I08 ANDREWS. 



they seem in general to play a passive mechanical or physical 

 role and are strongly hinted by the phenomena to be for the 

 most part, and for most times, segregated excess, waste, or 

 reserve material of the living substance. 



By holding the place of continuous element in the proto- 

 plasmic foam, the living substance has its contact, or more 

 strictly speaking, its contacts, almost infinitely extended and 

 multiplied. For every pellicle is a contact surface of the 

 irritable substance as such, and a possible contractile membrane; 

 and to this every alveolar inclusion, as well as every local dif- 

 ference or activity within actual touch of it, bears as truly a 

 relation of stimulus or control, as does external environment to 

 the substance as organism. 



To the irritable substance, contact is stimulus : to the living 

 substance, contact is environment. 



Heretofore in biology, environment has been used in rather 

 a limited sense for the sum of influences which affect an organ- 

 ism from without, as opposed to its own intrinsic forces; there- 

 fore as modifier of its inherent tendencies as organism, and chief 

 factor in determining the final result of organization. 



From the new standpoint of the substance as such, which it 

 is my privilege to preach, biological use of the term environment 

 must be widened to give it its full value carrying our thought 

 of it into the minutest subdivisions of living substance. 



It is at once plain what a magnificent device is the physical 

 form of the substance for multiplying and extending contacts ; 

 and, given the physical variant of viscidity, as well for preserv- 

 ing, conserving, and unifying, stimuli ; for segregating incon- 

 venient and inutile substances ; and for providing at any point 

 a homogeneous basis for organized activities. As by convolu- 

 tions in the brain, thought surface has been, and may yet be, 

 greatly extended; so by structural subdivisions of a fluid foam, 

 the environment of the living substance can be extended and 

 multiplied until it may even be coextensive with a primal 

 irritable stuff. 



For what is at first but a minute and momentary contact for 

 the substance as mass or organism, can presently be transformed 

 into contact for the substance as such, which is now limited 



