68 THE MICROSCOPICAL NEWS. 
the term organisation can be applied. You have before you a 
glairy, tenacious fluid, which, if not absolutely homogeneous, is yet 
totally devoid of structure.” This statement, as to the total absence 
of structure, is also made by other physicists, and generally accepted. 
But though our best appliances fail to detect any organisation, 
can it really be that such is wanting? Perchance it may be 
totally unlike anything with which we are acquainted, and which 
the microscope is as little adapted to reveal as it is to pry into the 
secrets of electricity or magnetism. Wherever we find a result 
accomplished we naturally, and properly, look for the mechanism 
requisite to produce that result, z.¢., simple or complicated, accord- 
ing to the result accomplished ; and though the machinery be 
hidden we still infer its existence. For the making of a piece of 
plain cotton cloth a comparatively simple loom is required, but for 
the production of an elaborately ornamental fabric, a much more 
complicated one is requisite. Again, if a machine has to perform 
only one operation—for instance, a lathe only to turn cylindrical 
pieces of wood or metal—a simple one will suffice; but if, in addition 
to this, it is required to turn oval, spiral, and other forms, and also 
to act as a planing, slotting, and shaping machine, it is evident 
that the machinery must be proportionately complicated. Now, 
protoplasm performs numerous operations, exceeding in com- 
plexity anything affected by machinery made by the hand of man ; 
and, it appears to me that the only inference which can be fairly 
drawn from this, and it seems a reasonable one, is that so far from 
being the structureless and unorganised substance which, even 
under the highest powers of our microscopes, it appears to be, 
it must be possessed of an organisation, the complexity of which 
surpasses the utmost efforts of our understanding and imagination. 
PRACTICAL PROCESSES IN VEGETABEE 
HISTOLOGY. 
By L. OLIveER, in Rev. Sci. Nat., 1882. 
(Continued from page 50.) 
V. DISSOLUTION AND DESTRUCTION. 
\ JE dissolve certain substances either with the object of dis- 
covering what they are, or more frequently the better to see the 
elements which they hide. Thus it is not uncommon to destroy 
the protoplasm in order to make the nucleus more visible. 
Protoplasm.—In order to display the nucleus the tissue is treated 
