Chapter XIV — 149 — The Vacuolar System 



concentrated colloidal contents, the enclosed pigment giving them 

 a natural color. Consequently, the formation of anthocyanin, from 

 its beginning, is associated with the manner in which the vacuoles 

 are generally formed. Struck by the resemblance between young 

 vacuoles and the chondriosomes, as we ourselves had been, Dange- 

 ARD was led at the beginning of his research to liken them to chon- 

 driosomes and to think that the forms described under this name 

 in animal cells corresponded to certain aspects of vacuolar develop- 

 ment analogous to those forms encountered in plant cells. 



He believed, furthermore, that he could demonstrate that the 

 colloidal substance of which the vacuoles are formed, corresponded 

 to a special substance found in all vacuoles, regardless of the type 

 of cell, which he identified with metachromatin (volutin of Meyer) . 

 Consequently, in spite of current opinion, there could be no rela- 

 tion between the chondriosomes and the plastids. Hence Dange- 

 ARD gave the name vacuome, or vacuolar system, to all the vacuoles 

 contained in a cell in the various phases of its development. This 

 expression was destined, in his own mind, to replace that of chon- 

 driome and the term mitochondrium that of mitochondrial sub- 

 stance. "The greatest error of cytologists," he said, "is to have 

 confused the chondriome and the metachromatin with the plastids. 

 This, at any rate, is what I am going to try to demonstrate. The 

 chondriome, which has been the object of so much investigation, 

 must, in my opinion, be considered otherwise than it has been to 

 the present time. It may be defined as the whole vacuolar system 

 in its various and successive aspects." 



Starting from the fact that vacuoles are stained by dyes and 

 are capable of taking up almost the entire amount of dye in a 

 solution, Dangeard made his vacuome play an essential role in 

 the phenomena of nutrition of the cell. According to him, meta- 

 chromatin, the substance specific for the vacuome, plays at one and 

 the same time an osmotic and a selective role. It fixes the nutri- 

 ents as it, in turn, is fixed by the vital stains. In this way DANGE- 

 ARD explains the formation of anthocyanin pigments. These, ac- 

 cording to him, arise in the cytoplasm and are fixed by the 

 metachromatin of the vacuome by virtue of its selective power. 

 Thus Dangeard transfers to the vacuome, the hypothesis which 

 Regaud had proposed to explain the role of the chondriome. 



Lastly, P. A. Dangeard and his son, P. Dangeard, think that 

 the vacuoles are permanent elements of the cell and multiply only 

 by division, thus agreeing with the conception of DE Vries, but 

 with this difference that, for the Dangeards, the vacuoles by de- 

 hydration of the metachromatin may become solid in certain 

 phases. This is true for aleurone grains and vacuoles of dormant 

 spores of fungi. 



This notion of taking the chondriome for the vacuome, which 

 rests exclusively on observations made with vital stains, was inad- 

 missible, it being true that at that time it had already been 

 demonstrated that the chondriosomes are not stained by the dyes 

 used by P. A. Dangeard, but only, and then with difficulty, by 



