1893.] NEW-YORK MICROSCOPICAL SOCIETY. 11 



many this fact is not yet generally acknowledged. In this coun- 

 try Dr. Alfred C. Stokes, of Trenton, N. J., has recently de- 

 scribed the reticular structure of red blood corpuscles of man 

 after treatment with dilute solution of bichromate of potash, as 

 first discovered by Louis Elsberg twelve years ago. The same 

 author has described the reticular structure in Pelomyxa, an 

 amoeboid protozoan quite common around Trenton. 



"In the speaker's laboratory Mr. Maximilian Toch has studied 

 the structure of vegetable protoplasm for more than a year, and 

 has succeeded in photographing this structure by new methods, 

 which he will soon publish. The specimen exhibited was treated 

 with one-half of one per cent solution of chloride of gold, and 

 afterward with sulphuric acid. The reticulum has assumed a 

 dark violet color, and appears dark in the photograph. In many 

 places numerous delicate spokes are seen traversing the cellulose, 

 or cement substance, interconnecting the reticulum of all so- 

 called ' cells,' and thus rendering the plant a continuous indi- 

 vidual, from the tips of the leaves dov/n to the ends of the root- 

 lets. This fact was first established by Louis Elsberg in 1883. 

 The connecting threads are far more numerous than represented 

 by Walter Gardiner, also in 1883. 



"Since in the animal organism all so-called 'cells' are of a re- 

 ticular structure, and all basis and cement substances are pierced 

 by a similar reticulum of living matter, we readily understand the 

 fact that, after liquefaction of the basis substance, its protoplasmic 

 condition is re-established. This happens in inflammation, as 

 proven by the speaker in 1873. Quite recently Prof. Grawitz, of 

 Greifswald, Germany, has rediscovered the appearance of 'cells' 

 in the basis substance of fibrous connective tissue in inflammation, 

 dubbing them 'slumbering cells.' The discovery is twenty years 

 old, and was ignored in Germany for no other reason but that 

 it proved the fallacy of the cell theory and the cellular path- 

 ology." 



Prof. Edmund B. Wilson, Ph.D., of the Department of Bio- 

 logy, Columbia College, being introduced to the Society by Dr. 

 N. L. Britton, related some observations on the germinal cells of 

 Amphioxus : Hans van Vleich, of Zurich, observed with regard to 

 the sea-urchin that, at the two-cell stage of the egg, if these cells 

 were shaken apart, each cell produced an embryo of one-half the 



