Now, the protoplasma is a hollow globule. The intestinal system is therefore nothing else than the original cystic form. Thus, there are Cystic animals like the Infusoria.
Again, cysts can increase in no other way, than by dividing into their like, or engendering cysts within themselves. The first kind of increase or multiplication of species is thus fissiparous, or produced by division.
The newly-engendered cysts are to be compared with the vitellus, and when they have attained perfection, to the ovum. They are therefore Oozoa or Ovum-animals.
In these animals consequently there are no separated sexual parts, namely, in addition to the vitelli, neither testes nor renal organs, or at least only obscure indications of them. In these Cystic animals the lowest feeling only, that of the sex or general sensation, can occur.
The Oozoa or Cystic animals, when compared with the plants, are the first flower that has been set free, or in other words, a flower which no longer stands polarwise upon a stem, because it is not developed in the differencing air, but in the indifferent water. It may be said that nature, having brought matters as far as the development of the sexual parts, then quits or passes out of the vegetable world; while these parts, or even the entire plant, requiring now no longer the stem and root, become a root themselves, and in behalf of this enter the water.
Animals, which have the form of flowers, are round or radiiform. There are Radiata or Radiated animals.
3108. These Anthoidal or Flower-like animals are Infusoria, Polyps, Acalephæ; being single or double concentric cysts.
3109. We may regard the Flower-animals as the fundamental mass of the sexual parts, which has attained unto free motion. They are sex throughout, or nothing but sex; it cannot therefore be said that they possess sexual parts like the plants, but that they are sexual parts. They are sexual parts that swim.
3110. Formerly, most of these Anthoidal animals were actually taken for real plants, on account of their floral and ramular form, and even their very substance; so slightly withdrawn are they from the vegetable kingdom. The whole difference between the two is effected by the water. Could we transpose them into the air, they would then become real plants.
3111. Now, as the vegetable flower is not a mere sexual system, but is also stock or trunk; so also is the animal flower at once an organ of digestion, respiration, and nutrition. The lowest condition of these organs is, however, only one of absorption, evaporation, and rigidification; these processes will therefore be present also, though only upon the lower stage—they are Intestinal animals; for in a simple intestine the same processes could occur, only within each other, whereas they are mutually dissevered or set apart in intestine, lung, and capillary system or parenchyma.