92 Field, Forest, and Wayside Flowers 



So "cell" is regarded as a sad misnomer for 

 the minute particles of living substance which 

 build up the animal or plant body, and some 

 modern scientists are striving to get rid of it. 



The name was chosen, in the first place, by a 

 microscopist who looked through his lenses at a 

 bit of cork, and found that it was made up of 

 plates of thin tissue, meeting one another at right 

 angles and enclosing empty chambers. He 

 thought that the walls were the important part 

 of the combination, as indeed they were in this 

 particular case, so he called the tissue ''cellular" 

 and its component parts he named "cells." 



Modern science teaches that in most cases the 

 cell-wall is as subordinate to the cell-contents as a 

 picture-frame is to the picture it encloses, and 

 also that the living units which go to build up 

 a plant or animal have a special form for each 

 kind of tissue, so that "cells," far from being uni- 

 formly square, or uniformly six-sided, as their 

 name might lead us to expect, assume shapes of 

 almost infinite variety. But the old, misleading 

 name is still in use, mainly because no one has yet 

 been able to think of a satisfactory substitute for it. 



In the jelly which fills the leaf-cells there are 

 floating specks of green, so vivid in color, and so 



