Trans: IN. YV3.Ab“SEz. 35 Nov. 21, 
hypothesis of Fletcher, that all living action is performed solely by 
virtue of portions of irritable or living matter interwoven with the 
otherwise dead textures.’”’ The objection, however, urged by Bastian 
to Beale is so very pertinent, that it must also find a place here, but I 
shall not dwell upon other points on which Beale differs from the 
bioplasson doctrine; such as, that living matter exhibits the same 
characters at every period of its existence; and that it is always per- 
fectly structureless. ‘‘It has always appeared to me,” says Bastian,' 
“to be a very fundamental objection to Beale’s theory, that so many of 
the most characteristically vital phenomena of the higher animals 
should take place through the agency of tissues—muscle and nerve, 
for instance—by far the greater part of the bulk of which would, in 
accordance with Dr. Beale’s view, have to be considered as dead and 
inert.” 
In 1873, the morphological knowledge of living matter became exact. 
In that year, Heitzmann discovered the manner in which bioplasson 
is arranged throughout the body, and announced the fact that what 
had until then been regarded as separate form-elements in a tissue are 
really interconnected portions of living matter; that not only are there 
contained no isolated unit-masses in any one tissue, but no tissue in 
the whole body is isolated from the other tissues; and that the only 
unconnected particles of living matter are the corpuscular elements of 
liquids, such as blood, sperm, saliva, pus, etc., and so-called wandering 
corpuscles ; so that, to use his own words: ‘the animal body as a 
whole is a connected mass of protoplasma in which, in some part, are 
imbedded isolated protoplasma-corpuscles and various not-living sub- 
stances ( glue-giving and mucin-containing substances in the widest 
sense, also fat, pigment-granules, etc.).” This announcement marked 
the commencement of a new era in biology. 
Heitzmann discovered that the living matter as seen in an amceba is 
not wzthout structure, as had, before his accurate investigations, been 
supposed ; and that its structure, in all cases when developed, is that 
of a network, in the meshes of which the bioplasson fluid, or the not- 
contractile, not-living portion of the organism, exists. When there is a 
nucleus, it is connected by delicate threads with the extra-nuclear net- 
work; nucleoli and nucleolini inside of the nucleus, as well as granules 
outside, are portions of living matter: sometimes in lump, sometimes 
mere points of intersection of the threads constituting the intra-nuclear 
and extra-nuclear living networks, sometimes terminals of section of 
such threads, as first explained by Eimer,? and after this author by 
1 The Beginnings of Life: being some account of the nature, modes of origin, and trans- 
formations of lower organisms. London, 1872, vol. i, p. 155: 
2 ‘* Weitere Nachrichten tiber den Bau des Zellkerns.”” Archiv f. mikrosk. Anatomie, 
X1V, 1877, P. 103. 
