Trans. N. Y. Ac. Sct. . 40 Nov. 21, 
is any manifestation of life, and that we must not transfer the seat of 
real action to any point beyond the cell.”! Against this statement 
nearly every author nowadays protests, and insists that vital power 
must be transferred from the ‘‘cell”’ to “living matter’’; yet, after 
all, the disagreement, though ever so strenuously declared, is a mere 
verbal one: so long as both parties hold that “every higher animal 
presents itself as a sum of vital unities ’’—no matter what these unities 
are called or how defined. Heckel, one of the most avowed advocates 
of “the protoplasm or sarcode theory,” clings to Virchow’s politico- 
physiological comparison, that every higher organism is like an organ- 
ized social community or state, in which the individual citizens are re- 
presented by the “cells,” no matter how he may define these, each 
having a certain morphological and physiological autonomy, although 
on the other hand interdependent and subject to the laws of the whole. 
Heitzmann’s views necessitate the comparison of the body to a 
machine, such as a watch or a steam-engine, in which, though there 
are single parts, no part is at all autonomous, but all combine to make 
up one individual. Even Huxley, the popular champion of protoplasm 
as the physical basis of life, quite recently delivered an address, before 
the International Medical Congress in London, August 9, 1881, in 
which he used the following language: ‘‘in fact, the body is a machine 
of the nature of an army, not of that of a watch, or of a hydraulic 
apparatus. Of this army, each cell is a soldier,” etc., etc. According 
to Haeckel and Huxley, the body is composed of colonies of amcebe ; 
according to Heitzmann the body is one complex amceba. I am very 
anxious to really make the difference between the cell theory and the 
bioplasson theory clear to every one of you. The essential point of the 
cell theory is the idea, that the body and each tissue of the body, every 
plant, and every animal, is made up of a number of distinct units; and 
the essential point of the bioplasson theory is the idea, that all the 
masses of living matter of each tissue of plants and animals are unin- 
terruptedly connected, and that every tissue is connected with every 
other tissue by filaments of living matter. To accept Mr. Huxley’s 
comparison, we must imagine that every soldier is indissolubly con- 
nected, hand and foot, with every neighboring soldier of the solid army ! 
There is no better test of the truth of the bioplasson doctrine than 
the structure of hyaline cartilage. If hyaline cartilage consisted, as 
“is generally believed,” of “a homogeneous ground substance, in 
which are closed cavities harboring the corpuscles,’ the bioplasson 
doctrine would certainly be erroneous. If it merely contained lymph, 
or juice-channels, no matter what their character, whether open or 
1 Die Cellularpathologie in ihrer Begriindung auf physiologische und pathologische Ge- 
webelehre, Berlin, 1858, p. 3. (Translation by Chance, London, 1859, p. 3). 
