A CRITICISM -OF THE CELL-THEORY. 155 
Although in this passage, which is descriptive of Thallophytes, 
Goebel attaches too much importance, as I think, to the con- 
tinuity of a vesicle as determining the unicellularity of a plant, 
he shows clearly enough that he regards the growth and mode 
of extension of the protoplasm, not its division into cells, as 
the feature of fundamental importance. 
There is the further property in plants that continuity 
between the cells of highly organised multicellular plants has 
been shown to be of very general, if not universal, occurrence, 
And if complete separation were to be insisted upon as a 
characteristic of a cell, any given Angiosperm, or other highly 
organised plant, could no longer be considered as an aggregate 
of life units, but rather as a conjunct mass of protoplasm, 
imperfectly broken up into corpuscles, in each of which there 
is a nucleus. It is but a step from the much-branched, multi- 
nucleate Coeloblastz, which have no partitions, to the forma. 
tion of incomplete partitions, breaking up the protoplasm into 
small masses, which remain, however, linked with one another, 
and so preserve an original continuity similar to that of the 
Ceeloblastz, which has only apparently but never actually been 
broken, ) : 
So much has this idea impressed itself on the minds of some 
observers, that Hofmeister suggested that the creeping motion 
of the plasmodia of the Myxomycetes and their later transfor- 
mation into fructification, is representative of the simplest type 
of growth, even for more highly organised plants, This 
opinion has been quoted with approval by von Sachs, who, 
before even the continuity of the protoplasm of plant cells 
was established, wrote that “fundamentally every plant, how- 
ever highly organised, is a protoplasmic body, coherent in 
itself, which, clothed without by a cell-wall and traversed 
internally by innumerable partitions, grows; and it appears 
that the more vigorously this formation of chambers and 
walls proceeds with the nutrition of the protoplasm, the higher 
also is the development attained by the total organisation.” 
Expressed in this way, the phenomenon of cell-formation is 
represented to us as being nothing more than a particular 
