"In the evening of the 2d of June, 1858, in Bombay, while looking through a microscope at some _Euglenæ_, etc., which had been placed aside for examination in a watch-glass, my eye fell upon a stalked and triangular _acineta_ (_A. mystacina?_), around which an _amoeba_ was creeping and lingering, as they do when they are in quest of food. But knowing the antipathy that the _amoeba_, like almost every other infusorian, has to the tentacles of the _acineta_, I concluded that the _amoeba_ was not encouraging an appetite for its whiskered companion, when I was surprised to find that it crept up the stem of the _acineta_, and wound itself round its body.
"This mark of affection, too much like that frequently evinced at the other end of the scale, even where there is mind for its control, did not long remain without interpretation. There was a young _acineta_, tender and without poisonous tentacles (for they are not developed at birth), just ready to make its exit from its parent, an exit which takes place so quickly, and is followed by such rapid bounding movements of the non-ciliated _acineta_, that who would venture to say, _a priori_, that a dull, heavy, sluggish _amoeba_ could catch such an agile little thing? But the _amoebæ_ are as unerring and unrelaxing in their grasp as they are unrelenting in their cruel inceptions of the living and the dead, when they serve them for nutrition; and thus the _amoeba_, placing itself around the ovarian aperture of the _acineta_, received the young one, nurse-like, in its fatal lap, incepted it, descended from the parent, and crept off. Being unable to conceive at the time that this was such an act of atrocity on the part of the _amoeba_ as the sequel disclosed, and thinking that the young _acineta_ might yet escape, or pass into some other form in the body of its host, I watched the _amoeba_ for some time afterwards, until the tale ended by the young _acineta_ becoming divided into two parts, and thus in their respective digestive spaces ultimately becoming broken down and digested."[31]
[31] Carter, _Annals of Natural History_, 3d Series, 1863, pp. 45, 46; quoted also by Romanes, _Animal Intelligence_, pp. 20, 21.
In the discussion of conscious and unconscious mind, I called attention to the marginal bodies of the nectocalyx of the jelly-fish. These bodies in the "covered-eyed" species are protected by hoods of gelatinous tissue; in the naked-eyed species the hoods are absent. The marginal bodies in both species are practically identical as far as general make-up is concerned, being composed of an accumulation of brightly-colored pigment-cells, embedded in which are several minute clear crystals. Nerve-fibres connect these bodies with the sensorium ("nerve-ring").