Their peculiar ambiguity is never devoid of interest. I tapped the left-hand trough.
Immediately an unexpected thing moved before me swimming by means of contraction; it was like an opaline Venetian goblet which had remained malleable; a second crossed over the first; they were two jelly-fish. Meanwhile the tapping of my fingers had set other things moving. The yellow and purple tufts of the anemones went back into their calcareous sheaths, then rhythmically unfolding, emerged again; the rays of the star-fish and sea-urchins stirred lazily; grays and reds and saffrons swayed about, and, as if under the influence of an eddy the whole aquarium became alive.
I tapped on the right-hand trough. Nothing budged.
This was proof positive; this separation of the polypi into two receptacles gave me a clearer understanding of the connection which, joining the animal and the vegetable, makes man akin to the blade of grass. At this meeting-place of the two organized kingdoms, the creatures on the left—active—were at the foot of their scale, and those on the right—inactive—at the top of theirs; the former were on the way to becoming beasts, the latter had finished being plants.
Thus, the gulf which seems to separate those two extreme poles in the world is reduced, as far as structure goes, to slight divergences, almost invisible—a less striking difference than that between the wolf and the fox which are, however, brothers.
Now, this infinitesimal difference in organization which Science, however, regards as unsurmountable, since it separates inertia from spontaneous movement—this difference Lerne had bridged! In the basin at the end of the room, the two species were grafted on to one another. I noted there a gelatinous sort of leaf of the immobile order, grafted on to a mobile stem, and now moving about too. The grafts adopted the condition of the plant into which they were inserted; penetrated with a life-giving juice, their indifference changed to animation, and the activity of the other was paralyzed through sucking in the ankylosis.
I would willingly have passed in review the various applications of this principle; but a medusa tied with a hundred knots to some seaweed or other struggled violently in its mossy net, and I turned away in disgust.
This last stage in grafting in spite of difficulties completed the profanation in my eyes, and I looked away into the blue shadow for less disagreeable sights.
The Professor’s apparatus stood ready for him. There was a whole chemist’s shop on a dresser. Four tables with clear glass tops alternated with the aquariums, and bore on them an arsenal of knives, pincers and tweezers.
No! Lerne had no right to do this! It was as infamous as a butchery! More so indeed! And his odious performances on virgin Nature offered at one and the same time the horror of a murder and the ignominy of a violation!