384 



NATURE 



\_Atigust 21, 1879 



scantily provided with hotels and restaurants. The list 

 of excursions seems unusually large, there being twenty- 

 four in all for Saturday the 23rd, and Thursday the 28th ; 

 all the arrangements for these bespeak the greatest 

 thoughtfulness for the comfort of the members. On 

 Friday evening, the 22nd, a twilight exhibition of 

 Bessemer steel manufacture is to be shown to 100 

 members at the Phcenix Bessemer Works, Iccles, Rother- 

 ham, and on Wednesday next Nunnery and Aldwarke 

 Collieries will be visited. 



Ample entertainment has been arranged for in the way 

 of banquets and conversazioni, and on Sunday the Arch- 

 bishop of York and Canon Tristram are to preach in the 

 Parish Church. Altogether the Sheffield meeting pro- 

 mises, if not to be unusually large, to be thoroughly 

 satisfactory so far as local arrangements go. 



Inaugural Address of Prof. G. J. Allman, M.D., LL.D., 

 F.U.S.S.L. and E., M.R.I.A., Pres. L.S., President. 



It is no easy thing to find material suited to an occasion like 

 the present. For on tlie one hand there is risk that a presidential 

 address may be too special for an audience necessarily large and 

 general, while on the other hand it may treat too much of 

 generalides to tal;e hold of the sympathies and command the 

 attention of the hearers. 



It may be supposed that my subject should have been suggested 

 by the great manufacturing industries of the town which has 

 brought us together ; but I felt convhiced that a worker in only 

 the biological sciences could not do justice to the workers m so 

 very different a field. 



I am not, therefore, going to discourse to you of any of those 

 great industries which make civilised society what it is— of those 

 practical applications of scientific truth wliich w ithin the last half 

 century have become developed with such marvellous rapidity, 

 and which have already become interwoven with our everyday 

 life, as the warp of the weaver is interwoven vith the woof. 

 Such subjects must be left to other occupiers of this chair, from 

 whom they may receive that justice w hich I could not pretend to 

 give tliem ; and I believe I shall act most wisely by keeping to 

 a field with which my own studies have been more directly 

 connected. 



I know that there are many here present from whom I have 

 no right to expect that previous knowledge which would justify 

 me in dispensing with such an amount of elementary treatment 

 as can alone bring my subject intelligibly before them, and my 

 fellow-members of the British Association \i ho have the advan- 

 tage of being no novices in that department of biology with which 

 I propose to occupy you, will pardon me if I address myself 

 mainly to those for whom the field of research on which we are 

 about to enter has now been opened for the first time. 



^ I have chosen, then, as the matter of my address to you to- 

 night, a subject in whose study tliere has during the last few 

 years prevailed an unwonted amount of activity, r'esulting in the 

 discovery of many remarkable facts, and the justification of many 

 significant generalisations. I propose, in short, to give you in 

 as untechnical a form as possible some account of the most 

 generalised expression of living matter, and of the results of the 

 more recent researches into its nature and phenomena. 



More than forty years have now passed away since the French 

 naturalist, Dujardin, drew attention to the fact that the bodies of 

 some of the lowest members of the animal kingdom consist of a 

 structureless, semi-fluid, contractile substance, to which he gave 

 the name of Sarcode. A similar substance occurring in the cells 

 of plants was afterwards studied by Hugo von Mohl, and named 

 by him Protoplasm. It remained for Max Scliultze to demon- 

 strate that the sarcode of animals and the protoplasm of plants 

 were identical. 



The conclusions of Max Schultze have been in all respects 

 confirmed by subsequent research, and it has further been ren- 

 dered certain that this same protoplasm lies at the base of all the 

 phenomena of life, whether in the animal or the vegetable king- 

 dom. Thus has arisen the most important and significant gene- 

 ralisation in the whole domain of biological science. 



Within the last few years protoplasm has again been 

 made a subject of special study ; unexpected and often starthng 

 facts have been brought to light, and a voluminous literature 

 has gathered round this new centre of research. I believe, 

 therefore, that I cannot do better than call your attention to 



some of the more important results of these inquiries, and en- 

 deavour to give you some knowledge of the properties of proto- 

 plasm, and of the part it plays in the two great kinTdoms of 

 organic nature. * 



As has just been said, protoplasm lies at the base of every 

 vital phenomenon. It is, as Huxley has well expressed it, "the 

 physical basis of life." Wherever there is life, from its 'lowest 

 to its highest manifestations, there is protoplasm ; wherever there 

 IS protoplasm, there, too, is life. Thus, coextensive with the 

 whole of organic nature— every vital act being referable to some 

 mode or property of protoplasm— it becomes to the biologist 

 what the ether is to the physicist ; only that instead of being a 

 hypothetical conception, accepted as a reaUty from its adequacy 

 in the explanation of phenomena, it is a tangible and visible 

 reality, which the chemist may analyse in his laboratory, the 

 biologist scrutinise beneath his microscope and his dissectin" 

 needle. ° 



The chemical composition of protoplasm is very complex, and 

 has not been exactly determined. It may, however, be stated that 

 protoplasm is essentially a combination of albuminoid bodies, and 

 that its principal elements are, therefore, oxygen, carbon, hydro- 

 gen, and nitrogen. In its typical state it presents the condition 

 of a semi-fluid substance — a tenacious, glairy liquid, with a con- 

 sistence somewhat like that of the white of an unboiled egg.i 

 While we watch it beneath the microscope movements are set up 

 in it ; waves traverse its surface, or it may be seen to flow away 

 in streams, either broad and attaining but a slight distance from 

 the main mass, or else stretching away far from their source, as 

 nan-ow liquid threads, which may continue simple, or may divide 

 into branches, each following its own independent course ; or tlie 

 streams may flow one into the other, as streamlets would flow 

 into rivulets and rivulets into rivers, and this not only where 

 gravity would carry them, but in a direction diametrically 

 opposed to gravitation ; now we see it spreading itself out on all 

 sides into a thin liquid stratum, and again drawing itself together 

 within the narrow limits which had at first confined it, and all 

 this without any obvious impulse from wdthout which would 

 send tlie ripples over its surface or set the streams flowing from 

 its margin. Though it is certain that all these phenomena are in 

 response to some stimulus exerted on it by the outer world, they 

 are such as we never meet with in a simply physical fluid— they 

 are sjontaneous movements resulting from its proper irritability, 

 from its essential constitution as living matter. 



Examine it closer, bring to bear on it the highest powers of 

 your microscope— you will probably find disseminated through it 

 countless multitudes of exceedingly minute granules ; but you 

 may also find it absolutely homogeneous, and, whether containing 

 granules or not, it is certain that you will find nothing to which 

 \\\e.\.^x\ii organisation can be appUed. You have before you a 

 glairy, tenacious fluid, which, if not absolutely homogeneous, is 

 yet totally destitute of structure. 



And yet no one who contemplates this spontaneously moving 

 matter can deny that it is alive. Liquid as it is, it is a living 

 liquid ; organless and structureless as it is, it manifests the 

 essential phenomena of life. 



The picture which I have thus endeavoured to trace for you in 

 a few leading outlines is that of protoplasm in its most generalised 

 aspect. Such generalisations, however, are in themselves unable 

 to satisfy the conditions demanded by an exact scientific inquiry, 

 and I propose now, before passing to the further consideration 

 of the place and purport of protoplasm in nature, to bring before 

 you some definite examples of protoplasm, such as are actually 

 met with in the organic world. 



A quantity of a peculiar slimy matter was dredged in the 

 North Atlantic by the naturalists of the exploring ship Porcupine 

 from a depth of from 5,000 to 25,000 feet. It is described as 

 exhibiting, when examined on the spot, spontaneous movements, 

 and as being obdously endowed with life. Specimens of this, 

 preserved in spirits, were examined by Prof Huxley, and 

 declared by him to consist of protoplasm, vast masses of which 

 must thus in a living state extend over wide areas of sea bottom. 

 To this wonderful sUme Huxley gave the name of Bathybius 

 Haechlii. 



Bathybius has since been subjected to an exhaustive examina- 



^ In speaking of protoplas:n as a liquid, it must be bjrnc in mind that this 

 expression refers only to its physical consistence— a condition depending 

 mainly on the amount of water with which it is combined, .and subject to 

 considerable variation, from the s:)lid form in which w« find it in the dormant 

 embryo of seeds, to the thin watery state in which it occurs in the leaves of 

 Valisneria. Its distinguishing properties are totally different from those of 

 a purely physical liquid, and arc subject to an entirely different set of laws. 



