466 Prof. S. Apathy on 
appear to him to be greater than, when considered from the 
comparative standpoint, they actually are. 
In what follows I only hope to apply to an interesting 
concrete case nothing but what is well known and generally 
admitted, while venturing to add thereto certain reflections of 
my own. 
“Tt is a well-known fact,” says Frenzel in his second paper 
(loc. cit. p. 577%), “ that between unicellular and multicellular 
animals there hitherto stretched a gulf which was wider than 
that between the vegetable and animal kingdoms; for indeed 
the two latter, in spite of the advances which we have made 
in knowledge, are even to-day hardly separable from one 
another.” But the further cur knowledge progresses the less 
will such a separation be possible, and the less moreover shall 
we consider it to be necessary: the animal and vegetable 
worlds have been developed in two different directions from a 
common basis, the non-nucleate Protoblasts. I totally dis- 
believe that it is permissible to institute such comparisons in 
the natural sciences. A gulf, if it is once present, can be 
neither smaller nor greater than any other. 
Between animals and plants a gulf might well exist; but 
happily it does not. It is nevertheless only in relatively 
quite recent times that our store of facts has been so far 
enriched as to render it possible to bridge over the gulf, 
which, from the standpoint of earlier knowledge, was only 
too evident. It is possible that, among the forms at present 
existing, there is a gulf between Protozoa and Metazoa; it is 
possible, nay even very probable, that it does not really exist 
at all, and that our array of facts only needs to be further 
amplified in order to bridgeit over. ‘The transition also from 
the unicellular to the multicellular plants is to-day quite a 
gradual one: why should it be otherwise from the unicellular 
to the multicellular animals? Frenzel contributes a very 
considerable pillar to the bridge, and withal exerts himself, in 
developing his paper, to make the gulf appear deeper and 
broader than it is. Our science does not deserve such an 
extremely pessimistic conception of its present position ; 
although in a general way I consider pessimism—but without 
relapsing into resignation and exclaiming ‘Zgnorabimus ” !— 
active pessimism, to be more fruitful than activity in an 
exaggeratedly optimistic direction. Frenzel, however, also 
overlooks stones which are already in existence for the 
building of the future bridge between Protozoa and Metazoa. 
Frenzel moreover does the modern zoologist injustice when 
* Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist. doe, cit. p. 79. 
