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When Zoophytes Speak: Polyps and Naturalist Fantasy in the Age of Liberalism

2012; Routledge; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08905495.2012.646546

1477-2663

Danielle Coriale,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The first and most significant of these is Harriet Ritvo's The Animal Estate, which considers how certain animals (mostly mammals) became metaphorical conduits for the expression of human desires and sociopolitical aspirations. More recently, the essays collated in Victorian Animal Dreams keenly analyze Victorian representations of horses, dogs, tigers, crocodiles, elephants, and even beetles, but none broach the subject of microscopic animals or their sociopolitical valences. Finally, Susan Hamilton's edited collection, Animal Welfare and Antivivisection 1870-1910: Nineteenth-Century Women's Mission, collates an impressive variety of Victorian primary sources that promote and contest vivisection, an archive that focuses on highly developed animals. For a thorough account of Abraham Trembley's discovery of the polyp and an illuminating discussion of its impact on eighteenth-century observers, see Virginia P. Dawson, Nature's Enigma: The Problem of the Polyp in the Letters of Bonnet, Trembley, and Reaumur. For an insightful discussion of the polyp's influence on philosophy from the eighteenth century to the present day, see Laurence Simmons's chapter, "Towards a Philosophy of the Polyp." George Johnston, the chief British expert on zoophytes during the 1840s and 1850s, offered this brief history of the term: "When the word 'Zoophyte' began to be used by naturalists, it designated a miscellaneous class of beings, which were believed to occupy a space between the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and where the characteristics of the subjects of each kingdom met and were intermingled" (p. 1). Although he argues that "zoophytes" were since proven to be "altogether animal" (p. 1), Victorian writers continued to relish the seeming hybridity of these creatures. The spelling of the word "polyp" varies in nineteenth-century texts, but it is most often spelled with an "e" at the end (i.e. "polype"). Following modern convention, I leave the "e" off unless it appears in a primary source. John Stuart Mill, for example, modified the principles of classical liberalism, as he was unwilling to conceive the state as a source of tyranny and oppression. Rather, he struggled to balance personal liberty (which he conceived as freedom from the burden of moral codes and public opinion) with the state-supported educational systems that he believed were necessary for the cultivation of both national citizens and colonial subjects. As Johnston explains, "The individuals (Polypes) of a few families are separate and perfect in themselves, but the great majority of Zoophytes are compound animals, viz. each zoophyte consists of an indefinite number of individuals or polyps organically connected . . . forming in their aggregation, corals or plant-like Polypidoms" (p. 2). The two most common species of hydra are Hydra fusca and Hydra viridis. All of the freshwater polyps I discuss fall into one of these two taxons. For a systematic Victorian overview of many different species of polyps then recognized, see George Johnston's A History of the British Zoophytes (1847) and Rev. D. Landsborough's A Popular History of Zoophytes, or Corallines (1852). Baker's natural history, written as an epistle to Martin Folkes, then president of the Royal Society, relates to an English audience much of what Trembley had discovered. Baker also collates diverse, emergent sources on the newly discovered freshwater polyp and places them alongside Trembley's findings. While Baker's attribution of agency to the budding polyp is fantastical, his description of process is generally accurate. Unlike other Hydrozoa that lived in colonial arrangements or remained attached to one another, the freshwater polyp sprouted or "budded" from the parent, eventually detaching completely. Denise Gigante's recent book, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism, offers a fascinating argument about William Blake's interest in the polyp's regenerative capabilities to signify revolutionary power (p. 129). In Physiological Aesthetics (1877), which argues for a physiological basis for responses to aesthetic stimuli, Grant Allen argues that the polyp's assymetry would elicit a visceral disgust: "If we proceed to the animal world we see, in the lower grades of life, the radiated or circular arrangement of star-fish, sea-anemones, and echini, all of which are beautiful objects . . . all apparently amorphous creatures, like the oyster, the slug, and the polypus, besides all species which depart from the usual bilateral symmetry . . . strike us with a certain disgust" (p. 176). In the 1855 edition of his Outline, Thomas Rymer Jones adds this passage: "To the earlier observers of the habits of the Hydra nothing could be more mysterious than this faculty, possessed by the creature, of seizing and retainingsuch active prey . . . but which is now satisfactorily explained to depend upon the prensence of a prehensile apparatus." He goes on to explain that, "These wonderful organs . . . appear under high powers of the microscope to be undoubtedly composed of minute oval vesicles, from each of which can be protruded a long delicate filament" (74). Similarly, Eliot notes that directing a stronger lens at the zoophyte will reveal the finer mechanisms of its predation, an idea that suggests she kept abreast of the latest research into these tiny creatures. The polypidom forms when the bodies of dead polyps decay in seawater and calcify over time. In Corals and Coral Islands, for example, James D. Dana argues that "It is not more surprising, nor a matter of more difficult comprehension, that a polyp should form structures of stone (carbonate of lime) called coral, than that the quadruped should form its bones, or the mollusk its shell. The processes are similar, and so the result. In each case it is a simple animal secretion; a secretion of stony matter from the aliment which the animal receives, produced by the parts of the animal fitted for this secreting process" (p. 18). Grant Allen used civic language to cast the aggregation of coral polyps on a polypidom as a "whole nation in miniature" (p. 38). According to Amigoni, Lewes makes the turn away from the unsettling implications of his remark about individuality by presenting a heroic and romantic biographical account of the George Cuvier as a young man. For a fuller account of Lewes' interest in uniformitarianism, see Jonathan Smith's Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (pp. 128–129).