once, just like two drops of water on a window-pane, or two strings of treacle slowly spreading along the surface of a plate.  When the jelly-speck meets any edible thing—­a bit of dead plant, a wee creature like itself, a microscopic egg—­it proceeds to fold its own substance slimily around it, making, as it were, a temporary mouth for the purpose of swallowing it, and a temporary stomach for the purpose of quietly digesting and assimilating it afterwards.  Thus what at one moment is a foot may at the next moment become a mouth, and at the moment after that again a rudimentary stomach.  The animal has no skin and no body, no outside and no inside, no distinction of parts or members, no individuality, no identity.  Roll it up into one with another of its kind, and it couldn’t tell you itself a minute afterwards which of the two it had really been a minute before.  The question of personal identity is here considerably mixed.

But as soon as we get to rather larger creatures of the same type, the antithesis between the eater and the eaten begins to assume a more definite character.  The big jelly-bag approaches a good many smaller jelly-bags, microscopic plants, and other appropriate food-stuffs, and, surrounding them rapidly with its crawling arms, envelopes them in its own substance, which closes behind them and gradually digests them.  Everybody knows, by name at least, that revolutionary and evolutionary hero, the amoeba—­the terror of theologians, the pet of professors, and the insufferable bore of the general reader.  Well, this parlous and subversive little animal consists of a comparatively large mass of soft jelly, pushing forth slender lobes, like threads or fingers, from its own substance, and gliding about, by means of these tiny legs, over water-plants and other submerged surfaces.  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.