Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 October 1882 — Animals Not Necessarily Mortal. [ARTICLE]

Animals Not Necessarily Mortal.

According to the Journal of Science, all animal life is not, of necessity, subject to death. Let us suppose, says the Journal, that we are watching through a microscope one of these minute single-cell creatures known as a protozoan. We see it expanding into an ellipsoidal figure, which becomes for a time longer and longer. It then begins to contract about what we may, for the sake of popular intelligibility, call its equator. It assumes the form of two nearly globular bodies, connected dumb-bell like by a narrow neck. This neck becomes narrower, and at last the two globes are set free, and appears as two individuals in place of one! What are the relations of these two new beings to the antecedent form and to each other? We examine them with care; they are equal in size, alike in complexity, or rather simplicity, of structure. We can not say that either of them is more mature or more rudimentary than the other. We can find in their separation from each other no analogy to the separation of the young animal or the egg from its mother, or to the liberation from a seed from a plant. Neither of them is parent, and neither offspring. Neither of them is elder or younger than the other. The process of reproduction, or rather of multiplication, must, so far as we can see, be repeated in the same manner forever. Accidents excepted, they are immortal; and frequent as such accidents must be, the individuals whom they strike might, or rather would, like the rest of their community, have gone on living and splitting themselves up forever. It is strange, when examining certain infusoria under the microscope, to consider that these frail and tiny beings were living not potentially in their ancestors, but really in their own persons, perhaps in the Laurentian epoch.

The result of my use of St. Jacobs Gil for rheumatism is: I have been recommending it ever since, says the Mayor of Chicago, Hon. Carter H. Harrison, in the Chicago Times. A passenger who has bought a through ticket for a journey which must be made by connecting lines, and has checked his baggage from the starting place to his destination, may recover for any loss or injury to the baggage from the company which sold him the ticket, or from the company which has delivered the baggage in bad order, or \yhich has lost it, in the opinion of the Supreme Court of Georgia, in Wolff vs. The Central .Railroad Company, decided at the present term of ourt. A missionary in Jamaica was once questioning some little black children on the fifth chapter of Matthew’s gospel, and he asked: “Who are the meek?” A little fellow answered: “Throe who give soft answers to rough questions.”