Slime

“ Before one's view there stretches away what appears to be a verdant meadow, dead level, and clad in rich green grass. Walk out on it, and you find it is bog, soft as pulp—millions of flat-topped, quivering tussocks, each separated by narrow intervals of squashy slime, knee-deep if you are lucky; the tussocks afford no foothold, the slime no stability—you cannot stand still, yet hardly dare advance. Before you, behind you, to the right and left, rise snipe in scores—in clouds: the air resounds with petulant, tantalizing cries. ”

“ Grim is never weary of rubbing against the soft, muddy peat.
Half-decayed remains of dead stalks form a network all over the great cushion at the bottom, and fresh remains of cell-tissue and organic things just dead are always on their way down. But from the depth new life rises once more; the sun is ever setting free tiny, green, mossy balls of slime that lie moored, as it were, to a single fine umbilical cord, and twirl and sway down on the bottom. All at once the cord breaks, and they rise through the water in a cluster like bubbles, and expand into large, fringed umbels. ”

“ Into the void I peered, but could make out nothing, though I could hear my own laboured breathing, and the melancholy drip, drip of water as it oozed from above me and fell in sullen drops on the slime below. ”

“ It is as though the bed of the ocean had suddenly risen, as though the ocean depths had become valleys and the ocean mudbanks hills, and the whole earth were a creation of slime. It is as though you suddenly looked out upon the birth of the world, before the grass had yet begun to spring and when the germs of primitive life still lay in the slime which covered it ”

“ The ground was very unstable all about us. I could feel slow waves rolling sluggishly under my feet, caused by my own and my companions’ footsteps on the thin carpet of vegetable matter covering the morass. When I tested the patch I found it to be slime. Correction southerly, all southerly now, to edge away from the wood. The areas of slime increased in number, multiplied, flowed together. The third I came to seemed to offer some resistance to the probing staff at first, then the pole went in as into water. I lost my balance. My left foot swung forward, to find another hold. ”

“ But a fresh crop of worms, and their subsequent generations, directed a pen that will entwine his memory around and within the body, flesh, blood, bones and marrow of the solitary being who beholds the orbs of night and day forever close their brilliant eyes on a numerous, funny, and mysterious race of worms that have so long defaced, and polluted and crawled through earth, sea and air, leaving their nauseous slime behind. ”

“ Clouds of dense yellow fog belched from countless projectors in the hands of the bluish-gray hosts, and beneath that deadly miasma all animal and plant life on the doomed planet was crumbling, dying, and rotting into a liquid slime. Then even the slime was swiftly obliterated, and the Xoranians were left triumphant upon a world starkly desolate. ”

“ Cube lifted away one of the latter, and peered down into a stagnant, fetid pool of green slime in which sticks of wood and small boulders were placed. No fish or other large organism could live in such water; the odor fairly snatched at human respiration. ”

“ But at the very bottom, in this carpet of slime, there are no weeds, or as we might call them sea-vegetables, for they cannot live altogether without light, so the creatures which have their home in what to us would seem this cheerless, miserable retreat, must live on one another. They are differently built from surface fish, because they have always resting upon them the weight of an enormous pile of water. ”

“ Thus, in the slime on the bottom of the waters in mines, several species of amœbæ are found, which consist of microscopically small animated bodies, continually floating about, nourishing themselves by absorbing organic matter, possessing sensation, propagating, etc., and, in fact, having actually the qualities of real animal nature. ”

“ It has been found that the formation of this layer of slime may be avoided by the use of tubs which are lined with sheet zinc. The addition of 10-20 cubic centimetres of formalin [40% solution of formaldehyde] to every hundred gallons of water also prevents or restrains the formation of slime. ”

“ All were of a uniform rusty-red colour, each with his broad bosom bared, and perspiration trickling down his besmeared countenance.
Here, however, the uniformity of their appearance ended, for they were of all sizes and characters. Some were robust and muscular; some were lean and wiry; some were just entering on manhood, with the ruddy hue of health shining through the slime on their smooth faces; some were in the prime of life, pale from long working underground, but strong, and almost as hard as the iron with which they chiselled the rocks. ”

“ There are more than 400 species of these slime molds and they are distributed over all the temperate and tropic zones. If only the spores and the stalked little ball containing them are considered, the slime mold would be placed squarely in the kingdom of plants. But when the protoplasm escapes from the spore and starts moving about ingesting bacteria, the behavior is that of a one-celled animal. When the cells unite to form a plasmodium there is a close likeness to a many-celled animal. ”

“ Covering himself in mud, and lying still on the bank of some stream, he opens his enormous jaws, when hundreds of smaller reptiles, attracted by the mucus or slime which covers his exterior, become the easy prey of the artful machinations of their scaly deceiver. ”

“ The force is supplied by the sudden contraction of the muscular body wall. They can squirt the slime to the distance of almost a foot. The slime, which appears to be perfectly harmless, is extremely sticky, but it easily comes away from the skin of the animal itself. ”

“ Above is man, built of myriads of cells woven into the most ingenious tissues and the most perfect organs for each function of life; below we have the radiolarian, in which a single cell must discharge all the vital functions, because its whole body is merely one cell. But there is another wonder. This tiny particle of living slime, floating in the blue waves at Messina, hardly more visible than a drop of spittle, has a most remarkable quality. ”

“ Squatting in the mire at the bottom of some dark hole, it absorbs the unwholesome humors of the slime for use in filling the warts on its back with a milky venom which oozes out and moistens the entire body in time of peril. ”

“ This animal has his body always covered with slime, which is the case with all fishes that live in muddy waters. When he comes on shore his track is covered with that slime, as his belly trails on the ground, and this renders the earth very slippery in that part, especially as he returns by the same path to the water. ”

“ Everywhere fat banks of black mud, nourishing everlasting mangroves, the obscene slime here piled up in great rotting masses, there smooth in beds, from which bubbles of impure air would come bursting to the surface, and sending up hideous smells of putrefaction. ”

“ In reality the apparent dewdrops consist of a sticky, clear, viscid slime, which is secreted by the glandular ends of the pin-shaped hairs or 'tentacles.' Insects which settle on the leaf are caught by the slime, and in this case also an acid, pepsin-containing fluid is secreted, which gradually effects the digestion of the soluble parts of the insect. ”

“ The possession of walls is an indication of some maturity. In the slime-mould the assumption of walls is indeed delayed. Walls at length appear and when they do come they are like those of the lily; they are cellulose. The myxomycetes may be regarded as a section of the organic world in which the forces of heredity are at a maximum whatever those forces may be. Slime-moulds have in smallest degree responded to the stimulus of environment. They have, it is true, escaped the sea, the fresh waters in part, and become adapted to habitation on dry land, but nothing more. ”

“ Even the yolk of an egg is nothing but albumen, mixed with granules of fat. Oken was therefore right when, more divining than knowing, he made the assertion—“Every organic thing has arisen out of slime, and is nothing but slime in different forms. This primitive slime originated in the sea, from inorganic matter in the course of planetary-evolution.”
Another equally grand idea of the same philosopher is closely connected with his theory of primitive slime, which coincides with the extremely important Protoplasm theory. ”

“ The banks of the river are shining slime giving off fetid exhalations under the burning sun; there is a general smell of vegetable decomposition, and miasma fever (one would suppose) is exhaling from every bubble of the teeming slime and swamp.
In the veranda of Mr. Hawley's house a number of forlorn-looking Rajahs are sitting, each with his forlorn-looking train of followers, and in front of the police station a number of forlorn-looking Malays are sitting motionless hour after hour. ”

“ The process is probably identical with that seen in Limax, but the thread, instead of preventing the animal's fall, prevents its sudden rise to the surface. The animal, gradually raising the anterior part of its foot from the bottom on which it is travelling, crawls upwards through the water upon its slime, which, left behind in the form of a thread, retains the animal as it slowly ascends to the surface, to which, or to the slime-film now deposited there, the thread is fixed; subsequently, crawling down the thread thus fixed, the creature uses it as a means of descent to its former position. ”

“ Some use to put up fish in baskets or hampers for carriage, stowing them with grass between; but this is not so good as water, for the grass cleaving to the slime of the fish, rubs and cleans it from the scales; which done, a carp scarce ever thrives after. And although perhaps the fish may live, they will not grow or thrive, because their natural slime, scarce recoverable, is rubbed off; and for the same reason, it is not good to let carps lie at all in grass, but keep them always in water, to preserve them from bruises, and losing their slime. ”

“ The total life of an organism in any case must be taken into account. [11] At the outset plants and animals are alike; there is no doubt about it; they differ in the course of their life-histories. The plasmodium is the vegetative phase of the slime-mould. It needs no cell-walls of cellulose, no more than do the dividing cells of a lily-endosperm; both are nourished by organic food and resort to walls only as conditions change. ”

“ Sometimes when you have been walking over the moorland you have run to gather some bright yellow moss, and have suddenly found your foot sinking into wet, black mud, and you have heard stories of men and horses sucked down by just such dreadful slime. ”

“ But the slime is lighter, wherein minerals, vegetables, animals, are procreated, as wee see by experience, by putting pure slime to the Erthree; for in lesse then three weekes, you will finde therein small stones, herbs, wormes, and snailes, and other little beasts, producted therefrom. Of the nourishment remaining that these individuals shall bee, as that of Sand, deprived of all humidity; according to what wee see in Earths, which having beene too much cultivated, and sowed, without bettering of them, are reduced from being fertill, as formerly they were, and become sandy and sterill ”

“ With such a life-history as that thus briefly sketched, it is small wonder that the taxonomic place of the slime-moulds is a matter of uncertainty, not to say perplexity. So long as men studied the ripened fruit, the sporangia and the spores, with the marvellous capillitium, there seemed little difficulty; the myxomycetes were fungi, related to the puff-balls, and in fact to be classed in the same natural order. The synonymy of some of the more noticeable species affords a very interesting epitome of the history of scientific thought in this particular field of investigation. ”

“ If we find this slime forming on the light side of our miniature pond we put it in a darker place, shade it heavily so that the light comes in from the top only, and put in a few more snails. These will make quick work of the green slime, for they are fond of it, if we are not. ”

“ Into the Eastern vacuity the empty world of Luvah
25 The ever pitying one who seeth all things saw his fall
And in the dark vacuity created a bosom of clayt
When wearied dead he fell his limbs reposd in the bosom of slime
As the seed falls from the sowers hand so Urizen fell & death
Shut up his powers in oblivion. then as the seed shoots forth
30 In pain & sorrow. So the slimy bed his limbs renewd
At first an infant weakness. ”

“ Another method is to send a man belonging to the Kāsada sept—Kāsada meaning slime—to bring a plough from the field and place it in his house. He also stops bathing or washing for the period for which a break in the rains is required, and the idea is perhaps that as the man whose name and nature are mud or slime is dry so the mud on the earth will dry up; and as the plough is dry, the ploughed fields which have been in contact with it will also become dry. ”

“ Slime-moulds have long attracted the attention of the student of nature. For nearly two hundred years they find place more or less definite in botanical literature. Micheli, 1729, figures a number of them, some so accurately that the identity of the species is hardly to be questioned. Other early writers are Buxbaum and Dillenius. But the great names before Rostafinski are Schrader, Persoon, and Fries. ”