Medusoid Bells

Abstract

JUST now the sea is full of little tiny bells, and, what is more, they are all a-ringing. A few weeks ago I watched some of them developing. Precisely how they do so is not very easy to see, but they develop with amazing rapidity. It is hard indeed to believe that they “grow,” cell by cell; rather do they seem just to “come off” the parent stock, one after another, like little curiously formed drops or droplets. They seem to me to be formed as a whole, and, apparently (to use Adam Sedgwick's words, written more than thirty years ago), whatever celluJar elements they contain “must be regarded as a multiplication of nuclei and a specialisation of tracts and vacuoles in a continuous mass of protoplasm.” If this be so, we may throw conventional embryology aside, and conceive of the little bell as being automatically conformed by some physical process akin to the many beautiful phenomena of ordinary drops. But let us pass this problem by for the moment, and merely inquire what modifications of structure would be likely to ensue if the little bell, once formed or partly formed, were to be in a state of vibration; and if at the same time its semi-fluid or colloid and very heterogeneous substance were such as to permit easy transference from place to place of its heavier or lighter particles.