60 . Vitality and Organization of Protoplasm. 



ally cumulating reintegration and its definite relations to the medium, 

 a self-rounded organism, performing all essential vital functions in in- 

 teraction with the medium, and having the functional differentiations 

 and localizations of organic structure determined in consequence of it. 

 ^ The problem of structural differentiation and localization can there- 

 \ fore not be statically solved, having regard only to the morphological 

 I juxtaposition and conjectured interactions of separately formed parts. 

 ; Under such a supposition the formative agenices remain hopelessly un- 

 ! intelligible. For organic shaping can nowise naturally result from a 

 mosaic-like arrangement of separate units. It is obviously a unitary 

 dynamic j^rocess, whose indivisible vital activity involves the construc- 

 tion of the organism as a whole. It evinces, as Driescli would say, the 

 autonomy of vitalj^^henomena. 



"The living substance has to be looked upon as a_chemically cumulating 

 vortex, whose foremost and highest region comes into active "coiitact 

 "with the surrounding medium, suffering thereby functional disintegra- 

 tion; and whose basal substance, in the case under consideration, enters 

 into direct assimilative relations of reintegration with nutritive ma- 

 terial. The continuously evolting living substance increases in chem- 

 ical comj^lexity the further it gets advanced from the region where nu- 

 triment is directly elaborated. The foremost and outermost regions 

 of the organism, its apex and circumference, are, in consequence, the 

 ch emica lly highest portions of the protoplasmic unit. Its headmost 

 portion represents, in fact, the consummation of all the vital labor per- 

 formed within the organism. And the outer surface constitutes a 

 chemically graduated substance, of which each succeeding zone is dif- 

 ferent in quality and responsive reaction from the one preceding it in 

 position. 



In the former section it was found, as repeatedly stated, that what 

 was called the dynamical interaction with the medium, constitutes the 

 Ijighest function of the protoplasmic individual, and that it necessarily 

 involves nutrition and depuration, which three indivisible processes un- 

 derly their vitality and govern their organization. This being dem- 

 onstrably the case in lower forms of life, it is by no means visionary, 

 or too bold a stretch of scientific imagination to look upon the com- 

 plex configuration of Metazoa as the visible structural elaboration of 

 these three indivisible vital activities: functional interaction with the 

 sundry dynamical influences of the medium inciting the gradual de- 

 velopment of ectodermic structures; interaction with the nutritive ma- 

 terial resulting in the development of entodermic structures ; and cor- 

 responding structural development of depurative organs taking place 

 in direct or indirect interaction with atmospheric oxygen ; the entire 

 organic development being essentially induced and controlled by the 

 dynamical life of outside relations carried on by the ectodermic struc- 

 tures, by which motor activities play a prominent part. 



The problem of structural differentiation and localization in its gen- 

 eral features fnds its solution in these results arrived at by the study 



