1890] NEW-YORK MICROSCOPICAL SOCIETY. 33 



Whatever we may think of this discussion, we must perceive 

 that, by this time, the cell doctrine had been wholly lost sight of, 

 and that the protoplasm theory had occupied the entire field, 

 although Doctor Beale was still feebly expressing the hope 

 " that the short convenient word ail should not be discarded," 

 and was venturing to " think that the phenomena essential to 

 living matter are only possible in minute masses separated from 

 one another, so that each may be supplied upon its circumfer- 

 ence with nutrient, materials." But it had become a general 

 tendency to make life an attribute of a substance as distinguished 

 from a form. As Doctor Sterling snid with reference to Pro- 

 fessor Huxley, the thing aimed at, as a result of mere ordinary 

 chemical process, was " a life-stuff in mass, as it were in the web, 

 to which he has only to resort for cuttings and cuttings in order 

 to produce, by aggregation, what organized individual he 

 pleases ; " or, as he describes it more briefly, protoplasm by the 

 spoonful or toothpickful. 



Now this basal matter of life, which was thus to be taken by 

 the spoonful or toothpickful to make a living organism, was at 

 this timQ, by common consent, looked upon as a homogeneous, 

 structureless substance, not distinguishable in merely phys- 

 ical constitution from other members of the class proteids ; — a 

 veritable colloid, differing from other colloids only in the respect 

 of being as ceaselessly active as they are continually passive. 

 Very soon, however, even this doctrine of homogeneousness and 

 structurelessness was attacked ; for, as it would seem we might 

 have anticipated, increasing microscopical powers and improv- 

 ing methods of observation began to disclose to some investi- 

 gators first differences of function in different portions of the 

 heretofore seemingly undifferentiated protoplasm of the lower 

 organisms, and then an actual structure which narrowed the 

 basis of life to a fine net-work within what before had been 

 regarded as a wholly living substance. 



This condition of things had not been suspected by Professor 

 Huxley and others who believed that protoplasm as they saw it 

 in the nettle-sting and in the white blood-corpuscle was abso- 

 lutely the starting-point of structural evolution ; — a simple 

 formative, but formless, matter. They were compelled, how- 

 ever, to recognize the fact that one bit of apparently homogene- 

 ous living jelly was bound to follovv a Ufe-history entirely dis- 



