CELL AND PROTOPLASM CONCEPTS; 

 HISTORICAL ACCOUNT 



By EDWIN G. CONKLIN 



DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGY, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, PRINCETON, N. J. 



I. Introduction 



In preparing this historical account of 

 the cell and protoplasm concepts I have 

 had occasion to note how much less inter- 

 esting such work is, based as it must be on 

 the publications of others, than that which 

 is first-hand observation. Indeed the latter 

 is so much more agreeable that I suspect 

 all historians must be tempted to mix their 

 own thoughts and fancies with the actual 

 records which they consult. The burden of 

 looking up literature is one of the unpleas- 

 ant features of modern research, and I 

 quite sympathize with Jacques Loeb who 

 used to say that he had no time or inclina- 

 tion for it. Some one has said that the 

 ancient Greeks were able to accomplish so 

 much because they had no ancient lan- 

 guages and literatures to master. 



I suspect I was selected to give this his- 

 torical review because I am probably the 

 oldest living cytologist in America, now 

 that our beloved master and foremost stu- 

 dent of the cell. Professor Edmund B. 

 Wilson, has passed away. But in spite of 

 my age, which may seem venerable to some 

 of you, I was not in at the birth of the cell 

 theory and I have had to rely largely on 

 literature in preparing the earlier part of 

 this address. That portion of it which 

 concerns the last half century falls within 

 my own period of research work and with 

 this account I have mingled some of my 

 own observations, thoughts and fancies. 

 Some of the earlier portions of this review 

 repeat in part a paper entitled "Prede- 

 cessors of Schleiden and Schwann" (1939) 

 which I gave in a symposium on the cen- 

 tenary of the cell theory at the Richmond, 

 Virginia, meeting of the American Associa- 

 tion for the Advancement of Science on 

 December 27, 1938. 



In the history of science, no less than in 



that of the material universe, it is difficult 

 if not impossible to find the real beginning 

 of anything, for every event is the result of 

 many preceding ones. In short there is no 

 creation de novo in either the material or 

 the intellectual universe. In an interesting 

 article in the Scientific Monthly for De- 

 cember 1937 entitled ''Who Invented It?" 

 S. C. Gilfillan lists the numerous reputed 

 inventors of the telegraph, the friction 

 match, the barometer, the telephone, the 

 airplane, steam boat, wireless and many 

 other modern inventions, and as to the an- 

 cient inventors of the wheel, the pulley, the 

 boat, the sail, history is silent. And yet in 

 each and all of these inventions we may 

 be sure that there were many cooperators. 

 The fact is that all discovery and all sci- 

 ence are social phenomena and their prog- 

 ress is possible only by the conscious or 

 unconscious cooperation of many minds. 



But it is difficult for human beings to 

 keep in mind a multitude of persons or a 

 multiplicity of causes. Consequently, even 

 in science we find discoveries attributed to 

 some one person, or phenomena ascribed 

 to some one cause, whereas a more accurate 

 account would recognize that they are the 

 results of many persons and many causes. 

 This difficulty of keeping in mind the 

 many, joined with a common human ten- 

 dency to make and worship heroes, leads to 

 a great deal of historic error and injustice. 

 We pick out some one person as the discov- 

 erer or inventor or leader or soldier and 

 build monuments to him, forgetting all his 

 collaborators; we concentrate our devo- 

 tions on the tomb of one unknown soldier, 

 rather than on the armies of the fallen — 

 we celebrate anniversaries of births, dec- 

 ades of science, jubilees of men and insti- 

 tutions, centuries of progress, millennia of 

 world history, as if these periods were inde- 

 pendent of all others. We pick out some 



