Viialiiy and Organization of Protoplasm. 35 



contact with the medium the hyaline substance becomes functionally 

 disintegrated, and therewith transformed again into granular substance. 



Active expansion by force of chemical reintegration constitutes, then, 

 the positive, progressive phase of vital motility, while contraction on 

 external stimulation constitutes its negative, retrograde phase. Chemi- 

 cal reintegration winds up the spring of action relaxed by chemical 

 disintegration. The force or energy expended during disintegration is 

 thus restored during reintegration. This two-fold process underlies y» 

 most fundamentally and essentially all vital activity. 



The struggle and interaction between disintegration on external stim- 

 ulation, and reintegration by force of intrinsic chemical affinities, taking 

 place amid greater or smaller supplies of expanding substance, give 

 rise in certain cases, and very conspicuously, for instance, in hairs of 

 certain plants, and in rhezopods such as Gromia oviformis; this antag- 

 onistic and yet compensative process gives rise here to a most varied and 

 complex display of partly progressive and partly retrogressive motions 

 undergone by different portions of the protoplasm at one and the same 

 time. And these manifestations of vital motility are further compli- 

 cated by partial stagnations and partial remeltings of the same. AH 

 these blending and diverging phases of vital motility produce in such 

 cases a most perplexing confusion of appearances, which, however, can 

 all be disentangled and explained by using the light here thrown upon 

 the actuating agencies of protoplasmic motility. 



Various kinds of amoeba are met with, in which the antagonistic forces 

 of disintegration and reintegration are completely harmonized or bal- 

 anced; in which the retrogressive and the progressive phase of motility 

 co-operate to form a continuously reconstructed and self-rounded proto- 

 plasmic individual. Nothing can be more instructive than to watch, 

 and to gain an insight into what takes place in such morphologically 

 unorganized, and yet organically and functionally unitary protoplasmic 

 beings. An individual ovoid being is seen to flow evenly across the 

 field of the microscope. From the interior of its body, toward the 

 basal or aboral pole, where nutritive corpuscles are gathered, there issues 

 what is seen as a continuous flow of granular material, expanding and 

 getting finer and finer granulated, until quite in front there emerges 

 a perfectly hyaline substance, forming what may be called the oral, most 

 expanded pole of the ovoid being. This foremost product of cumula- 

 tive reintegration presents thus its fully expanded surface to the me- 

 dium. Suffering thereby functional disintegration through contact with 

 the same, the disintegrated portion is thrust aside by the pushing forth 

 of new expanding material, and is left sliding down along the sides, 

 helping there to form the gradually contracting envelope, getting more 

 and more granular, and closing in at the rear collapsed, and ready to 

 reinter by means of compl omental restitution the ascending current. 



It is by means of this cycle of definitely interdependent activities that 

 the form of the organism is maintained and its steady locomotion ef- 

 fected. Such highly instructive organisms have to be looked upon as 



