whole life of the animal had retired into
_it_, continued dancing upon the moss for a full minute after, like a
young eel scooped out of some stream, and thrown upon the bank; and then
lay wriggling and palpitating for about half a minute more. There are
few things more inexplicable in the province of the naturalist than the
phenomenon of what may be termed divided life,--vitality broken into
two, and yet continuing to exist as vitality in both the dissevered
pieces. We see in the nobler animals mere glimpses of the
phenomenon,--mere indications of it, doubtfully apparent for at most a
few minutes. The blood drawn from the human arm by the lancet continues
to live in the cup until it has cooled and begun to coagulate; and when
head and body have parted company under the guillotine, both exhibit for
a brief space such unequivocal signs of life, that the question arose in
France during the horrors of the Revolution, whether there might not be
some glimmering of consciousness attendant at the same time on the
fearfully opening and shutting eyes and mouth of the one, and the
beating heart and jerking neck of the other. The lower we descend in the
scale of being, the more striking the instances which we receive of this
divisibility of the vital principle. I have seen the two halves of the
heart of a ray pulsating for a full quarter of an hour after they had
been separated from the body and from each other. The blood circulates
in the hind leg of a frog for many minutes after the removal of the
heart, which meanwhile keeps up an independent motion of its own.
Vitality can be so divided in the earthworm, that, as demonstrated by
the experiments of Spalanzani, each of the severed parts carries life
enough away to set it up as an independent animal; while the polypus, a
creature of still more imperfect organization, and with the vivacious
principle more equally diffused over it, may be multiplied by its pieces
nearly as readily as a gooseberry bush by its slips. It was sufficiently
curious, however, to see, in the case of this brown lizard, the least
vital half of the creature so much more vivacious, apparently, than the
half which contained the heart and brain. It is not improbable, however,
that the presence of these organs had only the effect of rendering the
upper portion which contained them more capable of being thrown into a
state of insensibility. A blow dealt one of the vertebrata on the head
at once renders it insensibl