Attempt to Subordinate Protista to Cell-Theory SOS 



all other portions of the living world, and to make this 

 effective the concept organism must be given greater defin- 

 iteness than it has generally had. The classes of fact which 

 have been sampled in the preceding pages furnish the basis 

 for both these readjustments. 



First as to the subordination of cells to organism. Let 

 attention be directed to the myriad of natural objects called 

 living beings and cells rather than to concepts about them. 

 Wherever in the living world structures occur which com- 

 petent judges agree to call cells, these are structurally part 

 of and functionally dependent upon, and therefore strictly 

 subordinate to, living beings. This subordination is seen 

 in the fact that cells arise as a consequence of the activities 

 of living beings. This mode of origin is most obvious in 

 the individual development of the larger plants and animals 

 where growth is accompanied by a resolution of the growing 

 body into a great number of such structures. 



It seems that racially as well as individually, cells were 

 produced by living beings. This I say seems to have been 

 the case, for be it always remembered that certainty as to 

 how either living beings or any of their parts arose in the 

 first instance — if indeed there was a first instance — is wholly 

 impossible for positive science. However much we may 

 speculate on the subject we have no right to permit the 

 speculations to exercise more than a secondary influence on 

 observationa^l and ^interpretative results touching actual 

 living beings. 



So far as the bacteria and other living beings near or be- 

 low the limits of microscopic vision can be supposed to rep- 

 resent earlier stages in the evolution of the living world, 

 they indicate that beings much smaller and considerably sim- 

 pler than cells existed long before cells. 



And functionally as well as developmentally, cells are 

 subordinate to the living beings to which they belong. This 

 is most manifest in animals which, like man and other higher 



