d
several times, showing that the _actinophrys_ instinctively knew that
those were nutritious grains, that they were contained in this cell, and
that, although each time after incepting a grain it went away to some
distance, it knew how to find its way back to the cell again which
furnished this nutriment.

"On another occasion I saw an _actinophrys_ station itself close to a
ripe spore-cell of _pythium_, which was situated on a filament of
_Spirogyra crassa_; and as the young ciliated monadic germs issued forth
one after another from the dehiscent spore-cell, the _actinophrys_
remained by it and caught every one of them, even to the last, when it
retired to another part of the field, as if instinctively conscious that
there was nothing more to be got at the old place.

"But by far the greatest feat of this kind that ever presented itself to
me was the catching of a young _acineta_ by an old sluggish _amoeba_,
as the former left its parent; this took place as follows:

"In the evening of the 2d of June, 1858, in Bombay, while looking
through a microscope at some _Euglenae_, 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 _amoebae_ 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