Herrick, Physiological Corollaries of Eginlibt^ him Theory. 23 



pressed in the forces of the body of a man may be expressed 

 in the terms of the forces of a spermatozoan equally well. 

 The assimilative power necessary when we assume that repeated 

 nucleary division takes place without reduction of the chroma- 

 tin is certainly dynamic and why should this dynamic deter- 

 minant be limited to some material element? Does not the 

 body preserve its integrity in spite of the flux of its materials ? 

 Why should not the actual material of the nucleoplasm be in a 

 similar flux while retaining its form, i. e., its dynamic attri- 

 butes ? 



From this point of view the coordination of parts through 

 the nervous system becomes only a special instance of a coor- 

 dination in the entire organism. It is true that even the unex- 

 pected wealth of fibrous ramification in the nervous end-organs 

 revealed by the various applications of the Golgi method is still 

 insufficient to explain the perfect co-adjustment of part with 

 part in nutritive and trophic equilibrium — in fact, any con- 

 ceivable completeness of nervous contimta would leave some- 

 thing to be explained, for, in the last analysis, the processes 

 are intracellular or even cytoplasmic, Even if we should grant 

 that unsuspected imperfections in our present methods deprive 

 us of the power of detecting the anastomoses between neuro- 

 cytes in the same circuit, yet the most perfect conceivable con- 

 tinuity would still leave an appeal lying to protoplasmic trans- 

 mission. A forthcoming paper will afford illustrations of what 

 is here referred to. In the skin of many (probably all) amphi- 

 bia and reptiles (Axolotl and Phiynosoina) there exists about 

 the cells of Leydig a very complete and beautiful protoplasmic 

 reticulum in such a way that each large cell is completely envel- 

 oped, while the meshes commingle and pass from cell to cell. 

 This reticulum arises from certain nucleated protoblasts which are 

 devoid of cell wall and whose naked protoplasm fills in inter- 

 stices between the larger cells. This reticulum is not an arti- 

 fact for it is found by the use of widely different reagents and is 

 most complete when the fixation of the protoplasmic structure 

 is most perfect, and in some cases of applications of chrome- 

 osmic + platinic chloride + alcohol solutions this perfec- 



