550 Ri:roRT or commissioner of ri.sii and fisheries [102] 



state with water as they do. That it has colloidal ])ro[)eitic.s of a kind 

 which are conditioned by its living state no one would perhaps deny, 

 but to treat living matter with the same terms and with the same im- 

 plications as not-living diffusible substances is manifestly an abuse of 

 terms. Nor does the implication stop here, for if we look into the ])io- 

 eesses of secretion in living bodies, there is apjiarently a tendency on 

 the part of the living membranes to act somewhat like dead 6nes, yet it 

 will require little reflection to satisfy the most ordinary mind that there 

 is not onl}^ a difference of degree, but of kind, when the two are com- 

 l)ared. The not-living membrane depends upon purely physical prin- 

 ciples for its workings, while the living membrane is an apparatus in 

 the true sense of the word, often comi)rised of many parts with diverse 

 functions, such as columnar or ciliated pavement epithelium, with con- 

 nective fibers, muscle, nerves, and vessels composed of cellular units, 

 each of which may have a specific share in the processes of transudation 

 carried on in follicles or cavities ot glands or other organs. It is true 

 the differentiation of these complex structures disappears as we des(;end 

 in the scale of life, yet it is also true that we have almost as constantly 

 developed in the lowest types, as well as in the highest, certain bodies 

 in the interior of cells, which, with a few unimportant exceptions, seem 

 to have some sort of a vital relation to the plasma in which they are im- 

 bedded ; we refer to nuclei. These bodies, if we may place any reliance 

 uijon what is manifested during embryonic development, seem to be very 

 intimately, and even physiologically, related to the phenomena of cleav- 

 age during development, and not improbably with nutrition and the 

 metabolic processes occurring in the interior of the cell. If sometliing 

 of the sort is not their function, the apparently more fluid contents, and 

 even trabecular network sometimes found in their interiors, are without 

 significance. Leaving out of the question any radial, or, moi-e exactly, 

 any heliozooidal* arrangement of the granular mattcraround thenucleus 

 as argued by Rauber, it is at least evident that the process of impreg- 

 nation is almost always, if not invariably, accompanied by nuclear met- 

 amorphosis and the development of asters, or single and double heliozo- 

 oidal figures, imbedded in the protoplasm of the cg^. These i)henomena 

 seem to be more or less constant accompaniments of later growth, of 

 which imi)regnation seems to be in reality only a particular i)hase, 

 bridging the vital continuity between sexual parents and their ofrsi)ring. 

 The phenomena of indirect cell-division or that accomi)anied by caryo- 

 kinesis or the development of cleavage si)indles or a double heliozooi<lal 

 arrangement of the granules of the medullary or inner (;ell substance, 

 which may extend even to the perii)heral cell surface or wall, probably 

 have a similar significance and seem intimately bound up with the pri- 

 mary phenomena of growth or segmentation, of which they are a pretty 

 constant attendant in the early stages of most forms which have been 



*A word which has eiiggested itself from the resemblance of some imclear figures to 



a lli'liozoon with its radiatiiif^ psoiidopods. 



