In some of Mr Worthington’s most beautiful experiments on {236} splashes, it was found that the fall of a round pebble into water from a considerable height, caused the rise of a filmy sheet of water in the form of a cup or cylinder; and the edge of this cylindrical film tended to be cut up into alternate lobes and notches, and the prominent lobes or “jets” tended, in more extreme cases, to break off or to break up into spherical beads (Fig. [70])[293]. A precisely similar appearance is seen, on a great scale, in the thin edge of a breaking wave: when the smooth cylindrical edge, at a given moment, shoots out an array of tiny jets which break up into the droplets which constitute “spray” (Fig. [71], a, b). We are at once reminded of the beautifully symmetrical notching on the calycles of many hydroids, which little cups before they became stiff and rigid had begun their existence as liquid or semi-liquid films.
Fig. 71. A breaking wave. (From Worthington.)
The phenomenon is two-fold. In the first place, the edge of our tubular or crater-like film forms a liquid ring or annulus, which is closely comparable with the liquid thread or cylinder which we have just been considering, if only we conceive the thread to be bent round into the ring. And accordingly, just as the thread spontaneously segments, first into an unduloid, and then into separate spherical drops, so likewise will the edge of our annulus tend to do. This phase of notching, or beading, of the edge of the film is beautifully seen in many of Worthington’s experiments[294]. In the second place, the very fact of the rising of the crater means that liquid is flowing up from below towards the rim; and the segmentation of the rim means that channels of easier flow are {237} created, along which the liquid is led, or is driven, into the protuberances: and these are thus exaggerated into the jets or arms which are sometimes so conspicuous at the edge of the crater. In short, any film or film-like cup, fluid or semi-fluid in its consistency, will, like the straight liquid cylinder, be unstable: and its instability will manifest itself (among other ways) in a tendency to segmentation or notching of the edge; and just such a peripheral notching is a conspicuous feature of many minute organic cup-like structures. In the case of the hydroid calycle (Fig. [72]), we are led to the conclusion that the two common and conspicuous features of notching or indentation of the cup, and of constriction or annulation of the long cylindrical stem, are phenomena of the same order and are due to surface-tension in both cases alike.
Fig. 72. Calycles of Campanularian zoophytes. (A) C. integra; (B) C. groenlandica; (C) C. bispinosa; (D) C. raridentata.
Another phenomenon displayed in the same experiments is the formation of a rope-like or cord-like thickening of the edge of the annulus. This is due to the more or less sudden checking at the rim of the flow of liquid rising from below: and a similar peripheral thickening is frequently seen, not only in some of our hydroid cups, but in many Vorticellas (cf. Fig. [75]), and other organic cup-like conformations. A perusal of Mr Worthington’s book will soon suggest that these are not the only manifestations of surface-tension in connection with splashes which present curious resemblances and analogies to phenomena of organic form.
The phenomena of an ordinary liquid splash are so swiftly {238} transitory that their study is only rendered possible by “instantaneous” photography: but this excessive rapidity is not an essential part of the phenomenon. For instance, we can repeat and demonstrate many of the simpler phenomena, in a permanent or quasi-permanent form, by splashing water on to a surface of dry sand, or by firing a bullet into a soft metal target. There is nothing, then, to prevent a slow and lasting manifestation, in a viscous medium such as a protoplasmic organism, of phenomena which appear and disappear with prodigious rapidity in a more mobile liquid. Nor is there anything peculiar in the “splash” itself; it is simply a convenient method of setting up certain motions or currents, and producing certain surface-forms, in a liquid medium,—or even in such an extremely imperfect fluid as is represented (in another series of experiments) by a bed of sand. Accordingly, we have a large range of possible conditions under which the organism might conceivably display configurations analogous to, or identical with, those which Mr Worthington has shewn us how to exhibit by one particular experimental method.
To one who has watched the potter at his wheel, it is plain that the potter’s thumb, like the glass-blower’s blast of air, depends for its efficacy upon the physical properties of the medium on which it operates, which for the time being is essentially a fluid. The cup and the saucer, like the tube and the bulb, display (in their simple and primitive forms) beautiful surfaces of equilibrium as manifested under certain limiting conditions. They are neither more nor less than glorified “splashes,” formed slowly, under conditions of restraint which enhance or reveal their mathematical symmetry. We have seen, and we shall see again before we are done, that the art of the glass-blower is full of lessons for the naturalist as also for the physicist: illustrating as it does the development of a host of mathematical configurations and organic conformations which depend essentially on the establishment of a constant and uniform pressure within a closed elastic shell or fluid envelope. In like manner the potter’s art illustrates the somewhat obscurer and more complex problems (scarcely less frequent in biology) of a figure of equilibrium which is an open surface, or solid, of revolution. It is clear, at the same time, that the two series of problems are closely akin; for the {239} glass-blower can make most things that the potter makes, by cutting off portions of his hollow ware. And besides, when this fails, and the glass-blower, ceasing to blow, begins to use his rod to trim the sides or turn the edges of wineglass or of beaker, he is merely borrowing a trick from the craft of the potter.
It would be venturesome indeed to extend our comparison with these liquid surface-tension phenomena from the cup or calycle of the hydrozoon to the little hydroid polype within: and yet I feel convinced that there is something to be learned by such a comparison, though not without much detailed consideration and mathematical study of the surfaces concerned. The cylindrical body of the tiny polype, the jet-like row of tentacles, the beaded annulations which these tentacles exhibit, the web-like film which sometimes (when they stand a little way apart) conjoins their bases, the thin annular film of tissue which surrounds the little organism’s mouth, and the manner in which this annular “peristome” contracts[295], like a shrinking soap-bubble, to close the aperture, are every one of them features to which we may find a singular and striking parallel in the surface-tension phenomena which Mr Worthington has illustrated and demonstrated in the case of the splash.