Trans. X. V. Ac. Sc/. 38 A'ov. 21, 



hypothesis of Fletcher, that all Hving action is performed solely by 

 virtue of portions of irritable or living matter interwoven with the 

 otherwise dead textures." The objection, however, urged by Bastian 

 to Beale is so very pertinent, that it must also find a place here, but I 

 shall not dwell upon other points on which Beale differs from the 

 bioplasson doctrine ; such as, that living matter exhibits the same 

 characters at every period of its existence ; and that it is always per- 

 fectly structureless. " It has always appeared to me," says Bastian,' 

 " to be a very fundamental objection to Beale's theory, that so many of 

 the most characteristically vital phenomena of the higher animals 

 should take place through the agency of tissues — muscle and nerve, 

 for inscance — by far the greater part of the bulk of which would, in 

 accordance with Dr. Beale's view, have to be considered as {fead and 

 inert." 



In 1873, the morphological knowledge of living matter became exact. 

 In that year, Heitzmann discovered the manner in which bioplasson 

 is arranged throughout the body, and announced the tact that what 

 had until then been regarded as separate form-elements in a tissue are 

 really interconnected portions of living matter ; that not only are there 

 contained no isolated unit-masses in any one tissue, but no tissue in 

 the whole body is isolated from the other tissues ; and that the only 

 unconnected particles of living matter are the corpuscular elements of 

 liquids, such as blood, sperm, saliva, pus, etc., and so-called wandering 

 corpuscles ; so that, to use his own words : " the animal body as a 

 whole is a connected mass of protoplasma in which, in some part, are 

 imbedded isolated protoplasma-corpuscles and various not-living sub- 

 stances (glue-giving and mucin-containing substances in the widest 

 sense, also fat, pigment-granules, etc.)." This announcement marked 

 the commencement of a new era in biology. 



Heitzmann discovered that the living matter as seen in an amoeba is 

 «(?/ wiihoiit structure, as had, before his accurate investigations, been 

 supposed ; and that its structure, in all cases when developed, is that 

 of a network, in the meshes of which the bioplasson fluid, or the not- 

 contractile, not-living portion of the organism, exists. When there is a 

 nucleus, it is connected by delicate threads with the extra-nuclear net- 

 work ; nucleoli and nucleolini inside of the nucleus, as well as granules 

 outside, are portions of living matter : sometimes in lump, sometimes 

 mere points of intersection of the threads constituting the intra-nuclear 

 and extra-nuclear living networks, sometimes terminals of section of 

 such threads, as first explained by Eimer,^ and after this author by 



1 The Beginnings of Life : being some account of the nature, modes of origin, and trans- 

 formations of lower organisms. London, 1872, vol. i, p. 155. 



- " Weitere Nachrichten liber den Bau des Zellkerns." Archiv /. mikrosk. Anatomie, 

 XIV, 1877, P- i°3- 



