290 ON THE INTERNAL FORM [ch. 



we may trace back to Leibniz* and to Hobbest), that there is no 

 Hmit to the mechanical complexity which we may postulate in an 

 organism, and no limit, therefore, to the hypotheses which we may 

 rest thereon. But no microscopical examination of a stick of sealing- 

 wax, no study of the material of which it is composed, can enlighten 

 us as to its electrical manifestations or properties. Matter of itself 

 has no power to do, to make, or to become: it is in energy that 

 all these potentiaUties reside, energy invisibly associated with the 

 material system, and in interaction with the energies of the 

 surrounding universe. 



That ''function presupposes structure" has been declared an 

 accepted axiom of biology. Who it was that so formula ted the 

 aphorism I do not know; but as regards the structure of the cell 

 it harks back to Briicke, with whose demand for a mechanism, or 

 an organisation, within the cell histologists have ever since been 

 trying to comply J. But unless we mean to include thereby 

 invisible, and merely chemicu,l or molecular, structure, we come at 

 once on dangerous ground. For we have seen in a former chapter 

 that organisms are known of magnitudes so nearly approaching the 

 molecalar, that everything which the morphologist is accustomed to 

 conceive as "structure" has become physically impossible; and 

 recent research tends to reduce, rather than to extend, our con- 

 ceptions of the visible structure necessarily inherent in living 

 protoplasm §. The microscopic structure which in the last resort 



* "La matiere arrangee par une sagesse divine doit etre essentiellement organisee 

 partout. . .il y a machine dans les parties de la machine naturelle a I'infini." Siir le 

 principe de la Vie, p. 431 (Erdmann). This is the very converse of the doctrine 

 of the Atomists, who could not conceive a condition "w6/ dimidiae partis pars 

 semper hahehit Dimidiam partem, nee res praefiniet ulla.'' 



t Cf. an interesting passage from the Elements (i, p. 445, Molesworth's edit.), 

 quoted by Owen, Hunterian Lectures on the Invertebrates, 2nd ed. pp. 40, 41, 1855. 



% "Wir miissen deshalb den lebenden Zellen, abgesehen von der Molekular- 

 structur der organischen Verbindungen welche sie enthalt, noch eine andere und 

 in anderer Weise complicirte Structur zuschreiben, und diese es ist welche wir 

 mit dem Namen Organisation bezeichnen," Briicke, Die Elementarorganismen, 

 Wiener Sitzungsber. xliv, 1861, p. 386; quoted by Wilson, The Cell, etc., p. 289. 

 Cf. also Hardy, Journ. Physiol, xxiv, 1899, p. 159. 



§ The term protoplasm was first used by Purkinje, about 1839 or 1840 (cf. 

 Reichert, Arch. f. Anat. u. Physiol. 1841). But it was better defined and more 

 strictly used by Hugo von Mohl in his paper Ueber die Saftbewegung im Inneren 

 der Zellen, Botan. Zeitung, iv, col. 73-78, 89-94, 1846. 



