PRESIDENT S ADDRESS SECTION D. 



lor 



questions to the cells themselves; and in 1835 one of them, in his 

 study of the foraminifera, made an epochal discovery — he ascer- 

 tained that the vital properties of the cell are peculiar to a portion 

 of its contents, a transparent slime insoluble in water, and, though 

 irritable, apparently structureless, and to this he gave the name 

 of '' sarcode." Eleven years later botany brought up its arrears 

 of progress by demonsti-ating that a like substance was the seat of 

 energy in the vegetable cell, but, unconscious that it could be other 

 than newly discovered, called it by another name, " protoplasm." 

 Of course it was not long before the two substances were rigor- 

 ously compared one with another in all their known phases and 

 conditions of existence. 'J'he result may be anticipated — sarcode 

 and protoplasm were found to be identical. By a further deduc- 

 tion the presence or absence of a limiting envelope was rendered 

 a condition to which the physiological completeness of the cell was 

 perfectly indifferent. As an abstract conception the cell became 

 the prisoner, and that though the prisoner were unconfined. Then, 

 by the way, it came about that amoeba, so long overlooked, was 

 remembered, and found full of interest as the first-discovered 

 realisation of the ideal of a living cell, a cell, moreover, with inde- 

 pendent life. Protoplasm now became, in ordinary but expressive 

 terms, " the physical basis of life" common to the two great 

 kingdoms of organisation. But the whole life of an organism 

 being but the sum of the life of its constituent cells, it follows that 

 the Ufe of the one-celled plant that tinges the arctic snow and 

 that of the many-celled animal that tames to his will the restless 

 energies of nature differ only by the phenomena resulting from 

 modifications of their common protoplasm. The conclusion is not 

 affected by the event that protoplasm has been proved to be by no 

 means the structureless substance it was long accounted to be, and 

 therefore not that immediately prevenient source of structure that 

 the real physical basis of life must be. The properties of a pre- 

 cursor of protoplasm are but the more remote properties of the 

 substance from Avhich plant and animal were to arise through the 

 interinediacy of protoplasm. 



It has been a happy consequence of the establishment of the 

 doctrine that life is identical wherever it exists, that the partition 

 which during all time stood between two companies studying 

 almost within mutual touch was thrown down. The schools of 

 botany and zoology recognised that the book before them was the 

 same, however dift'erently its volumes had been edited, and thence- 

 forth united in the endeavor to find its full and true interpretation. 

 A higher category inclusive of both their sciences had arisen, and 

 for its common denomination they had no choice but to adopt that 

 of the science of life — biology. A great step had been taken ; but 

 if this category prove, as it will assuredly, to be but a constituent 

 of a still higher one, whose terms will bind together the organised 

 and the unorganised, a still greater advance will be made towards 



