556 REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF FISH AND FISHERIES [102] 



state with water as they do. That it has colloidal properties of a kind 

 which are conditioned by it« living state no one would perhaps deny, 

 but to treat living matter with the same terms and with tbe same im- 

 plications as not-living diffusible substances is manifestly an abuse of 

 terms. Xor does the implication stop here, for if we look into tbe pro- 

 cesses of secretion in living bodies, there is apparently a tendency on 

 the part of the living membranes to act somewhat like dead ones, yet it 

 will require little reflection to satisfy the most ordinary mind that there 

 is not only a difference of degree, but of kind, when the two are com- 

 pared. The not-living membrane depends upon purely physical prin- 

 ciples for its workings, while the living membrane is an apparatus in 

 the true sense of the word, often comprised of many parts with diverse 

 functions, such as columnar or ciliated jiavement epithelium, with con- 

 nective fibers, muscle, nerves, and vessels composed of cellular units, 

 each of which may have a specific share in the processes of transudation 

 carried on in follicles or cavities ot glands or other organs. It is true 

 the differentiation of these complex structures disappears as we descend 

 in the scale of life, yet it is also true that we have almost as constantly 

 developed in the lowest types, as well as in the highest, certain bodies 

 in the interior of cells, which, with a few unimportant exceptions, seem 

 to have some sort of a vital relation to the plasma in Avhich they are im- 

 bedded ; we refer to nuclei. These bodies, if we may place any reliance 

 upon what is manifested during embryonic development, seem to be very 

 intimately, and even physiologically, related to the phenomena of cleav- 

 age during development, and not improbably with nutrition and the 

 metabolic processes occurripg in the interior of the cell. If something 

 of the sort is not their function, the apparently more fluid contents, and 

 even trabecular network sometimes found in their interiors, are without 

 significance. Leaving out of the question any radial, or, more exactly, 

 any heliozooidal* arrangement of the granular matteraround thenucleus 

 as argued by Eauber, it is at least evident that the process of im])reg- 

 nation is almost always, if not invariably, accompanied by nuclear met- 

 amorphosis and the de^^elopment of asters, or single and double heliozo- 

 oidal figures, imbedded in the protoi^lasm of the Qgg. These i)henouiena 

 seem to be more or less constant accompaniments of later growth, of 

 which impregnation seems to be in reality only a particular phase, 

 bridging the vital continuity between sexual parents and their offspring. 

 The phenomena of indirect cell division or that accoinjianied by caryo- 

 kinesis or the development of cleavage spindles or a double heliozooidal 

 arrangement of the granules of the medullary or inner cell substance, 

 which may extend even to the peripheral cell surface or v»^all, probably 

 have a similar significance and seem intimately bound up with the pri- 

 mary phenomena of growth or segmentation, of which thej* are a pretty 

 constant attendant in the early stages of most forms which have been 



^A word which has suggested itself from the resemblance of some nuclear figures to 

 a Heliozoon with its radiating pseudopods. 



