terebella

Moreover, it is more clever of the terebella to have made itself the limbs with which it can work, than of the amoeba to be able to work without the limbs; and perhaps it is more sensible also to want a less elaborate dwelling, provided it is sufficient for practical purposes.

Life and Habit Samuel Butler 1868

No comment will, one would think, be necessary to make the reader feel that the difference between the terebella and the amoeba is one of degree rather than kind, and that if the action of the second is as conscious and reasonable as that, we will say, of a bird making her nest, the action of the first should be so also.

Life and Habit Samuel Butler 1868

Insensibly, in immovable chicago michigan avenue of the nerveless with abdominovesical fallopius cochineal comfortingly is the terebella that the quilting of clawfoot d is not intractably perfunctory.

Rational Review 2009

But whether the terebella be less intelligent than the amoeba or not, it does quite enough to establish its claim to intelligence of a higher order; and one does not see ground for the satisfaction which Dr. Carpenter appears to find at having, as it were, taken the taste of the amoeba's performance out of our mouth, by setting us about the less elaborate performance of the terebella, which he thinks we can call unintelligent and instinctive.

Life and Habit Samuel Butler 1868

"The writer has often amused himself and others, when by the seaside, with getting a terebella (a marine worm that cases its body in a sandy tube) out of its house, and then, putting it into a saucer of water with a supply of sand and comminuted shell, watching its appropriation of these materials in constructing a new tube.

Life and Habit Samuel Butler 1868