Polyps

These are animals:

• with a sub-gelatinous and regenerating body
• without any special organs, other than an alimentary canal with a single opening
• with a terminal mouth, together with radiating tentacles or a ciliate and rotating organ.

Here, the imperfection and the simplicity in the organic structure are very evident.

The animals at this point have hardly any more faculties and for a long time we had doubts about their animals nature.

These are gemmiparous animals:

• with a homogeneous body
• usually gelatinous
• very regenerative in their parts
• not manifesting a radiating shape (something nature began in them) except in their radiating tentacles around their mouths.

They have no other special organ except an intestinal canal with a single opening and, consequently, incomplete.

Polyps are much more imperfect animals than those which are part of the preceding classes.

They do not have:

• brain
• longitudinal marrow
• nerves
• special organs for respiration
• vessels for circulation of fluids
• ovaries for reproduction

The substance of their bodies is homogenous and made up of a gelatinous and irritable cellular tissue, in which fluids move slowly.

All their internal organs:

• are reduced to an imperfect alimentary canal
• are rarely folded back on itself or furnished with appendixes
• looki like only a long sack, always with only one single opening serving simultaneously as a mouth and anus.

Some claim that such animals that have no nervous system, respiratory organ, muscles, etc actually:

• have those organs dissolved in their corporeal mass and distributed in all its molecules, instead of being in particular places.
• could experience all sorts of sensations, muscular movement, will power, ideas, and thought.

I think that is not probable.

With such an assumption, one could say that the hydra has in all the points of its body, all the organs of perfect animals.

• The polyp could thus see, hear, smell, taste, etc. and have ideas, forms judgments, and thinks and reasons.

In reality, everywhere where an organ ceases to exist, the faculties which depend on it also cease.

Every animal which has no eyes sees nothing.

And although in the last analysis the different senses derive their source from touch, which is only variously modified in each of them, every animal which lacks nerves, the special organ of feeling, will not be able to experience any sort of sensation.

For it does not have the intimate sense of its existence, it does not have the chamber to which sensation must be conveyed, and consequently it would not be able to feel.

Thus, the sense of touch, the basis of the other senses, which is spread out into almost all parts of the bodies of those animals with nerves, does not exist any more in those which, like the polyps, lack nerves.

In the latter, the parts are only simply irritable, and are so to a very high degree. But they have no feeling, and as a result, no type of sensation.

In fact, in order for a sensation to take place, there must first be an organ to receive it (nerves) and then there must be some chamber or other (a brain or a longitudinal marrow with ganglia) where this sensation can be carried.

A sensation is always the consequence of a received impression which is carried immediately to an interior chamber where this sensation is formed.

If you interrupt the communication between the organ which receives the impression and the chamber where the sensation is formed, all feeling immediately ceases in this place. One will never be able to contradict this principle.

No polyp can really be oviparous.

For no polyp has a special organ for reproduction.

Besides, to prepare real eggs, the animal must have:

• an ovary
• a special organ for fertilization

Instead, they have buds which develop for reproducing themselves.

These buds are only fissions more isolated from the animal’s body.

Its fissions are less simple than those that multiply the animalcules which make up the last class of the animal kingdom.

The polyps:

• are very irritable
• move only with external stimulations foreign to them.

All their movements are results of impressions received.

They generally carried out without acts of free will, because they do not know how to produce them, since they cannot have free will.

The light forces them constantly and always in the same manner to direct themselves its way, as it does with respect to branches and leaves or the flowers of plants, although more slowly.

No polyp moves after its prey or seeks for it with its tentacles. But when some foreign body touches these same tentacles, they seize it, take it into the mouth, and the polyp swallows it without making any distinction about its appropriate nature or about its utility.

It digests it and feeds on it, if this body is capable of being digested. It rejects it entirely, if it is preserved intact for some time in the alimentary canal.

Finally it returns any remains which it cannot break down any more. But in all that, the action is a necessary one, without ever the possibility of a choice which permits the action to vary.

As to the distinction between the polyps and the radiates, it is very large and marked. We do not find in the interior of the polyps any distinct part having a radiating arrangement.

Their tentacles alone have this arrangement, that is to say, the same as the arrangement of the arms of the cephalid mollusks, which we will surely not mix up with the radiates. Moreover, the polyps have a terminal superior mouth, while the mouth of the radiates is arranged differently.

We cannot call polyps as zoophytes or animal-plants because they are completely animals.

• They have faculties not found in plants, that of being truly irritable and can digest.

The only interrelationships between polyps and plants are:

1. The similar simplification in their organic structure
2. The faculty which many polyps possess of:

• adhering to one another
• communicating by their alimentary canal
• forming composite animals

3. The exterior shape of the masses which these combined polyps form.

This shape for a long time made people take these masses for real plants, because often they are branched out in almost the same way.

Whether the polyps have a single or several mouths, it is always the case, with respect to them, that they lead to a single alimentary canal and, consequently, to one digestive organ, which all the plants lack.

If the degradation in the organic structure which we have noticed in all the classes from the mammals on is anywhere evident, it is surely among the polyps, whose organic structure is reduced to an extreme simplicity.