Trans. N. V. Ac. Sci. 40 Nov. 21, 



is any manifestation of life, and that we must not transfer the seat of 

 real action to any point beyond the cell."' Against this statement 

 nearly every author nowadays protests, and insists that vital power 

 must be transferred from the "cell" to "living matter"; yet, after 

 all, the disagreement, though ever so strenuously declared, is a mere 

 verbal one : so long as both parties hold that "every higher animal 

 presents itself as a sum ot vital unities" — no matter what these unities 

 are called or how defined. Hceckel, one ot the most avowed advocates 

 of " the protoplasm or sarcode theory," clings to Virchow's politico- 

 physiological comparison, that every higher organism is like an organ- 

 ized social community or state, in which the individual citizens are re- 

 presented by the " cells," no matter how he may define these, each 

 having a certain morptiological and physiological autonomy, although 

 on the other hand interdependent and subject to the laws of the whole. 

 Heitzmann's views necessitate the comparison ot the body to a 

 machine, such as a watch or a steam-engine, in which, though there 

 are single parts, no part is at all autonomous, but all combine to make 

 up one individual. Even Huxley, the popular champion of protoplasm 

 as the physical basis of life, quite recently delivered an address, before 

 the International Medical Congress in London, August 9, 1881, in 

 which he used the following language : " in fact, the body is a machine 

 of the nature of an army, not of that of a watch, or of a hydraulic 

 apparatus. Of this army, each cell is a soldier," etc., etc. According 

 to Hasckel and Huxley, the body is composed of colonies of amoebae ; 

 according to Heitzmann the body is one complex amoeba. I am very 

 anxious to really make the difference between the cell theory and the 

 bioplasson theory clear to every one of you. The essential point of the 

 cell theory is the idea, that the body and each tissue of the body, every 

 plant, and every animal, is made up ot a number of distinct units ; and 

 the essential point of the bioplasson theory is the idea, that all the 

 masses of living matter of each tissue of plants and animals are unin- 

 terruptedly connected, and that every tissue is connected with every 

 other tissue by filaments of living matter. To accept Mr. Huxley's 

 comparison, we must imagine that every soldier is indissolubly con- 

 nected, hand and foot, with every neighboring soldier of the solid army ! 

 There is no better test of the truth of the bioplasson doctrine than 

 the structure of hyaline cartilage. If hyaline cartilage consisted, as 

 "is generally believed," of "a homogeneous ground substance, in 

 which are closed cavities harboring the corpuscles," the bioplasson 

 doctrine would certainly be erroneous. If it merely contained lymph, 

 or juice-channels, no matter what their character, whether open or 



' Die Cellularpathologie in ihrer Begriindung auf physiologische und pathologische Ge- 

 webelehre, Berlin, 1858, p. 3. (Translation by Chance, London, 1859, p. 3). 



