AUTHOR’S PREFACE. XV 
In the above-mentioned investigations of Henle, Turpin, and 
Dumortier, the resemblance which the animal tissues examined 
(epithelium and the liver or yelk of snails) bore to plants, lay, 
in the first place, in the circumstance, that their elementary 
particles grew without vessels, and in part, free in a fluid, or 
even inclosed in another cell; and in the second place, in that 
these elementary particles exhibiting a non-vascular growth, 
were furnished with a peculiar wall, like the cells of plants. 
When this coincidence was furnished, we were entitled to 
arrange these cells as near to the vegetable cells as the different 
kinds of animal cells, for instance, germinal vesicles, blood-cor- 
puscles, and fat-cells, stand together, when regarded as different 
species comprised under the natural-history idea of cells. 
The state of the matter, therefore, when I commenced my 
researches was as follows: The elementary particles of or- 
ganised bodies presented the greatest variety of form; there 
was a resemblance between many of them, and, according to 
the greater or lesser degree of similarity, a group of fibres, of 
cells, of globules, and so on, might be distinguished, and 
in each of these divisions again there were different forms. 
As the cells taken collectively differed from the fibres, so also, 
only in a less degree, must the separate kinds of cells differ from 
each other, and the different kinds of fibres from each other. 
All those forms seemed to have nothing else in common, save 
that they grew by the addition of new molecules between those 
already existing, that they were living elements. So long as 
the epithelium-cells were regarded as a secretion of the 
organised substance, they could never, in that sense, be classed 
with the living elementary particles. There seemed to be no 
general rule with respect to the mode in which the molecules 
were joined together to form the living particles; here they 
united into one kind of cells, there into another, and at a third 
spot into a fibre, and so on. The principle of development ap- 
peared to be altogether different for such particles as differed 
