That is Junior that you can hear now, I think.

XVIII

POLYP WITH A PAST

THE STORY OF AN ORGANISM WITH A HEART

Of all forms of animal life, the polyp is probably the most neglected by fanciers.  People seem willing to pay attention to anything, cats, lizards, canaries, or even fish, but simply because the polyp is reserved by nature and not given to showing off or wearing its heart on its sleeve, it is left alone under the sea to slave away at coral-building with never a kind word or a pat on the tentacles from anybody.

It was quite by accident that I was brought face to face with the human side of a polyp.  I had been working on a thesis on “Emotional Crises in Sponge Life,” and came upon a polyp formation on a piece of coral in the course of my laboratory work.  To say that I was astounded would be putting it mildly.  I was surprised.

The difficulty in research work in this field came in isolating a single polyp from the rest in order to study the personal peculiarities of the little organism, for, as is so often the case (even, I fear, with us great big humans sometimes), the individual behaves in an entirely different manner in private from the one he adopts when there is a crowd around.  And a polyp, among all creatures, has a minimum of time to himself in which to sit down and think.  There is always a crowd of other polyps dropping in on him, urging him to make a fourth in a string of coral beads or just to come out and stick around on a rock for the sake of good-fellowship.

The one which I finally succeeded in isolating was an engaging organism with a provocative manner and a little way of wrinkling up its ectoderm which put you at once at your ease.  There could be no formality about your relations with this polyp five minutes after your first meeting.  You were just like one great big family.

Although I have no desire to retail gossip, I think that readers of this treatise ought to be made aware of the fact (if, indeed, they do not already know it) that a polyp is really neither one thing nor another in matters of gender.  One day it may be a little boy polyp, another day a little girl, according to its whim or practical considerations of policy.  On gray days, when everything seems to be going wrong, it may decide that it will be neither boy nor girl but will just drift.  I think that if we big human cousins of the little polyp were to follow the example set by these lowliest of God’s creatures in this matter, we all would find, ourselves much better off in the end.  Am I not right, little polyp?