude. In private, we can despise the distinctions established by others, but keep a corner of favouritism for our own.[2]
I remember once showing a bottle containing Polypes to a philosopher, who beheld them with great calmness. They appeared to him as insignificant as so many stems of duckweed; and lest you should be equally indifferent, I will at once inform you that these creatures will interest you as much as any that can be found in ponds, if you take the trouble of studying them. They can be cut into many pieces, and each piece will grow into a perfect Polype; they may be pricked, or irritated, and the irritated spot will bud a young Polype, as a plant buds; they may be turned inside out, and their skin will become a stomach, their stomach a skin. They have acute sensibility to light (towards which they always
- ↑ Trembley in his admirable work. Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire d'une genre de Polypes d'eau douce, 1744, furnished science with the fullest and most accurate account of fresh-water Polypes; but it is a mistake to suppose that he was the original discoverer of this genus: old Leuwenhoek had been before him.
- ↑ The editors of the Annals of Natural History append a note to the account I sent them of this new Polype, from which it appears that Dr. Gray found this very species and apparently in the same spot nearly thirty years ago. But the latest work of authority, Van der Hoeven's Handbook of Zoology, only enumerates the three species.
